Customer Reviews

Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing

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Like Lila O'Neale in her early twentieth century study Yurok/Karok Basket Weavers, the authors of this book, Willink and Zolbrod, have set about to "read Navajo rugs" through the eyes and minds of Navajo, mostly older weavers and their families. What we, the readers, get is a somewhat anecdotal filtering of ideas, recognitions, myth and oral history that indeed does lend surprising information about some of the designs.

But, the real jewels of this book are the weavings themselves. Forty separate color plates show rug after rug, over half predating 1900, from the School of American Research Collections in the Museum of New Mexico's Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each is magnificent in its own way. Accompanying text relates a separate story for twenty-seven of them, organized into: The Mythic Memory; The Collective memory; Ceremonial Practices; Harmony and Disharmony; and A World In Motion.

What I personally love about this collection is the insight into balance, detail, symbolic representation and the fact that each weaving is strictly individual. A great reference for weaver and collector alike, my only criticism is that there aren't more close-up photos.