Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar

Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar

Edited by the agency of Chapurukha M. Kusimba, J. Claire Odland, and Bennet Bronson

UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, No. 7 looks Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and Chicago: The Field Museum, 2004 196 pp 45 b/w photos, 109 color photos, 7 maps. $4000 softcover

In 1925 Ralph Linton, the assistant curator of North American Ethnology at the Field Museum, traveled to Madagascar to "untangle the threads of cultural history." sum of two units years later, he returned to Chicago with an extensive collection of Malagasy artifacts, including nearly 600 textiles. Today, this collection may well be the greatest in quantity comprehensive record of Malagasy textile production from that time period, particularly following the tragic fire of 1995 that break uped the Queen's Palace Museum in Antananarivo, Madagascar, along with its immense textile collection. Thanks to Chapurukha M Kusimba, J Claire Odland, and Bennet Bronson coeditors of Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar, we now have the first all-inclusive close attention of the Linton collection.

Their publication is single of two coedited volumes upon Madagascar textiles to have appeared in the last five years. In 2002 Christine Mullen Kreamer and Sarah remuneration coedited the six-essay volume external realitys as Envoys: Cloth, Imagery, and Diplomacy in Madagascar as the catalog for their NMAfA exhibition. Together, Kreamer and pay drew on the Smithsonian's small, late-nineteenth hundred collection of textiles and contemporary postcards to paint a fairly broad picture of Malagasy textiles and their history. Where appropriate, they included examples from other museums, Including those assembleed by Linton. The Fowler work with its nine chapters and sum of two units appendixes, features some of the same authors, on the contrary is focused solely on the Ralph Linton collection as a window into Madagascar history and to Linton himself.

Linton had at least sum of two units reasons for wanting to muster artifacts in Madagascar. One was his fear that Malagasy agriculture was headed for extinction, compelling him, like for a like reason many anthropologists of his time, to gather as much as he possibly could in order to secure it. In her fascinating account of Linton's expedition to Madagascar, the historian Liliana Mosca informs us that Linton was unrelenting in his collecting mission, eager to overspread every corner of the island, to stay in each area for weeks or month upon end, and to continually push onward, in spite of his numerous curves of malaria. I recommend this chapter and the following single featuring his description of a Malagasy market he visited, for their insight into the mindset and motivations of an early twentieth hundred cultural anthropologist collecting in the field.

Besides aiming to guard Malagasy culture, Linton hoped to sort on the outside the cultural mix of African and Asian influences in an area Kusimba defines as the "crossroads between Africa and Asia." Linton was forever seeking test of links between these sum of two units areas of the world by means of for example, noting parallels between Malagasy customs and those from the Marquesas or novel Zealand, or by guessing the tribal identities of the race he was observing during his visit to a Malagasy market.

Appropriately, Kusimba, Odland, and Bronson use Madagascar's cultural mix as the underlying theme of their volume They begin it with an introductory chapter through Kusimba, an African-focused scholar, and extremity it with one by Bronson an Indonesianist. greatest in quantity of the chapters in between address the various cultural threads that make up this collection. Four of the articles focus upon regional styles, with Rebecca Green's upon funerary textiles from the Madagascar highlands (Betsileo); Sarah Fee's upon a broad range of issues concerning woven fabric production and its use in the southwest; Wendy Walker and Edgar Kreb's upon raffia cloths from the southeast; and Odland upon a form of ikat from the Sakalava area that bears an uncanny resemblance to ikat from the Philippines. Between these four articles, we diocese everything from raffia and bark to cotton and silk. Indeed, smooth the latter is multifaceted. The biologist Richard s Peigler, in his article upon Malagasy raw silk, demonstrates that individual particular silk cloth is itself a unite of mulberry silk (landikely) and wild silk (landibe), a conclusion he draws from stunningly detailed photographs he took using a scanned electronic microscope (SEM)

Linton's textile collection is revealing in what it lacks as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as in what it contains. As remuneration and others point out, Linton not at any time collected European textiles, even admitting the Malagasy were using them extensively at the time he was there. a certain quantity of of those hybrids may already be evident in the WT Rawleigh Collection of Malagasy Portraits dating between 1910-1930 that Chantal Radimilahy writes about. Indeed, Madagascar has had a lengthy history of European contact, generating a certain quantity of of the earliest comprehensive accounts of textiles of anywhere in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. by the agency of the late nineteenth century, the French and British had greatly escalated their woven fabric trade to Madagascar, as elsewhere in Africa, leaving an Indelible mark upon local cloth production and use. In his essay upon change in the weaving of Highland Madagascar, Simon matchs informs us that by the mid-nineteenth hundred the Malagasy had already not to be found three-quarters of their previous, rather diverse, textile production. He describes the remains as the "survival of pouchs of techniques and styles."