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Bolong-Bolong And Tirtanadi: An Unknown Group Of Balinese Textiles, Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartaschoff, Monika Palm-Nadolny

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

On late 19th- and early 20th-century photographs, South and East Balinese people clad in traditional adat wardrobe for rituals, temple ceremonies, and dances often wear transparent, netlike open-work textiles as breastcloth (anteng), shouldercloth (cerik) girdle (selendang), or headcloth (destar, lelunakan). Information given by elderly Balinese concerning the situation before World War II confirm their use as part of their ceremonial wardrobe but also as important items in offerings and rituals. Such textiles could be laid over several fabrics, covering the body of a toothfiling candidate, or serve as curtains (langse …

Micronesian Textiles In Transition: The Woven Tol Of Kosrae, Ann Deegan, Ross Cordy

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper presents findings on the major steps in the transition of the Kosraen tol from traditional clothing, to tourist souvenir, to the end of tol manufacture. An extensive study of the German, French, and English literature of the 19th and 20th centuries was done to piece together the history of the Kosraen tol.

The island of Kosrae, located in the Pacific (4–10°N latitude, 140–163°E longitude), is part of the Federated States of Micronesia. Since earliest European contact it has seen numerous changes in its traditional culture. One of its most beautiful and complex traditional crafts is the woven …

The "Severed Shroud": Local And Imported Textiles In The Mortuary Rites Of An Indonesian People, Penelope Graham

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper explores the significance of local and imported textiles as these interact forming complex categories in the mortuary rites of the Lamaholot-speaking people of the traditional district Lewolema in eastern Flores, Indonesia. Within this regional framework, my account draws primarily on field work in the village of Lewotala. There a person's physical demise elicits diverse social and ritual practices, depending on the deceased's achievements during his or her lifetime and the circumstances surrounding the death. As regards the mortuary sequence that commonly occurs, I will argue that various uses of cloth for exchange purposes mark both the severence—consequent on …

Supplementary Weft On An "Ikat" Isle: The Weaving Communities Of Northwestern Flores, Roy W. Hamilton

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Among textile enthusiasts, the island of Flores is known primarily for its beautiful warp-ikat cloths. Most of the island's numerous ethno-linguistic groups, including the Ngadha, Nage, Endenese, Lio, Palu'e, Sikkanese, and Lamaholot, produce related yet distinctive textiles within this tradition. It is therefore surprising to find a series of weaving districts, stretching along the northwest coast of the island, where the ikat technique is not used. Instead, weavers in this region produce indigo-dyed textiles decorated with colorful supplementary-weft motifs.

In the ikat districts, sarongs for men and women differ in their patterning and in the names applied to them. In …

The Influence Of Computer Technologies On Contemporary Woven Fiber Art, Cynthia Schira

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

It is generally agreed upon, by both the participants in the field and those few who have chronicled it, that the fiber art movement as we know it today began with Jean Lurcat in France in the late 1950s. He was among the first, if not the first, to make designs or cartoons specifically for the medium of tapestry. Previously, paintings were translated into the medium of tapestry. As well as creating the design or cartoon, he personally oversaw the actual weaving process. This direct connection between the process and the concept or image, the manual and the mind, laid …

Byzantine Influences Along The Silk Route: Central Asian Silks Transformed, Anna Maria Muthesius

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Silks traded along the ancient Silk Route were precious, light, and easily transportable commodities that served as ideal vehicles for cross-cultural exchange. The survival of several hundred Central Asian silks, variously datable between the seventh and the eleventh centuries, presents an opportunity to trace patterns of trade, diplomacy and cross-cultural developments at the heart of the Silk Road. These silks perfectly mirror contact, cross over, and change fostered under the auspices of Mediterranean/Near Eastern economic and diplomatic exchange.

This paper will ask three questions:

1. What lay behind Byzantine influence in Central Asia along the ancient Silk Route?

2. What …

Cloth As Marriage Gifts: Change In Exchange Among The Lio Of Flores, Willemijn De Jong

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The exchange of gifts at life cycle ceremonies is one of the most important institutions in Lio society, as in many other societies in Oceania. The life cycle event of marriage and its exchange of gifts is often significant, because important sociopolitical alliances between kin groups are initiated or renewed. In these exchanges, cloth wealth may play a crucial role, especially in ranked societies. Weiner contends that in Samoa "each distribution [of fine mats] is an example of the negotiation and validation of rank and power." Gittinger has pointed out the economic and symbolic value of cloth gifts at marriage …

From The Ancestors Or The Portuguese: Exotic Textiles In Flores And The Solor Archipelago, Robyn Maxwell

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Throughout the eastern Indonesian island of Flores and the neighbouring Solor archipelago, village treasuries usually contain considerable numbers of highly valued textiles and some items of costume. These consist predominantly of important local products clearly made within the particular village or district.

Other heirloom textiles have been acquired from outside the local regions in the distant or not-so-distant past. These exotic heirlooms are often awarded a special place in the hierarchy of textiles found throughout Flores, Solor, and Lembata and, where possible, examines local histories and myths associated with the origins of particular objects or types of cloth.

Further, an …

Market Effects On The Design And Construction Of Carpets In The Milas Region Of Southwestern Turkey, 1963–1993, Charlotte A. Jirousek

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Beginning in 1964 my husband and I were involved in the development of a village carpet weaving cooperative in Southwestern Turkey. We lived with the weavers of Çömlekçi from 1964 to 1966, as part of the first Peace Corps rural community development program in Turkey. Between 1966 and 1969 we continued to work with the cooperative in its efforts to develop markets and quality control standards while working as Peace Corps staff. Since leaving Turkey in 1969, I have visited Çömlekçi periodically, most recently in 1992 and 1994.

The success of the Çömlekçi cooperative in tum generated carpet cooperatives throughout …

The Assimilation Of European Designs Into Twentieth Century Indian Saris, Linda Lynton

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Although so-called "Indian" designs of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chintzes influenced Western European [Western] textiles almost from their introduction, Western patterns did not impinge on indigenous Indian fabrics, such as saris, until the last half of the nineteenth century.

They were superimposed upon an already complex mix of textile ornamental styles, which can be briefly categorized as: (i) Mughal, (ii) Hindu, and (iii) adivasi (aboriginal). The Mughal style consists of the elaborately patterned prints and brocades typical of western India. It shows strong Persian influences, such as the kalga (Paisley motif); intertwining floral vines (bel); and life-like depictions of …

From Bohemian To Bourgeois: American Batik In The Early Twentieth Century, Nicola J. Shilliam

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In 1919 Pieter Mijer wrote in his influential book Batiks and How to Make Them, "Batik is still a comparatively recent importation; brought here some ten years ago, it was met with absolute incomprehension and lack of interest, but its real merit as a means of decorating fabrics has earned it a place in the industrial art of the nation and year by year it is gaining wider recognition."

This paper briefly considers the rise and fall in popularity of batik in America in the period Mijer indicated: how it changed from being a foreign import chiefly seen in …

Anni Albers: Pre-Columbian Resonances: The Significance Of Pre-Columbian Art In Her Textiles And Writings, Virginia Gardner Troy

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Anni Albers is known primarily for her contribution to the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop and her woven prototypes for industrial production; she has rarely been acknowledged for her role in reviving and redefining the Pre-Columbian fiber art tradition. She researched, analyzed, collected, and extensively wrote about Pre-Columbian textiles. Her seminal text, On Weaving, 1965, is not only dedicated to Andean weavers, "my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru," but is essentially a textbook of Andean weaving techniques, revived and meticulously analyzed by Albers. Furthermore, she and her husband, Josef Albers, amassed an important collection of ancient Mesoamerican sculpture, acquired …

Textile Society Of America Newsletter 6:15 – Winter 1994, Textile Society Of America

Textile Society of America: Newsletters

Technical Issues
Fiber Identification
Letter from the President
In Memoriam
Letter from the Editor
Travel
Announcements
Calls for Papers
Conferences, Meetings, Symposia
Wanted: Saris to Photograph
Lectures, Workshops & Classes
Fellowships, Grants, Internships
People
Exhibitions
Membership Information
Symposia/Conferences/Seminars – Past/Present/Future
The Eastern Region’s Late Spring Tour of the Renwick Gallery’s Exhibition of Contemporary Navajo Weaving
TSA Bibliography Announced

Characters: Portraits By Robert Weaver, George W. Neubert

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

character n -S 1: a distinctive differentiating mark: ... d: a conventionalized figure, representation, or expression ... 2: CHARACTERISTIC: as a 0): one of the essentials of structure, form, materials, or function that together make up and usually distinguish the individual: any feature used to separate distinguishable things (as organisms) into categories ... (3): the aggregate of distinctive qualities characteristic of a breed, strain, or type b: the complex of accustomed mental and moral characteristics and habitual ethical traits marking a person, group, or nation or serving to individualize it c: main or essential nature esp. as strongly marked and …

Pictures On Stone: American Color Lithography, Daphne A. Deeds

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Art is often defined as the mirror of society. Chromolithography fulfills that defmition because it was invented in response to the changing demographics of post -Civil War America. During the period 1860-1900 a variety of social changes transformed America from a small agrarian society to a giant industrial nation poised on the brink of joining the modem international world. Many aspects of American life were imbued with an egalitarian spirit. The new democracy was especially evident in the reformed educational system. For the first time in U.S. history, public schools were mandated for all U.S. children, and land-grant universities (including …

Wreath And Cap To Veil And Apron: American Modification Of A Slavic Ritual, Patricia Williams

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper explores a wedding custom practiced for more than one hundred years in the Chicago area by the descendants of Czech, Polish, and Slovak immigrant women. Through the custom's existence and perpetuation in America, the role of a transitional rite of passage is chronicled in both the process of assimilation and the preservation of ethnic heritage. The original textile symbols used in the ritual were modified to reflect the differences in culture in the United States but with the "echoes" of European folk tradition still heard. Chicagoans today have continued to modify the custom as the role of women …

Discussion Of "Textile Transformations And Cultural Continuities In West Africa", Christopher B. Steiner

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

I have divided my discussion of these papers into two parts. First, I would like briefly to address each of the papers individually—highlighting what I find to be some of the most important issues raised by each. And second, I would like to put forth two dichotomies—(1) regarding the relationship between the sacred and the profane, and (2) on the relationship between aesthetic value and commercial value—both of which strike me as critical organizing principles that join these four papers [those of Judith Byfield, Kathleen Bickford, Lisa Aronson, and Elisha Renne and Joanne Eicher in this proceedings] into a coherent …

Contact, Crossover, Continuity: The Emergence And Development Of The Two Basic Lace Techniques, Santina Levey, Milton Sonday

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

According to the present understanding of the term, lace is a soft pliable fabric, most often white, with a pattern composed of solid and open areas, made either with a needle and thread in a looped structure or with a variable number of threads wound on bobbins and interlaced in a form of braiding. Laces matching that description survive from the mid 17th century onward, with some needle and bobbin-made examples that at first glance appear indistinguishable. Yet each of these totally unrelated techniques has its own history. The purpose of our project is to trace how it happened that …

The Pomegranate Pattern In Italian Renaissance Textiles: Origins And Influence, Rosalia Bonito Fanelli

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The term "pomegranate motif" includes a series of vegetal patterns—the pine cone, the artichoke, the thistle, variants of the tree-of-life motif, and, in particular, the lotus and the palmette. These last two patterns were closely studied by Alois Riegl in his 1893 work Stilfragen (Problems of Style). The term itself came into use during the period of historic revivalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. At that time important design theorists and practitioners such as Owen Jones, William Morris, and Walter Crane dedicated space in their writings with accompanying plates to the reconstruction of Renaissance pomegranate patterns. The …

The Transformation Of Men Into Masquerades And Indian Madras Into Masquerade Cloth In Buguma, Nigeria, Elisha P. Renne, Joanne B. Eicher

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Kalahari Ijo people of the Niger Delta area of southeastern Nigeria use a group of dark indigo-blue cloths with white patterning to cover the faces of masquerade performers. Subsumed under the name of alubite (masquerade cloth) are at least three distinct types: (1) ukara cloth, an indigo-resist of imported muslin, stitched and dyed by Igbo craftsmen, (2) alubite cloth, a gauze-weave, also an indigo-resist, but of unknown provenance, and (3) pelete bite, an Indian madras from which threads are cut and pulled by Kalahari women to form a new pattern.

The first two types of cloth apparently come …

New Twist On Shibori: How An Old Tradition Survives In The New World When Japanese Wooden Poles Are Replaced By American Pvc Pipes, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The subject of my talk is arashi shibori or pole wrap resist Although at times it is hard to recognize some arashi effects as such, technically arashi shibori is one of many forms of tie-dye. After thirty years of its exploration through art-to-wear, dyed and painted tapestries, three dimensional sculptures, and mixed media in the United States, various forms of tie-dye have now become part of the lexicon of American fabric design and fiberarts vocabulary.

On the one hand, there has been much effort by textile specialists to circumvent the term "tie-dye," due to its association with the Grateful Dead, …

Ethnic Artists And The Appropriation Of Fashion: Embroidery And Identity In The Colca Valley, Peru, Blenda Femenías

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

"When I'm in Arequipa and I see a lady in embroidered clothes, I always greet her; she's from my land, she's my compatriot. . . . [When I teach embroidery] no matter how much one teaches, the motifs don't come out the same. If there are twenty embroiderers, twenty different motifs come out although they have the same name. It's like, even if you're my brother, we're not the same."

These comments by embroidery artist Leonardo Mejfa neatly express the character of Colca Valley ethnic clothes: simultaneously shared and individual. Similar appearance is important in recognizing a compatriot, but an …

Paj Ntaub: Textile Techniques Of The Hmong, Joyce Smith

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Narration of the video:

Who Are the Hmong?

What Is Paj Ntaub?

Why Providence?

Zoua V. Lor

Seng Yang Vang

Lee Khang

Chia Vue Moua

What Next?

Paracas Cavernas, Paracas Necroplis, And Ocucaje: Looking At Appropriation And Identity With Only Material Remains, Ann Peters

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Paracas Cavernas, Paracas Necropolis, and Ocucaje are groups of burials made some 2000 years ago on the south coast of Peru. The Peruvian coast is a desert, and textiles, basketry, and other artifacts made from plant fiber and animal fiber and other organic materials are preserved there in ancient tombs. The Andes is known for funerary traditions that emphasize the dressing of the dead, with documented preservation of mummified ancestors or funerary bundles, and in some cases their participation as ancestors in kin group and community ritual.

. . .

It is clear that there are continuing relations of contact, …

Dressing The Part: Indigenous Costume As Political And Cultural Discourse In Peru, Katharine E. Seibold

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In Latin America, indigenous clothing has often been equated with indigenous cultural identity. When we speak of indigenous fashion as being a marker of cultural identity, we must also examine the more fluid roles of the indigenous individual and community within the state. How is individual, community, and state identity represented? What form does the discourse between the individual, the community, and the state take? Many anthropologists have written of the flexible and strategic use of ethnicity, and costume as a primary tool in the manipulation of ethnic identity. Indigenous, handwoven dress legitimates community as well as ethnic group membership …

Annual Report 1994, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year got off to an unusual start. The hyperbole associated with the BBC Television production of Middlemarch suddenly shot George Eliot into the forefront of many people's minds. The beginning of the year is always a very busy time but from January onwards I was inundated with letters and phone calls. For three weeks the Fellowship became a full-time occupation. The BBC in London and in Coventry were in regular contact, admirers of George Eliot had their interest newly aroused, students aimed enquiries at us, local clubs and societies wanted talks and tours of the George Eliot Country, newspapers …

Women And Jews In Daniel Deronda, Pam Hirsch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When Daniel Deronda was first published in 1876 George Eliot was disappointed that readers tended to 'cut the book into scraps and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there'.1 Her contemporary readers had failed to see the connections she had forged between the condition of Jews in British society and the condition of women in British society at a specific moment in history. By 1876 Jews in England had, like Dissenters and Catholics, been allowed to hold most public offices since 1828. In 1858 Rothschild had become …

Metafiction And Metaphor: Daniel Deronda As Golem, Saleel Nurbhai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A criticism of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, from Henry James onwards, is that it is a novel of two halves: the realist Gwendolen half, and the visionary Mordecai half. These two are regarded as unable to mesh, and thus weaken the novel in structure and purpose. When examining the novel and a contextual interpretation of the Jewish myth of the golem, however, this bifurcation seems intentional; more than that, it is a metafictional rendering of the theme in the novel's structure.

The term golem is central to mythical creation in Judaism. It means an unformed mass. Before he is given …

American Branch Report, Linda Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Several members of the Fellowship in America attended the 1992 MLA Convention in New York in December. On the 28th they gathered together for a Dinner Meeting at Warwick Hotel, New York City.

Harriet Williams, Vice-President of the Fellowship, presided; Linda K. Robertson was moderator of the Special Session discussion; Marjorie Goss was Recorder. Others present were William Baker, Catalina Hannan, Conrad Harper, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Michael Wolff, and Joanna Yin.

The Fellowship gave a toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot.

The discussion began with the matter of continuing to try to get Allied Organisation status. This requires …

Notes On Contributors

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Jonathan Ouvry is the great-great grandson of George Henry Lewes, and has been President of the Fellowship since 1984.

Kathleen Adams has been Secretary of the Fellowship since 1968. She initiated the Review in 1970, was editor until 1981 and co-editor 1982-91. She published Those of Us Who Loved Her in 1980.

Beryl Gray lectures in literature for the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies, Birkbeck College. She has recently completed an edition of Adam Bede for Everyman Paperbacks and is preparing The Mill on the Floss for the same series.

Graham Handley has published widely on George Eliot, his latest contribution …