Textile Economies - (Society for Economic Anthropology Monograph) by Walter E Little & Patricia A McAnany (Hardcover)

About the Book

The economy of textiles provides insight into the fabric of social relations, local and global politics, and diverse ideologies. Textile production and exchange represent a key node for the intersections of multiple aspects of ancient and modern economies, including social-cla...

Book Synopsis

The economy of textiles provides insight into the fabric of social relations, local and global politics, and diverse ideologies. Textile production and exchange represent a key node for the intersections of multiple aspects of ancient and modern economies, including social-class relations, gender, tourism, exchange, commerce, and transpolity relationships. A political economy of textiles, discussed from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, offers ways to understand cloth and clothing as parts of mutually constitutive processes that shape and reflect economic practices, cultural ideologies, and sociopolitical rank.

Review Quotes

Textile Economies brings together a group of intelligently researched and argued articles that examine how different systems of value play into the lives of textiles and the people who create, market, and consume them. Relationships of power and strategies to negotiate these thread through richly detailed case studies that focus on the local but are ever mindful of the global flows and creative (re)imaginings in contemporary and historical contexts. A welcome contribution to the growing literature on the social life of textiles.

Spanning every continent, and a temporal arc that begins in pre-history and takes us to the present, this edited collection demonstrates how much we can learn through textiles--among the most potent, meaningful, and desired of human creations. Privileging the artisanal domain of textile production, while at the same time acknowledging the significance of industrialism, the respective authors illuminate labor processes, societal inequality, global interactions, and the constitution of both spiritual and material value.

About the Author

Walter E. Little is associate professor of Anthropology at the University at Albany, SUNY, and director of the Ethnographic Field School in Guatemala. He is the author of Mayas in the Marketplace and co-author of Mayas in Postwar Guatemala.

Patricia A. McAnany is Kenan Eminent Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Ancestral Maya Economies in Archaeological Perspective and Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society.