Between the folds : stories of cloth, lives, and travels from Sumba /

This book on textiles and social life in the Eastern Indonesian island of Sumba weaves vestments of history and ethnographic presents entangled in circuits of exchange to fashion a stunningly textured portrait of cloth caught up in the threads of daily life for a Kambera-speaking people from the eastern region of the island. The "stories of cloth" Forshee (Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Territory Univ., Australia) encounters illustrate the manufacturing histories of ikat from point of production in home and village through networks of trade in and outside of Sumba. But these storied textiles are, more important, fabrications of history, social opportunity, and innovation. Ikat imagery reflects and projects the biographies of this thing caught in labyrinths of tourism, Indonesian nationalism, and local ethnicities that site something more than struggles between tradition and modernity. Forshee shows that ikat represents textiled exhibitions of the lived experiences and histories of particular lives, journeys of masculinity, domestic agency, opportunistic success, and dispiriting failures. This readable if regionally specific examination of the relationship of material culture with history and social life will be extremely useful for the specialist, as well as for those interested in the social lives and cultural biographies of things. S. Ferzacca Bryn Mawr College