The Material Culture of Basketry: Practice, Skill and Embodied Knowledge

ground-breaking work is presented in two final chapters that cover cloth made in various weaving centres in the Burman heartland and textiles from the periphery made for the Burman market. These chapters comprise the region-by-region documentation of Myanmar’s village textile production that has heretofore been lacking. They are clearly the result of painstaking field research carried out over multiple journeys to places rarely visited by outsiders. While much of the cloth might be considered aesthetically mundane, the best of it shows sophisticated, subtle beauty, as in many colonial-era silk longyi (unisex tube skirts) with Europeaninspired block patterns in supplementaryweft ‘overshot’ weave. The most complexly patterned of these were produced in Rakhine State (fig. 11.10), while those from the Inle Lake region were often enlivened with the pou-jwe technique— the twisting together of two yarns of contrasting colours to produce a watered or moir e effect in the finished cloth (fig. 11.19). The book is well organised, nicely produced and copiously illustrated, while Fraser-Lu’s clear and thoughtful prose is appropriate for general audiences and specialists alike. Because the material is based primarily on historical and field research, there are fewer full-page studio photographs of exemplary textiles (especially in comparison to a museum catalogue or collection-based coffee-table volume). An impressive bibliography vouches for the breadth of the research and an extensive glossary helps with the many Burmese terms that are unfamiliar to most of us. Unfortunately, many equally unfamiliar place names cannot always be found on the maps provided. Sylvia Fraser-Lu is to be congratulated for bringing the wealth of Myanmar’s handwoven textiles to greater attention. At last, a standard reference work on Burman cloth has taken its rightful place in the literature on South-East Asian textiles. Fittingly, the Textile Society of America has given the book its R. L. Shep Award, judging it the best book of the year in the field of ethnographic textile studies.