Textile Economies: Power and Value from the Local to the Transnational [Hardcover]

Textiles have been a highly valued and central part of the politics of human societies across culture divides and over millennia. The economy of textiles provides insight into the fabric of social relations, local and global politics, and diverse ideologies. Textiles are a material element of society that fosters the study of continuities and disjunctions in the economic and social realities of past and present societies. From stick-loom weaving to transnational factories, the production of cloth and its transformation into clothing and other woven goods offers a way to study the linkages between economics and politics. The volume is oriented around a number of themes: textile production, textiles as trade goods, textiles as symbols, textiles in tourism, and textiles in the transnational processes.Textile Economiesappeals to a broad range of scholars interested in the intersection of material culture, political economy, and globalization, such as archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, economists, museum curators, and historians.

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.

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 textilesamong 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, l£7