A Companion to Textile Culture

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles

The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject.

A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored--technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others--and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume:

• Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators
• Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies
• Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range
• Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives
• Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts

A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

"Textiles are rarely preserved in archaeological contexts, often leading to an incomplete and even biased picture of their role in past cultures. When textiles do survive, however, a wide range of interdisciplinary methods and approaches can be applied to them, leading to information regarding their date, raw materials, and provenance. Indirect evidence consisting of archaeological textile tools, written sources, iconography, as well as archaeobotanical and archaeozoological remains can provide additional evidence about textile production, use, and economy of the resources. This empirical data obtained from the extant archaeological textile finds informs cultural aspects, such as the role of gender in cloth manufacture, long-distance trade in textiles, and the use of textiles for signaling identities"--