__ i_, Weavings and Interweavings Cloth and Human Experience. ANNETrE B. WEINER and JANE SCHNEIDER, Eds. Smithson- ian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1989. xvi, 431 pp., illus. $39.95. Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry. Based on a conference, Troutbeck, NY, 1983. The subject of "cloth and human experi- ence" is well suited to display the schism between idealist and materialist views within anthropology. Cloth, which is inanimate yet composed of formerly living substances, is reanimated through its symbolic at- tributes-yet cloth is also the product of labor and economic relationships connect- ing individuals, groups, and societies to one another. In this book anthropologists Jane Schneider, best known for her interest in political and economic questions, and An- nette B. Weiner, whose research is solidly concerned with symbolic issues, have joined forces in a nonpolemical attempt to bring together these competing approaches to the study of culture. Such an effort deserves a careful look. I must confess to certain reservations re- garding its success. All cultures do indeed invest cloth with symbolic values. The cloth one wears is a symbolic presentation of self: sex, age, marital status, class, political affili- ation. Anthropologists who bemoan the numbers of tweed jackets and suits at con- ferences, compared to a recalled late 1960s sartorial ethnic anarchism, are less con- cemed with what is on their colleagues' backs than with what is in their minds. Textiles may have supernatural properties: the shroud of Turin, cloaks of darkness, and in India's Ram Lila, Sita's sari that unwinds vast lengths of fabric to protect her from a lustful demon. Textile production may be used as a metaphor for life: the three Fates spin; Penelope rips out her weaving nightly in order to arrest the flow of time; the pricking of a finger on a spindle puts Sleep- ing Beauty into suspended animation. Tex- tiles are imbued with the characteristics of their wearers or impart special qualities to them: witness auctions of Elvis Presley's clothing or that 1980s notion "power dress- ing." One can, no doubt, link each of these symbolic values to the institutional arrange- 1588 ments and fundamental cultural properties of each society. In the present volume, for instance, the circulation of banana leaf bun- dles and pandanus fiber mats between kin groups in the Trobriand Islands and Samoa is depicted by Weiner as a solution to the existential puzzle of "giving while keeping" (groups united through marriage maintain these connections, as well as to members who have married out). The "blueness" in- volved in Sumbanese ikat warp dyeing, ex- amined by Hoskins, symbolizes the life-cycle changes through which a woman passes and the reproductive power of women. Other symbolic connections, linking cloth, society, and funerary ritual, are outlined by Feeley- Harnik, writing on an ancestral cult in Mad- agascar, and by Darish, who studied Kuba raffia textiles in Zaire. One gets a good sense that humans are wonderfully inventive with respect to symbolic codes. These symbolic analyses, however, rarely touch on the most important processes af- fecting cloth during the past three centuries. The advent of mercantilism and industrial capitalism transforms ecological, economic, and political relationships in a community as labor and land become involved in commod- ity production. The overlapping relation- ships of kin, social, and ritual identities associated with production for use in the community disappear. Producers are work- ers, not neighbors or kin. The meaning of cloth is transformed as production becomes divorced from consumption and new eco- nomic and political pressures arise. One might reasonably wonder what the impact of being able to buy one's banana leaf bun- dles is on the elaborate exchange system described by Weiner, or whether, given that men often assume control of "women's work" when it becomes economically im- portant, the ideology of blueness, inter- preted by Hoskins as a culturally female attribute, might reflect conflicts and changes in the role of men and women with the expansion of ikat textile production for ex- port. A commonality in the symbolic analyses in this volume is their focus on societal integration and stability. This may stem from the authors' substantive interest in the use of cloth in mortuary rites. Funeral ritu- als, as is known, are frequently preoccupied with reaffirming the enduring nature and solidarity of the social unit. Yet the symbols associated with cloth need not passively mirror societal integration. Cloth may pro- vide a focus for the expression of conflict or reflect commentary on current affairs. The "Age of Napoleon" exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art last winter resoundingly demonstrates the sym- bolic connection of protest, politics, and fashion. Women's scarves were wrapped over the shoulders, with the ends wrapped around the torso and tied in back-a refer- ence to the bound hands of victims en route to the guillotine, perhaps only slightly less macabre than jewelry fashioned in the shape of that implement, complete with dangling crowned heads, a symbolism that is inexplic- able without reference to the French Revo- lution. In two papers in the volume Cohn and Bean explore the symbolic and political as- sociations of cloth in British India. Gandhi's call for his countrywomen and men to reject British cloth in favor of locally produced hand-loomed fabrics equates handmade, in- digenous cloth with India and imported manufactured cloth with the Raj. Yet Gan- dhi's use of cloth as a metaphor for indepen- dence goes beyond a simple dualism. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Indian fabrics were made to specification for export markets that stretched from Southeast Asia to Africa, northem Europe, and North and South America. So competitive was Indian cloth that European nations instituted protection- ist measures against it. In Britain, the Indus- trial Revolution gave a technological edge, aided in good part by trade policies that helped to choke off India's textile industry. India became a producer of raw materials bound for British mills and a consumer of imported goods, in a process known today as the development of underdevelopment. These considerations lead to the core issue for the book, which is the processes that affect the production of cloth and its sym- bolic investiture with meaning: that is, the ecological, economic, political, and techno- logical infrastructure that generates changes and its transformation within the culture's symbolic code. In a provocative essay, Schneider argues that traditional European "spirit helpers" came to be represented as malignant about the time of the Industrial Revolution, as exemplified in the tale "Rumpelstiltskin." Using ecological and economic data on flax production, Schnei- der links environmental deterioriation that occurred as the consequence of increased flax production to the development of changed attitudes toward the spirit SCIENCE, VOL. 249 on July 4, 2015 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from on July 4, 2015 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from