Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar.

Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar

Edited by Chapurukha M. Kusimba, J. Claire Odland, and Bennet Bronson

UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, No. 7. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and Chicago: The Field Museum, 2004. 196 pp., 45 b/w photos, 109 color photos, 7 maps. $40.00, softcover.

In 1925, Ralph Linton, the assistant curator of North American Ethnology at the Field Museum, traveled to Madagascar to "untangle the threads of cultural history." Two years later, he returned to Chicago with an extensive collection of Malagasy artifacts, including nearly 600 textiles. Today, this collection may well be the most comprehensive record of Malagasy textile production from that time period, particularly following the tragic fire of 1995 that destroyed the Queen's Palace Museum in Antananarivo, Madagascar, along with its immense textile collection. Thanks to Chapurukha M. Kusimba, J. Claire Odland, and Bennet Bronson, coeditors of Unwrapping the Textile Traditions of Madagascar, we now have the first all-inclusive study of the Linton collection.

Their publication is one of two coedited volumes on Madagascar textiles to have appeared in the last five years. In 2002 Christine Mullen Kreamer and Sarah Fee coedited the six-essay volume Objects as Envoys: Cloth, Imagery, and Diplomacy in Madagascar as the catalog for their NMAfA exhibition. Together, Kreamer and Fee drew on the Smithsonian's small, late-nineteenth century collection of textiles and contemporary postcards to paint a fairly broad picture of Malagasy textiles and their history. Where appropriate, they included examples from other museums, Including those collected by Linton. The Fowler book with its nine chapters and two appendixes, features some of the same authors, but is focused solely on the Ralph Linton collection as a window into Madagascar history and to Linton himself.

Linton had at least two reasons for wanting to collect artifacts in Madagascar. One was his fear that Malagasy culture was headed for extinction, compelling him, like so many anthropologists of his time, to collect as much as he possibly could in order to preserve it. In her fascinating account of Linton's expedition to Madagascar, the historian Liliana Mosca informs us that Linton was unrelenting in his collecting mission, eager to cover every corner of the island, to stay in each area for weeks or months on end, and to continually push onward, in spite of his numerous bouts of malaria. I recommend this chapter and the following one, featuring his description of a Malagasy market he visited, for their insight into the mindset and motivations of an early twentieth century cultural anthropologist collecting in the field.

Besides aiming to preserve Malagasy culture, Linton hoped to sort out the cultural mix of African and Asian influences in an area Kusimba defines as the "crossroads between Africa and Asia." Linton was forever seeking proof of links between these two areas of the world by, for example, noting parallels between Malagasy customs and those from the Marquesas or New Zealand, or by guessing the tribal identities of the people he was observing during his visit to a Malagasy market.

Appropriately, Kusimba, Odland, and Bronson use Madagascar's cultural mix as the underlying theme of their book. They begin it with an introductory chapter by Kusimba, an African-focused scholar, and end it with one by Bronson, an Indonesianist. Most of the chapters in between address the various cultural threads that make up this collection. Four of the articles focus on regional styles, with Rebecca Green's on funerary textiles from the Madagascar highlands (Betsileo); Sarah Fee's on a broad range of issues concerning cloth production and its use in the southwest; Wendy Walker and Edgar Kreb's on raffia cloths from the southeast; and Odland on a form of ikat from the Sakalava area that bears an uncanny resemblance to ikat from the Philippines. Between these four articles, we see everything from raffia and bark to cotton and silk. Indeed, even the latter is multifaceted. The biologist Richard S. Peigler, in his article on Malagasy raw silk, demonstrates that one particular silk cloth is itself a blend of mulberry silk (landikely) and wild silk (landibe), a conclusion he draws from stunningly detailed photographs he took using a scanned electronic microscope (SEM).

Linton's textile collection is revealing in what it lacks as much as in what it contains. As Fee and others point out, Linton never collected European textiles, even though the Malagasy were using them extensively at the time he was there. Some of those hybrids may already be evident in the W.T. Rawleigh Collection of Malagasy Portraits dating between 1910-1930 that Chantal Radimilahy writes about. Indeed, Madagascar has had a long history of European contact, generating some of the earliest comprehensive accounts of textiles of anywhere in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. By the late nineteenth century, the French and British had greatly escalated their cloth trade to Madagascar, as elsewhere in Africa, leaving an Indelible mark on local cloth production and use. In his essay on change in the weaving of Highland Madagascar, Simon Peers informs us that by the mid-nineteenth century, the Malagasy had already lost three-quarters of their previous, rather diverse, textile production. He describes the remains as the "survival of pockets of techniques and styles."

One of those survivals is the so-called lamba, a rectangular-shaped cloth woven in two parts and, depending on the context, used for either the living or the dead. Once particular to only certain Madagascar groups, the lamba and its name are now recognized throughout much of the island as quintessential Malagasy attire. The coeditors emphasize the cultural importance of the lamba all the more by including two appendices, one by Michael Razafiarivony on lamba song and another by Chantal Radimilahy on lamba and proverbs.

Change in Madagascar textile production, as Peer notes, is about more than just the survival of the old and traditional. Some weaving experienced interesting permutations as a result of European contact. By the late nineteenth century, some Malagasy weavers were replicating the designs on European traded damask, resulting in a cloth with an entirely new aesthetic. Damask-inspired cloths were so much the norm by the time Linton was there that he felt compelled to collect it, and may even have thought of it as "traditional."

After reading Kusimba, Odlund, and Bronson's volume, with its emphasis on the cultural mix that underlies Madagascar textile production, I came away convinced more by the Asian (and European) elements in Malagasy textiles than by the sub-Saharan African ones, suggesting that more attention could have been given to arguing for the latter. As well, I felt that that there could have been a more concerted effort to contextualize the cloths featured in the Rawleigh portraits as they relate, or do not relate, to the Linton collection. But overall, I praise the authors for their comprehensive, well-illustrated, and highly useful book on a particularly important Malagasy textile collection.