Textiles For This World and Beyond: Treasures From Insular Southeast Asia

London: Scala Publishers, 2005. Softbound. Fine (museum label inside front cover and bottom outside front cover). Navy card wraps with color illustration of batik. 136 pp., profusely illustrated in color. Catalogue from the exhibition of the same title, held March to September 2005. An exploration of the role that textiles play in Indonesian and Malaysian daily life. Textiles sometimes illustrate the transition that take place at important life ceremonies. Often patterned inlarge geometric form, the textiles used for funerals and other rites and ceremonies to appease the spiritual world are among the most dramatic made in all of insular Southeast Asia. The striking motifs, materials, and patterns of othertextiles communicate class standing or membership in a particular ethnic group. Notes, Map, Glossary, References, Index. Encompassing Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Indonesian and Malaysian societies, it describes how each share a common heritage by their extraordinary sense of the power of cloth: whether as a sign of benevolence from the gods to a ruler, a supreme honor to the dead, symbols of contractual alliances or as items of beauty and conceit. Includes Sumatra and the Malay world, the Lesser Sundra Islands, the Toraja of Sulawesi, the Iban and their neighbors and more.