Livre - Palestinian costume and jewelry

This beautifully illustrated book, a catalog of the Santa Fe, New Mexico, Museum of International Folk Art s collection of Palestinian clothing and jewelry, presents an overview of Palestinian history arid traditional life. The author shows how costume reflects social mores and how jewelry explains and enhances status among the Arabs, Christians, and Jews of Palestine. The richness of materials used in clothing and in decoration often points up class rather than cross-cultural differences. The qafṭān, for example, which dates at least from the tenth century, is worn by men and women villagers, townsfolk, and Bedouins. Whether it is made of velvet or linen, and how it is decorated, will reveal more about the wealth of the wearer than about his racial origin. Stillman gives the reader not only information about each of the pieces in the MOIFA collection, a collection known for its scope, size, and quality, but also brief histories of the textile industry and the development of handicrafts and embroidery in the Middle East. This book will appeal to Middle Eastern scholars, curators of textile and costume collections, the general reader interested in costume history, and embroiderers, for whom there is a sampler of traditional Palestinian motifs. Yedida Kalfon Stillman is assistant professor of classical and Near Eastern studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton and consultant to the International Folk Art Foundation and the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe.