The role of textiles in any society is both pervasive and diverse, for textiles serve everyone in many ways. Textiles are created to serve the daily and ceremonial needs of nearly all individuals, literally from birth to death. Enfolding a newborn in cloth is usually the first act a woman does for her infant that an animal does not; being clothed or wrapped in cloth is the first mark of the infant’s incorporation into the human community. Most cultures also pay close attention to the garments with which they prepare their dead, a habit that has engendered preservation of extraordinary textile remains such as those excavated at Pazyryk in Siberia and at various sites along the desert coast of Peru. Intimately intertwined with human experience, textiles have served throughout history as a medium of interaction between humans and the world they inhabit. Textiles function as garments, as furnishings, as containers for storage and transport, as architecture (tents) and architectural elements (e. g., doors, walls, floors), as bearers of belief systems and cultural heritage, and in the care of domesticated animals. From cradle to grave, cloth enfolds us, protecting, defining, and embellishing our persons, the spaces we occupy, and the activities in which we engage.
In all categories of the world’s populations, individuals require textiles regardless of age, sex, status, belief, or occupation. Yet textiles by their design and function also serve to distinguish among individuals and among groups of individuals, in terms of class, religion, activity, gender, stature, and respect. The basis of fashion, textiles distinguish by means of drapery, form, and cut, by color and texture, by the fibers and how they have been prepared, by processing and finishing of the fabric. Combining aesthetics and technology, the textile arts represent nearly all human activity and express much that is valued in any given society. A major component of material culture, textiles are intended to serve defined purposes.
Lightweight, flexible, and sometimes worth their weight in gold, textiles have served as vehicles for commerce and communication from prehistoric times to the present. They have been used to proclaim an individual’s age, gender, status, wealth, profession, and religious affiliation; to highlight individuality and/or foster group identity; and to support, defy, or subvert social organization and political power. An integral part of many religious and civil rituals, textiles can embody and make visible belief systems (see Ritual, Religion, and Ideology). Imbued with the power of the image or the authority of a ruler, textiles may serve to legitimize, to provide a blessing, or to unify people around a potent symbol such as a banner or flag.
All textiles, including those that have survived only as scraps, derive from particular places at particular times. Each textile or fragment represents a complex set of human interactions between user and viewer, which implies a social response, and between user and maker, which sometimes results from an economic transaction or transactions among buyer and seller, lender, merchant, and trader. Suppliers of raw materials and market officials adjudicating fair trade and quality control may also have been involved. The quality and appearance of any given textile results from the contemporaneous conjunction of such factors as desire, taste, knowledge, technology, social traditions, aesthetic preference, style, fashion, political and economic circumstance, market conditions, organization of the household, availability of raw materials, and local ecology. In short, every textile ever produced, from oversize carpets to the tiniest shred of a fabric, is the product of its own environment, made and used in response to a particular set of historical circumstances. Analyzed with care, a great deal of information about the environment and historical circumstances that produced a textile can be deciphered from even a small, discolored fragment hundreds or even thousands of years later.
World History
