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Colette Ghysels herself provides detailed captions for all the illustrations, identifying materials and craft methods, giving tribal names and uses for the objects, and offering a more sophisticated appreciation not only of the value, rarity, and significance, but of the beauty of each work.
Throughout history jewellery has expressed a multitude of meanings - social position, marital status, self-esteem. Richly elaborate or elegantly simple, Native American beadwork, Turkoman silver, Burmese jade and other examples of ethnic jewellery are avidly sought by collectors. This book reveals the full splendours and the subtle meanings behind the finely crafted works of art in one of the world's finest private collections of ethnic jewellery - that of Colette and Jean-Pierre Ghysels, which has until now remained carefully protected in Brussels, never exhibited extensively, and accessible only to selected scholars.
Ethnic Jewellery from Indonesia: Continuity, Creativity and Evolution is a compelling introduction to the little known visual power and beauty of the body adornments used by the myriad peoples of Indonesia s outer islands, including Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, Sumba and Maluku. Illustrated with more than 500 rare pieces that have been accumulated since the 1970s by collector Manfred Giehmann, the book explores the depth and breadth of an ancient and magnificent tradition, revealing the fruits of careful documentation that has taken place over a period of decades. It will provide information on the origin, meaning and purpose of the jewellery items, as well as unique insights into the people who crafted and wore the jewellery for ritual or ceremonial functions. Ethnic Jewellery: Continuity, Creativity and Evolution is a definitive work on the subject and a testimony to the greatness of a fast-disappearing Indonesian tradition."
The care with which this book has been prepared is simply astonishing. Its history began when Truus and Joost Daalder acquired their first examples of non-European ethnic body adornment around 1980, four years after their arrival in Adelaide.
Jewelry responds to our most primitive urges, for control, honor, and sex. It is at once the most ancient and most immediate of art forms, one that is defined by its connection and interaction with the body. In this sense it is inescapably political, its meaning bound to the possibilities of the body it lies on. Indeed, the fate of the body is often bound to the jewelry. This study looks at gender and jewelry in order to gain some understanding into how jewelry is constructed by and constructs not just a single society, but human societies. It will explore how societal traditions that have sprung up around jewelry and ornamentation have affected the possibilities available to women across a broad spectrum of social and ethnic circumstances, determining which have served women well and which are constrictive and destructive. It also examines the possibilities for the intentional creation of feminist jewelry, including an overview of the author's own work.
Enduring Splendor focuses on the rich and diverse silver jewelry traditions of India's Thar Desert region, stretching across the western states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. These traditions are considered against the background of the five-thousand-year history of jewelry making across the vast Indian Subcontinent. Drawing on recent field research carried out in the city of Jaisalmer, a thriving center of contemporary jewelry production, Enduring Splendor explores for the first time the life and work of four sonis (silversmiths or goldsmiths). To contextualize this recent production, numerous illustrations of very fine examples of ninteenth- and twentieth-century jewelry types that are still worn are included. These objects have been borrowed from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection of Jewelry and Ritual Arts of India, part of a promised gift to UCLA, where it will find its future home with the Fowler Museum. The Linde Collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of Indian jewelry in the world. This volume highlights elaborate rural styles rendered in silver as well as selected ornate examples, largely associated with the elite, made with gold and gemstones.
This second volume of a multi-volume series on the Gbysels collection -- probably the most comprehensive and beautiful collection of ethnic jewelry in the world -- presents nearly 800 extraordinary objects, most of which have never been shown to the public before, coming from Africa, Asia and America. Since time immemorial, earrings have been a means of seduction for women. Craftsmen the world over have set their imaginations to work, using every available material. Firstly they used flowers and grass, feathers and horns, wood, shells, and ivory. Mines and alluvional deposits offered stones and metals. Bold travellers and adventurous sailors set off in search of exotic goods. Their symbolism is also rich and complex: for the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya, a person's prestige is measured by the number of ear ornaments, as long as their lobes can stand without tearing. Statues of Buddha show him with long ears. In the archipelagos of Indonesia, the suitor's family offers earrings to seal an alliance. Leather earrings with pearls are a sign of a married woman's status for Masai. In the Philippines and among the Naga headhunters, the men's hunting exploits and prowess as warriors are embodied in the jewellery theywear on their ears.
An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. “A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying” (Kirkus Reviews), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation. One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English, but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies who negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal. In Blood Moon, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga that informs much of the country’s mythic past today. Fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick’s own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—it is “a wild ride of a book—fascinating, chilling, and enlightening—that explains the removal of the Cherokee as one of the central dramas of our country” (Ian Frazier). Populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties, this is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.
With reference to India.
The Caliph’s Splendor is a revelation: a history of a civilization we barely know that had a profound effect on our own culture. While the West declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new Arab civilization arose to the east, reaching an early peak in Baghdad under the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Harun is the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, but his actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. In The Caliph’s Splendor, Benson Bobrick eloquently tells the little-known and remarkable story of Harun’s rise to power and his rivalries with the neighboring Byzantines and the new Frankish kingdom under the leadership of Charlemagne. When Harun came to power, Islam stretched from the Atlantic to India. The Islamic empire was the mightiest on earth and the largest ever seen. Although Islam spread largely through war, its cultural achievements were immense. Harun’s court at Baghdad outshone the independent Islamic emirate in Spain and all the courts of Europe, for that matter. In Baghdad, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new learning enhanced civilization. Over the following centuries Arab and Persian civilizations made a lasting impact on the West in astronomy, geometry, algebra (an Arabic word), medicine, and chemistry, among other fields of science. The alchemy (another Arabic word) of the Middle Ages originated with the Arabs. From engineering to jewelry to fashion to weaponry, Arab influences would shape life in the West, as they did in the fields of law, music, and literature. But for centuries Arabs and Byzantines contended fiercely on land and sea. Bobrick tells how Harun defeated attempts by the Byzantines to advance into Asia at his expense. He contemplated an alliance with the much weaker Charlemagne in order to contain the Byzantines, and in time Arabs and Byzantines reached an accommodation that permitted both to prosper. Harun’s caliphate would weaken from within as his two sons quarreled and formed factions; eventually Arabs would give way to Turks in the Islamic empire. Empires rise, weaken, and fall, but during its golden age, the caliphate of Baghdad made a permanent contribution to civilization, as Benson Bobrick so splendidly reminds us.