Letter from the Editors


ETHNOBIOLOGY LETTERS                                                                                                                    Book Review 
 

 3 

Book Review 

Material Choices: Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibers in Asia and the Pacific 
Roy W. Hamilton and B. Lynne Milgram, eds. 2008. Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles. Pp. 187, bibliography, 
index, copious color illustrations. $30.00 (paper).  ISBN-13 9780974872988.   
 

Reviewed by E. N. Anderson
1 

 
Reviewer Address:

 1
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, California 92521 

 
Received: December 6

th
 2009                           Volume 1:3 

Published: August 3
rd

 2010                © 2010 Society of Ethnobiology 
 
This work is the catalogue of an exhibition of East 
Asian and Micronesian textile art at the Fowler 
Museum, UCLA’s large and excellent museum of 
ethnic arts.  It is important and interesting to 
ethnobiologists because of its unique coverage of the 
textile plants of Asia and Oceania that provide the 
fibers.  Plants involved include flax, hemp, various 
banana species, hibiscus, elm (bast from inner bark), 
lotus, and others.  Decidedly the most exotic is Curculigo 
latifolia, used only by the Benuaq of Kalimantan.  They 
produce spectacularly beautiful fabrics, but the industry 
almost died out a generation ago; it has been revived 
largely because of tourism and art collecting.  Also 
specialized is the exquisite banana and hibiscus fiber art 
of Fais Island, Micronesia, a tiny speck with a 
population of some 300. 

Other cultures treated in this volume include 
Hmong (Vietnam), Korea, In-tha (north Myanmar), 
Okinawa (the famous banana fiber there), interior 
Luzon peoples, and Japan including the Ainu.  Several 
of the chapters are authored or coauthored by scholars 
from the countries in question.  The level of 
scholarship and detail is high. 

All these art traditions are extremely labor-
intensive and specialized, and thus in danger of 
displacement in this world of cheap mass-produced 
textiles.  The weavers show great dedication in 
continuing to work in the face of this.  Some (notably 
in Japan) receive appropriate recognition, but others 
work for themselves and their communities, 
unrecognized by the wider world until now.  Thus, a 
major part of the book concerns the efforts to preserve 
and maintain these arts in the face of imminent threats. 

Yet the art presented in this book is world-class.  
Textiles in Europe have a lowly reputation and are 
sometimes unfairly dismissed as “mere craft,” because 
the European world has long regarded sculpture and 
painting as the “fine” arts.  However, in much of island 

Asia, especially the small-scale societies of Indonesia 
and the Philippines, it is textiles that are the “fine” arts, 
while sculpture and painting receive decidedly lower 
status and aesthetic investment.   

The results shown herein are amazing.  Textile 
lovers will already be familiar with the beauty of 
Japanese and other mainstream textile art, but the work 
from the Benuaq and from Fais may come as a 
surprise, and, if so, prepare to be literally stunned.  To 
anyone who appreciates abstract geometric art, any one 
of the photographs of the Benuaq pieces is worth the 
full price of this book. 

Roy Hamilton deserves recognition as a powerful 
major figure in ethnobotanical art.  His previous work 
The Art of Rice (2003) was a landmark—a truly great 
work of aesthetic anthropology.  The present work is a 
unique contribution, apparently the first book to cover 
the bast traditions of East Asia and Oceania.   

Reference Cited 
Hamilton, Roy W. 2003. The Art of Rice: Spirit and 
Sustenance in Asia. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural 
History, Los Angeles.