Description
Surviving Desires: Making and Selling Native Jewellery in the American Southwest by anthropologist and curator Henrietta Lidchi is a visually stunning exploration of the symbolic, economic, and communal value of jewellery in the American Southwest. The author works in the National Museums Scotland and has examined British collecting, exchanges between British and American institutions, and the development of the British Museum’s contemporary collection. Drawing on the author’s archival research and on interviews she conducted with Native American jewellers and with traders, dealers, and curators, Lidchi focuses on jewellery in the cultural economy of the Southwest, exploring jewellery making as a decorative art form in constant transition. She describes the jewellery as subject to a number of desires, controlled at different times by government agencies, individual entrepreneurs, traders, curators, and Native American communities. Lidchi explores the jewellery as craft, material culture, commodity, and adornment. Considering the impact of tourism, she discusses fakes in the market and the artists’ desires to codify traditional styles, explaining how these factors can affect stylistic development and value. Native American jewellery of the Southwest is an iconic art form. Internationally recognized and locally significant, Native American jewellery has a compelling history—it represents the persistence of tradition while encapsulating the vitality of Native American communities and the continuously transforming nature of the jewellery makers’ art and design. This volume is an important addition to understanding the unique silver and turquoise jewellery of the Native Americans in the Southwest. It features 300 colour photographs of jewellery in the British Museum, the National Museums Scotland, and major collections in the United States, sources, and an index.