“Spiritual Matters: Material Culture and Japanese Religion” Lecture Series: Secular Garment, Sacred Cloth: The Four-Hundred-Year Life of a Japanese Textile

A set of Japanese textile fragments reveal a complex web of entangled histories. They once shared a single existence as a garment, likely worn by a high-ranking member of sixteenth-century society. Subsequently, the garment was fragmented and made into an altar cloth, crossing the border from a secular to a sacred context. By the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, the sacred cloth was dismembered and established separate narratives as collectible objects in the hands of individual collectors. This lecture will trace this transfiguration from garment to fragments and highlight the shifting values and functions of textiles as clothing, ritual offerings, and coveted museum objects.