A digital archive showcasing the extensive collection of jewellery and adornment images shared on the former Ethnic Jewels Ning site over the years. These images have significantly enriched discussions on cultural adornment and its global dispersion.
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Love happy little bracelets like these. See many of them in the South of Morocco, often made of non-silver. Is this bracelet silver? Do you have a lot of base metal jewelry in Tunisia? There is lots and lots of it in Yemen and some in Morocco and of course Central Asians often use German silver for their more popular products.
The bracelet is gilt silver. There is a certain amount of base metal jewelry in Tunisia, and plenty of low-grade coin silver. I tend to think I actually see more coin silver than base metal, but plenty of the latter exists. The bad thing is that the base and coin metal is easy to hide under a layer of gilding. The bracelet above is of good quality silver (one can see it on the inside of the bracelet where the gilding has worn away.)
Here is some base metal jewelry I recently saw for sale in the coastal city of Gabes.
What a nice bracelet, Edith! Very appealing: I learn a great deal from you as so few other people, including writers of books, pay much attention to Tunisian pieces. And that Djerba seems to be a particularly good source for nice pieces!
Thanks Joost! I think the pieces from Djerba tend to be the most skilled of the Tunisian workmanship. I am hoping to write something myself, but know that it may be difficult to find a publisher. I want to try to place Tunisian jewelry in an ethnographic context since that aspect of Tunisian pieces is particularly complex and interesting.
I gathered some very interesting info on my recent trip to the south, and discovered that the use of jewelry in the south is highly differentiated between different localities and ethnic groups. This differentiation may be diminishing due to increased migration to urban areas, amalgamation (not a bad thing), globalization of the market place, mass production of cheaply produced pieces and wider market distribution from fewer fabrication centers.
One could probably do an extensive ethnographic study on the subject of Tunisian jewelry, but I think that what I am working on will probably be more of a survey since I do not have time and funding to do more. It will be more anecdotal than I would like, but I think if I make this too much of a tome no one will publish or read it.
A great post, Edith! As someone who, with his wife, has been involved in the production of a very ambitious publishing project in the area of ethnic jewellery I would have to say that the ONLY satisfaction that comes from doing it is the joy of creating something one can believe in and which gives a great many other people the opportunity to see and read what they otherwise would not normally come across: if they then let one know, as they are very often kind enough to do, that they like what they have, then that is the crowning climax of the whole process. As all that has been very satisfying, we have no regrets. HOWEVER: the negative side is that you end up paying most of the cost yourself (not all, thank God, as we did co-publish), and that you spend an unbelievable amount of time on the selling process, with little chance - I would so far predict - of ever recouping much of the outlay. Indeed, we could only do so if this first impression gets sold first, which would STILL leave us out of pocket, and if we then successfully published a cheap paperback. In short, your thinking is entirely along the right lines. If you want to avoid all such hassle and significant financial loss as a big book is likely to bring with it, then my strong advice to you would be to do just what you are thinking of as most essential and practical: that is, to publish a short book, with good photographs, giving a good idea of Tunisian jewellery with informative but basic and compact text, and in paperback form. As, moreover, you'd publish on just one cultural area, it is the more important to keep the cost down. Aim for something worth doing within its limits, but make very sure you end up with a saleable product at a modest price. Even that is very difficult to do - but anything too ambitious would hardly sell, and after all the MAIN thing is that you want to see the book in the hands of other people, even if you do have to subsidise your own book. As well, the more modest the outlay the more likely is it is that a publisher MIGHT support you financially.