“Carpets that bind the world: Indian carpets and their journey toward the Kyoto Gion Festival”(Nagoya University Press, 2017)

Yumiko Kamada(Keio University, Faculty of Economics, Associate Professor )

It is a great pleasure and honor to receive the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. I have been specializing in Islamic art, especially Islamic paintings and carpets, which are areas of study that are less well known in Japan. Therefore, I am encouraged by the fact that the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Foundation has chosen to award such an honorable prize for a field of research whose presence and significance have not yet been fully recognized. In particular, I would like to thank the foundation, prize committee members, editors of the University of Nagoya Press, and those who have kindly assisted me in my research. In my book entitled Carpets that Bind the World: Indian Carpets and Their Journey toward the Kyoto Gion Festival, I focused on the production, circulation and reception of carpets woven in south India (the Deccan) as trade goods in the 17th to 18th centuries and revealed how their function and significance changed as they traveled across cultural borders. Some of them were brought to Edo-period Japan by the Dutch East India Company and were used as float covers for the Kyoto Gion Festival. In fact, not a few Indian carpets were brought to pre-modern Japan and related pieces are still preserved in collections in Europe, the United States, and India as well. Given the fact that the study of carpets is less well known in Japan, my book has a section that provides readers with basic knowledge about carpet studies. My book also describes the international trade in Islamic carpets and how they fascinated people in Europe from the 14th century onward. Through the 188 color illustrations and 167 black and white images in the book, readers can easily imagine the life of people in the distant past. I will continue to do research in the field of Islamic art in order to contribute to this field of study. At the same time, I will keep writing readable books based on my research so that many people can familiarize themselves with Islamic culture and history. Thank you once again for this award.

Profile
1979 Born in Fukuoka 2002 Received B.A. in Aesthetics and Art History from Keio University 2004 Received M.A. in Art History from The University of Tokyo 2004 Enrolled in Ph.D. program, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University 2008-2010 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Dept. of Islamic art 2011 Received Ph.D. in Islamic Art from Institute of Fine Arts, New York University 2011 Assistant Professor, Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University 2014 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics, Keio University 2017 Associate Professor, Faculty of Economics, Keio University