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Folk Arts of Southeast Asia: Persistence and Change

Arts and crafts are the expression of the community that creates them, but they also belong to the land that produces the materials used in their manufacture and according to whose seasons the calendrical festivals are set. The folk arts of a people embellish the festivals and ceremonies of their lives and are produced in accord with the cycles of the community--the availability of raw materials and time of the craftspeople. While ceremonies and costumes are to some extent portable, one of the tasks of the new immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is to seek ways of preserving and adapting their crafts to the United States, which has ...

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