Textiles are prone to perish more easily than other crafts, which makes them trickier objects to study. At the same time, they constitute a special medium of folk culture and help shed light on the lifestyle of human communities, and their geographic & social environments.

In Episode #1 “What are textiles and why study them?” (series The world of Central Asian textiles) Victoria tells us:

1. what textiles actually are (many people cannot accurately define textiles even in their primary language!), 
2. what they can tell us about the people creating and wearing them, and 
3. what methods of data gathering & analysis exist and are practiced by the researchers of textiles.

You can find transcript for this conversation at: https://notjustsilkpodcast.wordpress.com/

The melody you hear in the episode is "Chuli Irok", a folk Uzbek melody played on dutar by Gulyam Kuchkarov.