Talismanic clothing

This interesting article about talismanic clothing was published in the recent edition of Asian Textiles. Alain Epelboin has studied these clothes from West Africa covered in talismanic writing which may be curative or preventative. Once the lifespan of the talisman is over, for whatever reason, it is abandoned and the collection he studied was acquired from workers who sort through refuse in Dakar, Senegal. Some of the clothes have writing on them, others have paper containing talismanic writing concealed within them. A selection was exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris last year.