Andean Textile Traditions: Material Knowledge and Culture, Part 1 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Pathways to the Past: Strategies for investigating Ancient Andean Textiles
Recuperando el pasado La conservación de textiles arqueológicos y etnográficos Recovering the Past The conservation of archaeological and ethnographic textiles, 2005
Through an overview of my research approaches (textile technology, replication of techniques, images and patterns modeled on fiber structures, graphic codes), I illustrate that the relationships evident in each area are also the relationships that underpin activities in diverse cultural domains. I argue that Andean people developed an alternative strategy for structuring and recording experience.
Representations of Nature in Andean Textiles
Journal of Global Initiatives Policy Pedagogy Perspective, 2013
Andean textile tradition is rich with symbolism demonstrating the close ties of Quechua speaking people of Peru with nature. The observations of several researchers and textile production centers bear witness to the fascinating world of Andean cosmology as it is expressed in traditional cloth. This article introduces many of these important ideas, people, and organizations to the reader.
Woven Brilliance: Approaching Color in Andean Textile Traditions
Textile Museum Journal, 2020
Support for volume 47 of The Textile Museum Journal is generously provided by the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection Endowment, David W. and Barbara G. Fraser, and the Markarian Foundation. The museum is grafeful for their support and commitment to advancing textile scholarship.
Textiles, Technical Practice and Power in los Andes
2014
This book explores the importance of textiles in Andean societies, past and present, as vital indicators of regional ideas about technique and technology, and the ways these interact with power relations, including gender and class relations. The focus is on Andean textiles from a weaver’s point of view, as living things which express through their structures, techniques and iconography a complex three-dimensional worldview. These ontological conceptions are traced through the various tasks and processes in the productive chain of textile making, and the manifold ways in which the ideas about a finished textile product refer back continually to these shared experiences in Andean societies. Different thematic approaches examine how the material existence of textiles served, and still serves, as records of technological knowledge, at the heart of human-centred efforts to integrate and coordinate diverse populations into socio-cultural and productive endeavours in common. Specific chapters on the technical competitions between young weavers, communication systems based on differential forms of spin and twist, the technical features of weavings as evidence of cultural origins, or as expressions of identity and alterity, and a reading of textiles (on a par with khipus) as documents about resource use and allocation, all illustrate the interests of societies which privilege technical creativity and complexity, and their visual and textural expression. Contributions cover time periods from the Early Horizon to contemporary rural communities of weaving practice, mainly in the South Central Andes.
Weaving Life. The Textile Collection of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia, following the productive chain., 2015
When we started preparing this catalogue, little work has been done in Bolivia on the museological aspects of textiles from the Andean and Amazonian regions of the country, and still less in a contextualised sense, taking into account the social life of its regions. Neither was there an adequate link, within Bolivian archaeology, between museum collections and national research into textiles, and this discipline is only recently showing an interest in this theme. And although there had been certain advances over the past decades within anthropology and the history of art into the study of textiles, this had not produced a renovation of ideas in theory or in practice, applicable to the organisation of textile exhibitions. In the present volume, in coordination with the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore (Musef), in La Paz, we decided to remedy this situation by proposing a new focus towards the woven objects located in the museum deposits, centred on making these textiles within the productive chain of weaving, taking into account the social life of the weaving communities of practice in the region, and also the social life of textiles as both objects and subjects.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11 (3), 2021
This article explores a Mesoamerican topology based on the figure of the fold. It argues that the operation of folding represents a crucial concept for understanding indigenous cosmology and ontology. The fold is what allows the separation and articulation of the two domains into which the indigenous cosmos is divided: the solar state, extensive and discrete, which humans and other ordinary beings inhabit, and the intensive, virtual sphere, where spirits dwell. In turn, the fold refers to textiles, which likely represent a basic model for invention and transformation in Mesoamerican cultures. The article examines certain classical themes in Mesoamerican anthropology in light of this topology: a human being's make-up, ritual operations, folding of the body, the sacred bundles, and the substance of time. At a more general level, this work is an attempt to contribute to what could be called an Amerindian transformational topology, a kind of imagination where certain "forms" or "figures" reappear in different domains of the world as transformations one of another.
Artl@s Bulletin, 2020
Through a comparative and multi-sited ethnography in Cusco (Peru) and Bolivia, the article shows how, by mobilizing Andean textiles, local actors are weaving social change(s) while also changing the way of weaving. These two ideas are interwoven: 1) Andean textiles contribute to local population to weave social change(s) by bringing alternative economic opportunities; 2) weaving practices are changing, since new fashionable, industrial, and “hybrid” production has been created and adapted to an urban-oriented/tourist-oriented market which provides money to make the social change(s) possible. Recommended Citation Terry, Cristian. "Weaving Social Change(s) or Changes of Weaving? The Ethnographic Study of Andean Textiles in Cusco and Bolivia." Artl@s Bulletin 9, no. 1 (2020): Article 6. Full article, free download : https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol9/iss1/6/