The possibilities presented by textiles as objects -and subjects- of study of the Andean region are multiple. For researchers who deal with the Andean world from disciplines such as archaeology, ethnology, history, linguistics and even from the arts, the Andean textile is an object that reveals a large amount of information regarding identity, territory , economic and productive relations, social and communication practices of the communities in which they are produced and used.
Thanks to the fact that textile production continues to be a living practice within indigenous communities in rural areas of Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina, it is possible -and essential- to resort to the knowledge of weavers, in order to understand the world of ideas or the Andean philosophy that surrounds the creation of textiles. Researchers such as Denise Arnold, Elvira Espejo and Verónica Cereceda, who have worked closely with various communities of Andean weavers, highlight an aspect that previous archaeological and anthropological studies had not taken into account: the living nature of the weave. The Andean conception of textiles as a living being has to do with the relationship established between the weaver and her creation, in the Aymara language and textile terminology, and the transformations that the fabric undergoes throughout the production chain. For the weavers, “textile production is comparable to the action of generating a baby”, it is a technical and reflective process that gradually forms a living being. In the field of language we can find, for example, the following Quechua and Aymara expressions:
The personality of the fabrics communicate about various aspects of the community in which they are generated. Thus, the textiles used as clothing reveal information about the community to which the person belongs and even what occupation they have. In the case of the sacks, the colors, the arrangement of the stripes and the size indicate the type of seed that is inside.
The anthropologist Verónica Cereceda shows that textiles consist of true visual languages that, through their particular characteristics, encode ways of understanding the world. In this way, both the fabrics for daily use and those for ritual use can be considered as a text –a woven text-. Cereceda presents in her book “From the eyes to the soul” (2017) a series of essays on this theme, where she analyzes in detail the way in which the Andean worldview is manifested in the form and style of textiles.
The transformations that occur at the technical level, the representations and the uses of textiles over time, also speak of social, economic and linguistic transformations within the Andean communities. In a context where studies on material culture expand to other disciplines beyond archaeology, Andean fabrics become a subject of study that presents great interdisciplinary potential. A “side effect” could also be the revaluation of traditional practices with a strong identity and symbolic charge that, in the context of globalization and rural-urban migration, seemed to be on the decline.
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