An interview with Lagi-Maama Academy and Consultancy consisting of the dynamic team of Kolokesa Uafā Māhina-Tuai MNZM, Toluma’anave Barbara Makuati-Afitu and Hikule‘o Fe‘aomoeako Melaia Māhina. We learned about their mediating and educational work with Moana Oceania communities as well as how their work has made a difference in how Indigenous knowledge and ‘art’ is understood, documented, and interpreted. We can consider their work as a form of cross-cultural weaving.
The enquiry merges textile craft and feminist discourse and methodologies to probe women’s subjectivities. Through inherited objects and memories, it considers generational wounds and patriarchal neglect as channels for trauma narratives, and explores material objects as acts of ‘re-membering’. It examines the significance of drawn thread embroidery work or Taarkashi as a tangible link between individuals across cultures, generations, and geographies. The juxtaposition of reflective pieces and needlework enables me to experience Taarkashi as practiced by my great-grandmother, Amma. Simultaneously, the craft becomes a testimony to limitations as it can only be done on an open-weave fabric, horizontally or vertically. This constraint reminds me of how the freedom and exposure of skilled women needle workers in the Punjab Province are gendered and controlled by society through disciplines of various kinds.
This is a transcript of a podcast interview conducted on September 15, 2024, for Season 2, Episode 1 of the Embodied Worlds Podcast in which Dr. Urmila Mohan interviewed Prof. Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Anthropologist, University of Cape Town. We are grateful to Dr. Lindsay Crisp, Lecturer, Open University, London, and Emily Levick, our Editorial Project Manager, for researching Prof. Nyamnjoh’s work on incompleteness and providing some of the questions in this interview. Francis’ philosophy of conviviality and collaboration is part of his framework of ‘incompleteness’ and he discussed its use in contexts of ecology, healing systems, and knowledge making. We have started our podcast’s second season with this interview of 50 mins. because Francis’ voice and actions embody our values of interdisciplinary engagement, imagination, and acknowledging incompleteness-in-motion as the state of our common world.
Lalita Waldia, Project Coordinator, People For Himalayan Development, Himachal Pradesh, India, reviews the book "Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism" by Urmila Mohan that explores the profound connection between material culture and religious devotion within the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The book delves into various elements of ISKCON’s practices, focusing on how clothing, body marks, japa beads, and other material artifacts are integral to the religious lives of its followers. The central thesis of Mohan’s work is that these material objects are not mere accessories but play a crucial role in expressing and cultivating devotion, encapsulated in the concept of “efficacious intimacy.”
Artisans in resettling refugee communities in Worcester, Massachusetts sometimes use their craft-making as a means of solace in the face of troubling memories. In this essay I contend that some other refugee artisans use the making of hand loomed textiles as a coded archive of the many borders they have crossed and losses they have experienced, fleeing extreme violence. One such textile is a dark orangish pink table runner woven in 2022 for sale by the nonprofit, Refugee Artisans of Worcester, or RAW. The weaver is the Karenni artisan Tu Meh, age about 62. I employ historian Tiya Miles’ historiography of another specific cloth object, a cotton sack, as set out in her All that She Carried (2022) and apply that approach to cloths made along the refugee journey.
During the 19th-20th century, Kathi women in Saurashtra, Gujarat used glass beads to create trousseau textiles, generating the unique tradition of beadwork. As a researcher trained in textile design and belonging to the Kathi community, I use my great-grandmother, Jadiba's beaded bag, inherited as part of my trousseau, as an entry point into her mind, creativity and use of mathematics at the turn of the last century. By exploring her story as well as those of two other women beadwork artists and analysing beadworks, I make a case for folk or vernacular knowledge and creativity embodied in the object.
This editorial makes a case for the revitalization of a comparative approach in studying textiles through the foci of its three editors. Sandra Dudley studies issues of fluidity and transformation through her research on forced displacement and museums. Emily Levick’s research as a doctoral candidate in museum studies offers a perspective on gender and representation. And Urmila Mohan is concerned with how communities are created through interaction of people and materials.
Dr. Kevin Murray, co-founder of Knowledge House for Craft, discusses the value of the knowledge weaving process in projects such as Reinventing the Wheel and Value of Craft. The Knowledge House for Craft is an international association of craft thinkers and makers. Its core activity is the production of knowledge that is stored in its online vault. The "knowledge weaving" process draws on textile craft as foundational to how we make sense of the world. As a "house" it shares with tapestry workshops the collaborative nature of production. This raises a question: how far can you take the weaving metaphor for knowledge work?
Embodied Worlds is our newest educational and programming initiative, and extends our rich platform and process to those who enjoy the immediacy and aurality of conversation. Each episode of Embodied Worlds explores and connects worlds, small or big, ranging from those made by anthropologists to artisans and community facilitators.
In many indigenous households of the region, rice wine is offered to guests as an honorific welcome drink. Rice wine for these communities is also an essential medium for interacting with forest spirits, performing rituals, and celebrating harvest festivals. However, much of the work that goes into making rice wine such a popular custom often remains unrecognised. This invisibilisation is rooted in the informal and vulnerable nature of women’s homestead-based brewing work, stemming from Liquor Prohibition Acts and prohibition movements, changes in indigenous religions and ideas of morality, or the easy accessibility of Indian-made Foreign Liquor in the region.
Urban landscapes are created, in part, from living materials and are shaped by human use and care. Human actions of maintenance and stewardship produce and sustain designed environments over time. Like other care labor, this work is physical, ongoing, and requires specific local knowledge, yet it is often considered ‘unskilled’ labor. Recent discourse in landscape architecture and planning has highlighted the role of land care work in addressing the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, while creating ‘green jobs.’ This article aims to identify opportunities and particular approaches for creating meaningful social change through stewardship activities.
The speed at which ChatGPT has penetrated higher education has been nothing short of astounding. ChatGPT is able to respond to prompts or commands and generate original content: in other words, it can write. For writers and readers ChatGPT may trigger anxieties about the very essence of authorship and originality, which in turn reflect certain deeply held notions of subjectivity. It is hard not to feel unsettled by the current moment. In this essay I reflect on the very practice of writing itself, and the values we ascribe to it, at this very moment at which its upending seems likely.
Textile work has traditionally been part of Tsotsil and Tseltal women’s domestic duties in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. However, recent national and foreign interest in artisanal handiwork has led women from the region to start selling their work. In this commercial foray, artisanal work emerges as a trade, one that entails accommodations between women’s economic activities and their home life. While most women carry out their artisanal work at home alongside family members, the way in which they define the nature of their work and its relation to their other domestic activities varies considerably. The following video and text profile three textile artisans from the Highlands region, highlighting the distinct ways in which they organize their work and fit it together with their family life and social relations in their communities.
From 2020-23, The Jugaad Project ran 3 virtual workshops with global participants. These workshops produced papers that were later edited into a book The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices (Routledge, 2024). Now released to very positive endorsements, this edited volume showcases new, exciting work at the intersection of belief, intimacy, and material culture, and connects life-worlds across religion and politics. Emma Cieslik reviews this book to explore how it might be useful to scholars.
While conducting fieldwork with informal doctors in low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, I noticed that several patients consulted them for what appeared to be work-related ailments. Reflecting on these encounters at the intersection of medicine and labour, I thought about how work consumes both our time and our vitality, and how responses to the effects of work mobilize particular ideas of care and wellbeing. I wondered: if health is socially constructed, in what ways does labour construct it? In this essay, I explore how, across various urban work contexts — from informal sector work to supposedly good jobs in “India Inc.” — people experience and differently articulate a range of symptoms and conditions (such as stress, tension, fatigue, pain, injury, and various infectious diseases) in relation to their labour.
