2024 Fall Editorial: What Matters in Textiles? Comparative Perspectives on Materials and Community

Citation: Mohan, Urmila, Emily Levick and Sandra Dudley. “What Matters in Textiles? Comparative Perspectives on Materials and Community” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2024, www.thejugaadproject.pub/editorial-textiles [date of access]

Textiles[1] surround us, whether we notice them or not. We wear them, we sit on them, we wrap ourselves in them, and we use, reuse, and repurpose them continuously throughout our lives. From cloth wrappers to bags and envelopes of various kinds, textiles cover and carry bodies from persons to architectural elements. Along with the idea that cloth contains is the emphasis on holding and carrying as women’s activities and the need for both cultural context and comparison (Fisher 1980: 56, Weiner and Schneider eds. 1989).

“Cloth, like people, can be damaged by circumstances; but it can also heal and be rebuilt. This rebuilding imbues textiles with multiple layers of meaning, which shift according to context” (Levick 2021). In its recent exhibition, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, the Barbican Centre in London, UK, presented works by fifty international artists who “use textiles to communicate vital ideas about power, resistance and survival” (Barbican 2024), demonstrating the reach of textiles and dress as a language and practice that is understood by all. Notable among the many fascinating installations in this exhibition was the section on ‘Wound and Repair’, in which were displayed textile pieces testifying to notions of damage and healing. As Wells Fray-Smith (2024) notes:

Stitching and weaving have often been considered metaphors for healing, synonymous with restoration, repair and also care. To sew is to mend, to bind together, to attend to a fracture or split in an attempt to bring fragments into a whole; it is an act of reconstruction following a rupture or wound. Yet sewing is a process that also involves violence: you cannot sew a stitch or attempt a repair without also making a puncture.

This use of textiles as vehicles of communication for powerful, and often political, commentaries, is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, as the Museum of London’s former “Votes for Women” display (Figure 1) demonstrates, textiles have been used throughout history by the politically disadvantaged to fight their corner and express themselves in ways that could not be adequately achieved through other means.

Figure 1 The Museum of London’s Votes for Women display highlighted the powerful way in which unenfranchised women in early 20th-century Britain utilised textiles as political tools, combining the ‘feminine’ skills of embroidery with the ‘masculine’ domain of politics. 2022 Photo by Emily Levick.

Figure 2 A view of Ibrahim Mahama’s cloth exhibit. Barbican, London, UK. 2024. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

While the Barbican exhibit was on, the exterior of the building, an example of Brutalist architecture, was transformed by strips of pink and purple handwoven kente cloth as part of an installation by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, who collaborated with hundreds of craftspeople (weavers, stitchers, etc.) to create ‘Purple Hibiscus’ (Figure 2). This was a feat based on collaboration but was ultimately identified, at least for visitors, with a singular artist-maker as representative of a community, although a large video screen was placed at the entrance to show the scale of the project and how many different kinds of people were involved (Figure 3). Cloth and dress-related practices, from making to display, thus connect across the scale from the minute to the massive. Their associated values and desires become a way to recognize how internal and external flows of agency are made, circulated or shifted. It is in knowing these affective and effective aspects that we can gain a more substantive understanding of how and why agentive connections are made.

Figure 3 A view of the process video and a plinth covered with kente cloth at Ibrahim Mahama’s exhibit. Barbican, London, UK. 2024. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

This editorial is also an attempt to stitch together the different perspectives that the three editors bring to this issue. Urmila Mohan and Sandra Dudley are anthropologists. Dudley’s dual specialisms of forced displacement and museums informs her emphasis on the fluidity and transformation inherent within the making, use and care of textiles. Emily Levick’s research as a doctoral candidate in museum studies relates to Dudley’s emphasis on museums as sites of enquiry while offering a focused perspective on gender and representation. Mohan is concerned with how communities are created and how cloth interactions shape people and materials.

This issue is an experiment in comparison as an analogical and interpretative tool (Strathern 2006, Weiner and Schneider eds. 1989) to tease out relational strands of ways of doing, thinking, and seeing. Viewing a person as separate and complete in themselves is a failure to recognize reality. That is, we are in contact with, and shaped by diverse others—people, animals, spirits, objects, and substances, to name a few. Simultaneously, how the social is imagined and enacted is a cultural and contextual act. Inspired by cloth practices, The Jugaad Project platform foregrounds the role of embodiment as co-production in education and aesthetics, stimulating discourse on the social through themes of healing, building, craft, heritage, work, etc., and connecting people across the global north and south. Previous issues of The Jugaad Project have explored textiles from a wide variety of angles. Rachel Barber demonstrated how women in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico have gone from weaving textiles for their family and domestic use to producing textiles and selling them as artisanal work to global customers. Susan Rodgers, a contributor to the present issue, previously discussed the curating of textile exhibitions as a ‘highwire act’, involving negotiations and compromises between museum and non-museum practitioners. Meanwhile, Lira Utami considered the relation-making qualities of Gringsing textiles in Bali, Indonesia, through the textiles’ embodiment of “a set of spiritual, cosmological and environmental perspectives and values, within a complex socio-religious framework” (Utami 2022). Other important textile-related offerings in previous issues include Alexandra Dalferro’s reflection upon the interconnectedness between appreciation for the colors of dyed silks and consideration of the dyes’ origins; interviews with textile artists Winnie van der Rijn and Lily Hope, and Emily Levick’s argument for the need to rebuild textile lives in museum contexts through more interactive and immersive interpretation.

Levick’s interest in textile history was sparked by research for her Masters in Classical Studies dissertation, where she chose to investigate the role and influence of women in ancient Greek society. Throughout classical literature, poetry, drama, rhetoric, and philosophy, textiles played a crucial part in the conceptualization of society in ancient Greece. They provided metaphors and analogies that could be used to represent a whole host of concepts across the democratic spectrum, demonstrating that textile production was a commonly understood practice in the ancient past. Moreover, women’s role in textile production was acknowledged, to such an extent that the two were often practically synonymous.

Figure 4 The weekly shopping includes loom parts. Geliting, Flores, Indonesia, 2018. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

An anthropologist of material culture, Mohan focuses on the social connections between groups through cloth, practice, and belief. Cloth’s fabrication and use is part of human experience around the world as part of religion, politics, economics, and kinship, among other things (Weiner and Schneider eds. 1989). However, there is still a significant gap in material culture studies of cloth because it tends to focus on the making of objects. Instead, Mohan looks at the textile process as the co-production of subjects (Introduction, Mohan ed. 2024) inspired by her earlier work on Hindu devotional clothing (see Waldia, this issue). The unraveling of social fabrics and loss of ‘enchantment’ raises the question of whether and how worlds can be sustained through cloth-based connections.

Figure 5 Portuguese Catholic influence evident in woven cloth wrappers. Geliting, Flores, Indonesia, 2018. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

In societies where ritual practices are strong or where handmade cloth is still made and used for ceremonial purposes, the connections between fabric, sociality, and the otherworldly are evident. Simultaneously, people are mobile and carry their stories with them. For instance, understandings of cloth cultures in diasporas and issues of cultural resilience demand both a greater degree of granularity and openness, as demonstrated in Rodgers’ article in this issue on Tu Meh, a Karenni forced refugee weaver, resettled in the U.S. When speaking of such textile stories perhaps one should speak of RE-connections as a way to emphasize that practices are enacted by, and on, entities already shaped by a history of prior interactions including approaches borrowed from other disciplines. Historical flux is also evident at the festive weekly market at Geliting on the island of Flores, Indonesia (Figures 4-5), where weaving is a living practice and women shop for vegetables and supplies along with loom parts. In spaces such as these, shaped by inter-island trade, Portuguese Catholicism and colonialism, and local belief-systems, woven cloths embody different influences within the ‘indigenous’.

Textile production has been strongly gendered throughout history. Even today, the person who sits at the handloom and is identified as the maker is, generally, a man in India or Africa. By contrast, in most of Indonesia, textiles are perceived as women’s work and femininity is associated with the backstrap loom. Levick’s research has focused primarily on British textile culture, and therefore from a largely Western perspective that relates to but also contrasts in some ways with how textile work is viewed in Indonesia. Anthropologists and historians have demonstrated how some textile production in fact challenges patriarchal domination: Janet Hoskins (1989: 141), for example, observes that in Sumba, “indigo dyeing is conducted as a cult of female secrets”. Indeed, it is only comparatively recently that the female associations of textile-making and consumption have been investigated, for instance, the value of cloth as women’s work and wealth in the Kula exchange, and their connotations challenged. Rooted in the fabric of women’s daily lives for millennia, the gender politics inherent in textile production and use were so obvious as to go unacknowledged, and so stereotyped as to be considered simply the way of life. From a methodological perspective, such politics and cloth ‘densities’ should be analyzed comparatively, “to learn about the intricate ways in which individuals and groups become empowered” (Weiner 1994: 400).

This association between women and textiles, whether women are the makers or users, worked metonymically, representing the idea of women. Crucially, this idea was not informed by women themselves, but by patriarchal social and political structures that worked to constrain women’s lives and prescribe ‘acceptable’ behavior. It was, then, within the parameters of acceptability in a patriarchal world that women produced and consumed textiles, and it is through this narrow and severely limiting lens that museums today often interpret textiles in relation to women’s histories and lives. Levick’s research in British museums (Figure 6) has highlighted overwhelmingly how women and their textile associations are often interpreted through stereotypes and by relying on outdated, patriarchal concepts and beliefs regarding women and textiles.[2] Such interpretations, reflective of the male gaze, do not allow visitors to ‘reach’ the real women behind the narratives. Indeed, resorting to implicit bias harms not just the women represented but women everywhere. By failing to question and critique the historical sources, such a practice distorts the past, and denies visitors the opportunities to understand their own histories and experiences.

Figure 6 A display of seventeenth-century British embroidery representing “Textiles in the Home”, British Galleries, V&A, London. 2024. Photo by Emily Levick.

Like Levick but with a different emphasis, Dudley has also problematized the gaze through which textiles, including textiles in museums, may be examined. She has experimented with attempting to experience encounters with textiles from the perspectives of the artefacts themselves, rather than or in addition to those of makers, users and viewers (e.g. Dudley 2018: 2021). Such an approach helps to reveal the complex, dynamic ways in which interlinked subjects (people and things) continue to exert effects on each other. This co-production (Mohan ed. 2024) is ongoing and ever-shifting; it is both material and sociocultural, and sensory and emotional. It can be gentle, reassuring and connective; but it can also be surprising, unpredictable and painful. For refugees, for example, textiles and textile production can be both comforting connectors with the pre-exile past and aching reminders of loss (Dudley 2010). They can weave into possible futures too, representing, manifesting and transmuting hope and fear alike.

Figure 7 Weaving a Kayan skirt-cloth on a continuous warp backstrap loom under the house, Karenni refugee camp at Mae Surin, Thailand, 1997. Photo by Sandra H. Dudley.

The following parts of the issue will be published on a staggered basis.

In “Decoding Women's Narratives of Gender and Creativity in 19th-20th century Beadwork of Saurashtra”, Medha Bhatt uses her great-grandmother's beaded bag, inherited as part of her trousseau, to attempt to enter the creative minds of 'unschooled' beadworkers of Saurashtra. Her exploration highlights the unique synergy of Kathiawadi (Saurashtra) makers’ cognition and imagination in Gujarat, India, and proposes that they were equipped with sharp skills of perception, artistic pursuit, a sophisticated sense of mathematics, and a deep awareness of environment and society. Her exploration of the spiritual narratives contained in these beadworks with tales from Hindu mythology and scriptures relates to Lailta Waldia’s review of the Indian edition of ‘Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism’ by Urmila Mohan.

In “A Handwoven Textile Narrates a Karenni Refugee Woman’s Journeys to Resettlement in Massachusetts”, Susan Rodgers examines a patterned back strap weaving made in 2023 by Tu Meh, a Karenni master weaver now resettling as a refugee in Worcester, Massachusetts. Originally from Karenni state in Burma/Myanmar, Tu Meh was forced to flee about 12 years ago to a refugee camp along the Thai border by the attacking Burmese national army. In the camp she wove in the staff-run craft house with a limited color palette and traditionalized motifs. Upon arriving in Worcester, she encountered a nonprofit, Refugee Artisans of Worcester (RAW), which offered weaving supplies for free and encouraged thread-level and motif-level creativity and innovation, the better to market the textiles to American publics seeking to buy “traditional crafts” and to help refugees financially (Dudley 2010). Rodgers interrogates Tu Meh’s cloth as a narration of refugee journeys to a challenging resettlement.

The objects handed down to artist Sana Naqvi by her mother piqued her interest in recalling events and gathering pieces of her identity while examining how power, patriarchy, and inherited trauma shaped experiences. In “Drawn Thread - Deconstructing the Trauma Narrative” Naqvi merges feminist discourse and methodologies to probe the erosion of personal agency resulting from separation, socialisation, assimilation, and oppression at various levels. She considers generational trauma and patriarchal neglect as channels to explore transference and healing through material objects, and examines the significance of needlework or Taarkashi as a tangible link between individuals across cultures. The juxtaposition of reflective pieces and needlework enables her to experience therapeutic aspects of repetition, manipulation, and deconstruction of Taarkashi as practised by her great-grandmother. Only done on an open-weave fabric, horizontally or vertically, this inbuilt constraint is a reminder of how the freedom and exposure of skilled women needle workers are gendered, demarcated, and decided by society.

In “Tupinambá Feathered Cloaks: The Weaving of a History of Resistance” Patrícia Rodrigues de Souza argues that the weft of a Tupinambá feathered cloak sews together the past of a pre-colonial Brazil to the struggling resistance of the remaining descendants from the original owners of Brazilian lands. It also weaves the Tupinambá way of life, intertwining the knowledge of traditional peoples, ancestry, spirituality, and agroecology. Several Tupinambá feathered cloaks produced in the 16th century have been kept captive in European museums. Souza explores the case of Glicéria, a Tupinambá artist and activisit who inherited, from her deceased grandfather, the mission of bringing back the feathered cloaks of her people.

We round this issue off with 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 learn 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.

In sharing these contexts by which different cloth worlds are built or sustained this editorial makes a case for the value of a comparative approach in studying textiles, reminding us that proximate forces can also be in tension. Making is the realization that our worlds overlap whether in subjectivities, systems of faith and belief, or academic disciplines. In a similar vein, acknowledging that women’s contributions to the history and culture of textiles is valid, diverse, and significant is an important step. Yet, museums, cultural institutions, and scholars must ensure that this acknowledgement is not merely a token gesture, or, as Cuesta Davignon (2020: 84) refers to it, an instance of “just add women and stir”. Women should be fully integrated into the study of textiles, for without their influence and contribution to one of life’s essential survival stories – the development of cloth and cloth-like materials – the narrative of human history and contemporary cultures would read very differently. 

References

Barbican Centre, “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”, 13 Feb-26 May 2024, https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2024/event/unravel-the-power-and-politics-of-textiles-in-art (accessed 6.5.24).

Cuesta Davignon, L. I. (2020) ‘Gender Perspective and Museums: Gender as a Tool in the Interpretation of Collections’, Museum International, 72:1-2, 80-91.

Dudley, S. H. (2010) Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand. Oxford/New York: Berghahn.

Dudley, S. H. (2018) “Paku Karen skirt-cloths (not) at home: Forcibly migrated Burmese textiles in refugee camps and museums,” in Leora Auslander and Tara Zara (eds.) (2018) Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement, Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 277-308.

Dudley, S. H. (2021) Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond: Loss, Liminality and Hopeful Encounters. London/New York: Routledge.

Fisher, E. (1980) Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. New York: McGraw Hill.

Fray-Smith, W. (2024) “Wound and Repair” in Fray-Smith, Wells, Johnson, Lotte and Pinatih, Amanda (eds.) (2024) Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Munich/London, Prestel, 163-165.

Hoskins, J. (1989) “Why do Ladies Sing the Blues? Indigo Dyeing, Cloth Production, and Gender Symbolism in Kodi,” in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (eds.) Cloth and Human Experience, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 141-173.

Levick, E. (2021) “Handling Textiles: Rebuilding Object Lives in Museums.” The Jugaad Project, 31 May 2021,  www.thejugaadproject.pub/handling-textiles  (accessed 6.5.24).

Mohan, U. (2018) Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press/Bard Graduate Center.

Mohan, U. (2019/2024) Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism. Leiden: Brill. (Republished in 2024 by Manohar Books, New Delhi.)

Mohan, U. ed. (2024) The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices. New York: Routledge.

Strathern, M. (2006) “Useful knowledge” in Marilyn, Strathern (ed.) Proceedings of the British Academy, 139: 73-109.

Utami, L. A. “Gringsing Fabric as Spatial Cosmology and Relation-making” The Jugaad Project, 5 April 2022, www.thejugaadproject.pub/gringsing-fabric (accessed 3.7.24).

Weiner, A. B. (1994) Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects. American Ethnologist 21(2): 391-403.

Weiner, A. B. and J. Schneider, eds. (1989) Cloth and Human Experience. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Endnotes

1 We use textile to cover a broad range of knitted and woven items from cloth to basketry.

2 From Emily Levick’s doctoral thesis (2024, unpublished) titled “Feminine Fabrications: Textiles and the Representation of Women in Museums”.