All tagged textiles
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.
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.
In studying museum exhibitions, there is value in looking at hidden negotiations (even combat) among academic guest curators, museum directors, and collector/lenders. These often-veiled interactions occur as different ideological stances and positionalities come into contact and friction with each other regarding what is important in displaying material culture. In this essay, I provide a close-up view of such negotiations in the planning and implementation of three shows that I guest curated as an anthropologist (one at the Asia Society Gallery, two at Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross). All concerned indigenous arts from island Southeast Asia. Judicious compromises and consensus resulted in stronger exhibitions.
How are craft production, techniques and skills interwoven into the space of the “everyday” as culture and identity in South and Southeast Asia? How are different understandings of tradition and indigeneity to be incorporated into such a discussion? Our Spring 2022 issue on Craft explores those questions via communities and cultures in India and Indonesia, featuring peoples’ cosmologies and beliefs in different ways. Lira Anindita Utami’s article on gringsing, a sacred double-ikat textile of Bali, and Debapriya Chakrabarti’s article on the infrastructural impact of Durga Puja idol-making in Kolkata deal with more explicitly religious objects. Lalita Waldia’s article on the woodcarving craft of likhai in Uttarakhand, India, and Amira Rahardiani’s study of bamboo weaving development in Central Java, Indonesia, delve, instead, into the complexities of craft as livelihood and heritage.
Textiles are imbued with the multifaceted and complex values, beliefs, and ideals of the cultures in which they were produced and consumed. They have been used as clothing, shelter, and ornament, and are often remade and repurposed throughout their ‘lives’, constantly acquiring new layers of meaning along the way. As such, they are ideal media for museums attempting to widen their audience reach and more effectively represent world history and culture. How can museums rebuild the stories and lives of textiles in exhibits? This essay explores the possibility of building connections between visitors and textiles through multisensory engagement and, in doing so, suggests the remaking of the museum experience.
The author interrogates the idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Colonial textile trade through the eyes of the object’s commissioner by focusing on four different textiles, from Italy, China, and India. Just after the ‘Age of Discovery’, this time period (16-17th c.) helps us situate depictions of cultural ‘othering’ within a historical lens. These textiles act as embodiments of political power and ‘worldliness’, making them early examples of translocal consciousness.
