Textiles, Technical Practice and Power in los Andes
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1 This book explores issues around the production of textiles in the Andean region and their use in Andean societies. Its main concern is to generate a significant Andean contribution to current interests in materials and materiality, technology, ontology, and the socio-cultural, by major experts in the field as well as emerging scholars. Where possible, the book focuses on Andean textiles from a weaver’s point of view, through the various tasks and pro- cesses in their making, and the manifold ways in which the ideas about a finished textile product refer back continually to these prior processes. We also take on board recent intellectual developments on the productive chain of weaving, specifically on the human dimension of this in the operative chain ( chaîne opératoire) of the textile domain, a concept developed mainly by French scholars based on pioneering work by Marcel Mauss and André Leroi-Gourhan. This was a point of convergence for various contributions to this volume (Arnold, Espejo, de Diego, Peters, Rivera, Tiballi, Torrico). Our decision to focus on the productive chain was confirmed in months of scrutinising textiles in museum collections of Andean pieces during the AHRC project ‘Weaving Communities of Practice’, where many of the existing museum registers did not refer much to the processes of their production, were not contextualised sufficiently in their docu- mentation, and above all not documented clearly in relation to the technical aspects used in their making. By working from the productive chain backwards, so to speak, we wished to trace and define the processes which had led to the material makeup of a certain piece. In this way, we sought to make more convincing links between, say, the materials or colours used during the productive processes and the finished museum object. So instead of viewing ‘colour’ as an abstract attribute of a certain textile piece, we could now talk about the way that plant, mineral, or animal dyes had been integrated into the threads of that object at a certain stage in its making. Similarly, instead of talking about the iconography of textile motifs in a finished piece, their style, and so on, we could now appreciate the way that certain motifs were woven into cloth during the application of particular textile structures and techniques (see Chapter 11). In all of this we became acutely aware that tex- tiles in museum collections are generally treated as two-dimensional flat objects, and that a significant limitation of current exhibition practices is to show only one particular face of the cloth to the visiting public, the other remaining hidden. By contrast, from a weaver’s point of view, textiles are perceived as three-dimensional objects (Arnold and Espejo 2013; cf. Dransart 1995: 228–229, 239). So any weaver visiting a museum collection will wish to see the other face of a cloth in order to appreciate better the structures and techniques used in its execution, which can vary on each face of the cloth. It is inter- esting that this weaver’s three-dimensional point of view confirms Ingold’s proposal that in fact all objects are ‘woven’ by their human makers (Ingold 2000: 347). Ingold challenges the conventional view that making entails the imposition of form upon the material world by an agent with a design in mind (Ingold 2010a: 91). He argues instead that objects are ‘made to grow’ in an organic sense, not from a solid surface outwards but in a form-generating process, where the forms of things arise within fields of forces and flows of materials. For Ingold, it is by intervening in these force-fields, and following the lines of flow, that practitioners make things: In this view, making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of mater- ial flows comprising the lifeworld. Rather than reading creativity ‘backwards’, from a finished object to an initial intention in the mind of an Introduction Denise Y. Arnold
Transcript of Textiles, Technical Practice and Power in los Andes
1
This book explores issues around the production of textiles in the Andean region and their use in Andean societies. Its main concern is to generate a significant Andean contribution to current interests in materials and materiality, technology, ontology, and the socio-cultural, by major experts in the field as well as emerging scholars. Where possible, the book focuses on Andean textiles from a weaver’s point of view, through the various tasks and pro-cesses in their making, and the manifold ways in which the ideas about a finished textile product refer back continually to these prior processes. We also take on board recent intellectual developments on the productive chain of weaving, specifically on the human dimension of this in the operative chain ( cha î ne op é ratoire ) of the textile domain, a concept developed mainly by French scholars based on pioneering work by Marcel Mauss and Andr é Leroi-Gourhan. This was a point of convergence for various contributions to this volume (Arnold, Espejo, de Diego, Peters, Rivera, Tiballi, Torrico).
Our decision to focus on the productive chain was confirmed in months of scrutinising textiles in museum collections of Andean pieces during the AHRC project ‘Weaving Communities of Practice’, where many of the existing museum registers did not refer much to the processes of their production, were not contextualised sufficiently in their docu-mentation, and above all not documented clearly in relation to the technical aspects used in their making. By working from the productive chain backwards, so to speak, we wished to trace and define the processes which had led to the material makeup of a certain piece. In this way, we sought to make more convincing links between, say, the materials or colours used during the productive processes and the finished museum object. So instead of viewing ‘colour’ as an abstract attribute of a certain textile piece, we could now talk about the way that plant, mineral, or animal dyes had
been integrated into the threads of that object at a certain stage in its making. Similarly, instead of talking about the iconography of textile motifs in a finished piece, their style, and so on, we could now appreciate the way that certain motifs were woven into cloth during the application of particular textile structures and techniques (see Chapter 11 ).
In all of this we became acutely aware that tex-tiles in museum collections are generally treated as two-dimensional flat objects, and that a significant limitation of current exhibition practices is to show only one particular face of the cloth to the visiting public, the other remaining hidden. By contrast, from a weaver’s point of view, textiles are perceived as three-dimensional objects (Arnold and Espejo 2013; cf. Dransart 1995 : 228–229, 239). So any weaver visiting a museum collection will wish to see the other face of a cloth in order to appreciate better the structures and techniques used in its execution, which can vary on each face of the cloth. It is inter-esting that this weaver’s three-dimensional point of view confirms Ingold’s proposal that in fact all objects are ‘woven’ by their human makers (Ingold 2000 : 347). Ingold challenges the conventional view that making entails the imposition of form upon the material world by an agent with a design in mind (Ingold 2010a : 91). He argues instead that objects are ‘made to grow’ in an organic sense, not from a solid surface outwards but in a form-generating process, where the forms of things arise within fields of forces and flows of materials. For Ingold, it is by intervening in these force-fields, and following the lines of flow, that practitioners make things:
In this view, making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of mater-ial flows comprising the lifeworld. Rather than reading creativity ‘backwards’, from a finished object to an initial intention in the mind of an
Introduction Denise Y. Arnold
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agent, this entails reading it forwards, in an ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic. (Ingold 2010a : 91)
This process of growth is evident in the thought and practices of Andean weavers, first in the ways that herders work with their herd animals to make their fibre ‘grow’, when they sense that a llama ‘is like a field’ (Tomoeda 1985 ; see also Gow and Gow 1975 : 154, and Dransart 1991 , 2002 ), and then in the interactions between weavers as practitioners, their raw materials, and the loom as a structuring instrument, to make their textiles ‘grow’ three-dimensionally.
With these ideas in mind, an additional challenge in the project was how to exhibit this three-dimensional quality of Andean cloth, which we did gradually through new software developments (in a program called Sawu 3D) that simulate on the computer screen this three-dimensional quality of cloth, and so show museum visitors both faces of a woven cloth.
Technique, the technical, and technology in the textile domain
In each of these major areas of study, we had to confront the meanings of technique, the technical, and technology, with specific reference to the textile domain. In the Western canon, an emerging body of studies (among them Dobres 2000 ) documents the changing sense of tekhn ē , from the Greek, as applied to each of these terms. Ingold tells us that the term tekhn ē is derived from the Sanskrit words for axe, tasha , and the carpenter, taksan . The carpenter is ‘one who fashions’ (Sanskrit, taksati ), a shaper or maker. The Latin verb for ‘to weave’, texere , comes from precisely the same root (Mitchell 1997 : 330, cited in Ingold 2010a : 92).
In this Aristotelian sense of tekhn ē as the embodied skill of craftsmanship and skilled making in general, weaving is but one aspect. This kind of skill as a form of knowledge and of practice is tacit, subjective, and context-dependent. Tekhn ē is often considered in relation to mekhan ē , another term from the Greek, which refers to the manually operated devices (or tools) that assisted tekhn ē ’s application, in subject-centred relations (Ingold 2000 : 316). Our interest in tekhn ē as technical skill concerned its development both through individ-ual learning practices and within the wider social learning practices embedded in the social relations
of what have been called ‘technology acquisition support systems’, with their varying degrees of complexity (Wynn 1994 : 153, cited in Ingold 2000 : 37).
We took as our point of departure the idea that technical relations are embedded within social relations and that technics should be understood in this relational matrix (Arnold and Espejo 2010 : 6; cf. Ingold 2000 : 314). So we were interested in the technical aspects of the processes of textile making, just as much as in the social life of textiles as finished products within Andean societies, past and present. We wished to explore the nexus between the technical relations of weaving produc-tion and the social relations which facilitated these, for example the effects of the increasing technical complexity of weaving techniques in the Andes on the social domain, and vice versa. We were par-ticularly intrigued by the way that developments in both the technical and social relations of textile production have been expressed in the increasing ‘three-dimensionality’ of cloth, using more warp layers, and with greater texture and colour use in the designs.
In order to explore these various aspects of the technical relations of cloth-making, it was neces-sary to develop an interdisciplinary focus. A core group of contributors to this volume are not only specialised Andeanists but also practical spinners, weavers, and dyers (for example Rowe, Torrico, and Dransart). Elvira Espejo, a weaver from child-hood, born and bred in ayllu Qaqachaka, is also an Andeanist, artist, and museologist. The chapters by these authors are informed by their practical inter-ests. Other contributions are from anthropologists and archaeologists with specific interests in cloth, and from colleagues in art history, art, literature, linguistics, and cultural studies.
The bridge-building we achieved is a positive consequence of this effort. This includes dialogues between anthropological and archaeological approaches to Andean textiles in general, giving more importance to the productive chain (Arnold, Espejo, Peters, Rivera), and greater attention to the terminology of thread spin and twist terminology (Splitstoser), and to that of textile structures and techniques, from a weaver’s point of view (Espejo). As a result, the chapters in this book comprise an academic reader directed at students and research-ers in university-level studies of material culture in general, textiles in particular, and the Andean region as a study area.
Understanding the technological aspects of the textile domain was just as challenging. We
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identified basically two ways of appreciating the meaning of technology. The first is comparative, taking the distinct meanings of technology over different time periods and historical social real-ities, as Dobres does ( 2000 : 76–84). The second is within a perspective that takes technology to mean a specific aspect of modernity, whereby in contexts outside this modernist framework, this modern phenomenon called ‘technology’ simply did not exist. Ingold ( 2000 ) takes this second approach. In the volume, as in the project, we sought to bridge both approaches.
This was because in the recent past various studies of Andean textiles have played a key role in current regional thinking about technologies and the social, in the first, comparative sense. These studies were stimulated by the pioneering work of Heather Lechtman from the 1970s onwards, based on her own work on Andean metallurgy, which draws in turn on more recent work on Andean textiles by the Canadian weaver Mary Frame. More recent cross-disciplinary developments in this field urged us to take up these ideas again, and provide a greater accessibility to their implications for a wider English-speaking public; this volume seeks to achieve this aim.
There are other ways in which textiles in the Andes have been at the heart of several ground-breaking studies in recent decades. Within wider social and productive relations, Andean textiles in the broadest sense, especially in studies on the knotted khipu , have long been acknowledged as key media in the region, for interrelating and integrat-ing diverse forms of knowledge. The chapters in this volume, as a group, rethink the complex semi-otic and graphically plural systems of this region as historical and contemporary media where power relations (whether political, class, or gender rela-tions) are expressed and played out, until today. A key difference, though, from former approaches to these questions, is that most chapters in this volume examine the ways in which textiles integrate know-ledge from a ‘material’ point of view rather than a ‘representational’ one. Through different thematic approaches, the book explores the ways that the material existence of textiles served and still serves as records of technological knowledge, and the inte-gration of socio-cultural and productive relations. When we use the thorny term ‘materiality’ we use it in the sense of the broad material basis of textile production (in raw materials and instruments) as well as in allusion to the ways that interactions with the vitality of these materials contribute to the ways that textile making, and the finished textile product,
are perceived by weavers, and given meaning in the societies of which they form a part.
The book focuses on two specific aspects of textiles that have become key areas of study in recent years in the social domain. The first is the relevance of wider reflections on the term tekhn ē in relation to technical and technological issues of increasing complexity. The second is the nexus between technology and technical issues in Andean textile production and power relations in Andean societies, past and present.
The relevance of tekhn e≤ to a reconsideration of Andean textiles In Europe, a series of recent studies has taken the term tekhn ē as the point of reference for the history of technology and that of ideas about things tech-nical in a universal sense (among them Ingold 1988 and Ferr é 1995 [1988]). While this has reinvigor-ated an ‘anthropology of technology’, there have been several limitations to this approach. The main problem is that a universalising reference point in the term tekhn ē does not acknowledge the diverse origins of technical and technological develop-ments in different societies, where terms for things technical and technological have complex histor-ies, generating many changes of meaning over the centuries, and a vast array of regional vari-ants, as Marcia-Anne Dobres has shown (Dobres 2000 : 50–53). Dobres calls these regional histor-ies of technology ‘technovisions’ (on a par with ‘cosmovisions’).
In comparing technique and the sphere of the technical with the technological, Dobres takes the view that ‘technology’ is the sum of the social relations generated around the interactions taking place within the material and productive world. For her, these relations acquire their specific meanings in the contexts of living communities of practice, whose ways of making things have been histor-ically and regionally constructed (Dobres 2000 : 61). ‘Technique’, on the other hand, she defines as the set of knowledges and practices constructed historically in a specific region, which can be understood at an intellectual and corporal level as they are enacted in the material contexts of arti-fact construction. At the same time, technological interaction between bodies and raw materials contributes to notions of identity, whether of the artifact generated in this way or of the participant (individual or group) producing artifacts in a par-ticular community of practice. As a result of these interactions through time, material artifacts are generated at a technological level, for example in
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developments in loom and loom furniture design, whose acceptance (or rejection) in a region is determined through the social processes of debate and reaching consensus (or imposition) about their relative advantages and disadvantages, between social groups vying for power at any one moment in time (Arnold and Espejo 2010 : 6).
While a number of collections on Andean tech-nologies have been written over the past decades, including articles on weaving (Ravines 1978 ; Lechtman and Soldi 1985 ), and despite the highly politicised contemporary focus in the region on ‘traditional Andean technologies’, the Andes as a whole does not figure prominently in the wider debates on this theme. This is partly because, in the Andes, in order to think through the notions of the technical or the technological, as Juan de Dios Yapita ( 2012 ) explains, there is a quite different cultural history and very distinct linguistic roots. Here the native languages of the Andean region, Aymara, Quechua, and Uru-Chipaya among others, and not Greek, have been the point of departure. So taking this Greek term, with all its cultural baggage, does not make much sense. But here begins the problem: what would be the equivalent of tekhn ē in Andean languages? And indeed, if there is no immediate equivalent, how might we reframe the question and its terms of reference to arrive at an approximate equivalent?
Technics, technology, and technological development in the Andes A first challenge comes from defining in an Andean setting the very notions of technics, technology, and technological development, and their relation-ship to the social domain. Technique tends to be defined as the skills or practice capabilities of par-ticular human subjects, organised in social settings. Technique as the skill of weaving is embedded in the experience of these subjects in the organisation of particular weaving patterns, textures, and compos-itional aspects, including the regional repertories of motifs and colour possibilities used. By contrast, technology tends to define a body of generalised objective knowledge with practical application.
Technological development tends to define the articulations between this body of objective tech-nical knowledge and its social and regional settings, and these can take on a range of possibilities. Taking a comparative view of technology, the expert in Andean metallurgy Heather Lechtman observed some time ago that in the Andes developments in technology were not centred on the generation of hardware , in the sense of implements (such as
wheels), but rather in developments at a social and organisational level (Lechtman 1993 : 245–246). If we take the case of the textile domain, technological developments were therefore very distinct from those of their Old World counterparts, precisely because their emphasis was not in material devel-opment but in the ways of taking advantage more effectively of the regional availability of human labour and other resources. For Lechtman, this meant that technological developments in the Andes were centred on the ideological and norma-tive spheres, which sought to integrate populations and territories into a shared technological venture. Because of this, the immense scale of weaving activ-ities was able to develop hand in hand with similar developments in Andean civilisations.
Interestingly, Tim Ingold uses the same com-parative viewpoint in his contrast between hunter-gathering societies and Western ones, of using technical resources to develop in the first case a kind of mutualism between society and natural resources, and in the second of overt control. Ingold argues that that through their tools and techniques hunter-gatherers strive to minimise the distance between society and the natural world, so drawing nature into the nexus of social relations or ‘humanising’ it, whereas Western society does the opposite, striving to maximise the distance between them (Ingold 2000 : 314). This confirms the status of Andean prehispanic societies as distinctly non-Western.
Another dimension to this same argument is that put forward in the regional literature by the Brazilian anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ( 1998 ) and Carlos Fausto ( 2001 ), that within Amerindian societies the objective of production, whether of woven textiles or other objects, is the constitution of persons rather than the manufac-ture of things. I have used this argument on various occasions to explain the nature of textiles, from a weaver’s point of view, as living beings, drawing on developing ideas among Andeanist scholars about this (Arnold 2000 , 2007 ; see also Desrosiers 1982 , among others). Viveiros de Castro’s and Fausto’s arguments are also relevant to the ways that the circulation of textiles as finished objects in Andean societies generates extensive social networks that interrelate humans and material objects (Arnold and Espejo 2013 ).
Pertinently, Tim Ingold has proposed that the technical forces of production were originally con-substantial with the social relations of kinship, but that when these forces acquired a separate institu-tional identity as ‘technology’, then the objectives
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of production were themselves transformed from the constitution of persons to the manufacture of things (Ingold 2000 : 319). Ingold does not perceive technical evolution as a process of complexification but rather one of objectification of the productive forces. For Ingold, then, the antecedents of tech-nology should be sought in the sphere of artifice, contained in social relations, rather than in the artifacts of material culture.
However, the history of weaving in the Andean region shows that a technical process of complexification did indeed take place (see for example Doyon-Bernard 1990 ), linked to the sphere of artifice, but with ramifications in society and social relations. It can be argued that it was in fact the organisation of textile produc-tion which generated the demand for other levels of organisation in human labour and the forces of production, in the development of technical knowledge, shared to a certain point in Andean society, and in the supporting technological developments, for example in loom and weaving instrument technology.
At the same time, this immense scale of product-ive organisation generated the necessity for certain levels of complexity at diverse interrelated levels, as well as the social recognition of this complex-ity. Characteristically, the massive use of human labour in the textile sphere at all levels of Andean society, whether in specialised labour groups or a domestic level of production, was directed towards state-sponsored tributary ends and the control of, and increased, productivity within this sphere. Although early examples of this drive for productive complexity can be found from the Late Formative Period onward, it was developed to the highest degree with Inka expansion in the Late Horizon, and many of the characteristics of Inka productive expansion continued into the early colonial period. This means that examples of domestic-level rural weaving production in the Andes today cannot ever be totally divorced from this much wider product-ive history with its longue dur é e , which had many of the characteristics of pre-industrial manufacture in a Marxian sense, from early times. There is ample evidence in the past of the controlled supply of raw materials, textile assembly involving more and less skilled artisans, with a prescribed division of labour within single specialised workshops as well as in domestic labour, and the establishment of forms of planning and quality control, with state function-aries and local leaders as controllers. These were already ‘weaving communities of practice’ in the widest sense.
One body of evidence for the social recognition of this productive domain that can be perceived until present times is the association between weaving activities and the female domain, and what are still viewed as women’s tasks, with being a good wife and an accomplished woman admired in Andean societies, as Torrico explains in Chapter 7 . While many spinning and weaving tasks in distinct Andean regions, and in different historical periods, are done and have been done by men, this over-riding relationship between weaving and women prevails. There also had to be ways of guaranteeing the reproduction of the social values at the heart of this weaving enterprise, as well as its transmission between generations.
Weaving instruments: mekhan e≤ and tekhn e≤ Another factor intimately related to issues of tech-nique and technology is the body of tools and instruments used in textile making. We saw how Ancient Greek society defined this as a relation between tekhn ē as technical skill, complemented by mekhan ē , as the manually operated tools that assisted its application.
Tools until now have generally been regarded as mediators, animated by the intention of the user to have an impact on raw material. Tools are also considered to be elements that extend the capacity of a particular agent in a determined environment. In this sense, tools mediate an active and pur-poseful engagement between persons and their environment, especially directed towards artifact making in the object being worked on. At the turn of the twentieth century, an earlier generation of anthropologists studied tool making and tool use, in this sense, in relation to making textiles in South America, and some of these studies had repercus-sions in the Andean region (see for example Fr ö din and Nordenski ö ld 1918 and Nordenski ö ld 1919 ). These early advances were followed by those of other scholars, including the school of Junius B. Bird (Joyce 1921 , 1922; Bird 1968 ; Goodell 1968 ). But since then there have been relatively few specialised studies, with the exception of the work by Olsen Bruhns on prehispanic instruments in the south of Ecuador (Olsen Bruhns 1989 ). The contribu-tion in this volume on weaving instruments in the prehispanic period by Claudia Rivera ( Chapter 9 ) is therefore particularly welcome.
However, a changing perspective now views tools less as external accessories to bodies working on technical tasks and more as extensions to bodies working in technical activities within a field of forces, whereby artifacts emerge from the rhythmic
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interactions between body, tool, and raw materials. This is particularly relevant in weaving a three-dimensional object. Tim Ingold has suggested that this might be why the term for ‘loom’ in medieval English (lome) is the epitome of a tool or utensil combined with skilled technical processing (Ingold 2000 : 346). He takes as his point of departure the fact that weaving epitomises technical activity within a field of forces on three-dimensional objects, to propose that making is actually subservient to weaving as the embodiment of rhythmic movement between body, tool, and the environment to help generate a textile as object.
Within Andean languages, ideas about structure and technique in relation to weaving presuppose the tool as the basis of work, and the loom as the tool par excellence . Indeed the complexity of Andean looms and loom furniture, combined with bodily movements, suggest that it might be appropriate to call the Andean loom a ‘machine’. This question has been examined by Ingold ( 2000 : 303) in his reflections on Marx and his notion of machine, and whether it is relevant to ask if the weaving loom is a machine, or when it does become a machine.
Loom complexity depends in great measure on precise coordinations with the somatic tool of the human body in manual and other operations. This includes coordinations between the main body, shoulders, arms, hands and fingers, legs and toes, as well as eyes, and the mouth at times (to bite off the end of a thread, for example). Each, some, or all of these play the role of communicators or modifiers of the loom movements. In manipulating the loom certain actions are more mechanical and rely less on development of specific skills and more on general bodily coordinations in a rhythmic pattern. For example, in simple looms the weaver’s body serves as the solid vertical element passing forces from the loom components back to the earth, whereas this role is taken by the loom frame in the vertical loom, a solid vertical element such as a tree in the backstrap loom, and vertical loom stakes in the case of the four-staked loom. The weaver provides the driving force in moving the loom shuttle and the series of loom elements (swords, compacting rods) that compact the weft threads once passed across the warp. In the use of a backstrap loom, the movements of the weaver’s body also contribute to the tension in the developing cloth as a whole, as does the relation between body and toes in much simpler looms.
More skilled manipulations of the loom, the loom furniture, and instruments, demand intimate coordinations of manual, visual, tactile, and more
general haptic functions. In Andean languages, in relation to warp-faced cloth, the equivalent of ‘structure’ would seem to refer to the groupings in layers of the warp bouts set up on the longitudinal axis of the loom. The equivalence of ‘technique’, on the other hand, would seem to be the range of options for counting the pick-ups of warp threads combined with the selection of coloured warp threads to make the regular patterns and varying textures of warp-faced cloth (Arnold and Espejo 2010 , 2012a ). Every increment of extension is coupled to what went before by transverse and longitudinal attachment. The arithmetical units of the pick-up counts generate proportional designs. These generative principles underwrite the con-stancy in distinct periods and regions of particular textile techniques, the options for using a certain number of colour groupings, and of presenting certain kinds of motifs and not others (cf. Ingold 2000 : 346).
Similarly with weaving instruments, a study of spindles cannot be separated from their use in rela-tion to the fingers, hand, and body, within a field of forces. Spinning is a ‘kinetic activity’ between spindle and hand (Dransart 1995 : 235). As a result, the emerging thread is both a product of this field of forces, and a transmitter in itself of these forces, the fibres of the threads in the making acting in turn as tools for twisting each and every other (cf. Ingold 2000 : 304). We begin to get this sense in Claudia Rivera’s chapter, where spindle whorls serve as weights, which, combined with their rotary motion and manual dexterity and directionality, are used to control thread thickness.
Technological development and power A second key aspect of this book is the nexus between technological developments in weaving production and power relations in Andean soci-eties. With regard to the relation between tekhn ē and power, we wanted to explore how political power might have been created, organised, con-solidated, and maintained in distinct political formations through the manipulation of and man-agement of cloth and its components. This meant first defining the different kinds of power relations at issue, and then how textiles became embedded in power networks as key elements (some would say ‘agents’). The demise of political anthropology some decades ago, which accompanied the ascend-ance of postmodernism, has not helped generate arguments recently about such questions, where material culture such as textile making forms a vital part.
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One view of technological development, with textile production at its core, that also concerns power relations draws on work by the French philosopher Michel Foucault ( 1980 ), in his ‘power over’ model. This takes as its point of departure Foucault’s well-known idea concerning modern states and their forms of social and physical control over populations, but also includes his notion of social power as an enabling or generating power: a ‘power to’ complete things. This second aspect of power, present in all social life and integral to every social relation, is often perceived as an invisible energy that drives activity. This is commensurate with the Andean notions of ch’ama in Aymara or qallpa in Quechua as the driving energies of human labour, and their control or channelling into spe-cific domains and activities. Mar í a Rostworowski has argued that societal controls over this kind of driving energy are at the heart of the interest in prehispanic Andean societies in measuring the biological energy levels of populations, particularly in relation to productive weaving tasks, through notions such as the ‘streets’ of Guaman Poma de Ayala ( 1936 [ c . 1615] cited in Rostworowski 2005 ; cf. Arnold 2012 : 180–187).
In this context of the power to complete things, weaving activities were vital measures of and points of reference for other integrating productive activ-ities into a common productive regional model. In order to facilitate these trans-domain relations and intercalations, it is pertinent here that weaving language was used to distinguish between distinct spheres of production, from textile to agriculture and herding production. Juan de Dios Yapita ( 2012 ) proposed that certain lexicons in Andean languages were key articulators of this kind. This is evident in many of the official visitas in the early colonial period, where there are terms for land that are used interchangeably in weaving terminology. Among these are patas and andenes for hill terraces, pampas for flat areas and meadows, and pedazos and pedacillos for small pieces of land.
Above all the term tupu was used as a general term for ‘measurement’ across the weaving, agri-cultural, and herding domains (Rostworowski 1981 : 385–386). I have argued elsewhere that these cross-cutting Andean uses of the term tupu , some of which still apply today, are evidence of a previous normative system of standards, and tech-niques of measurement, that was easily adapted to the regional variation of Andean microsystems at distinct altitudes (Arnold 2012 : 170–175). Tupu measurements were used to define areas of land, the productive quantities of seed, the sizes of cloth
to be woven for tribute purposes, and measures of finished cloth.
Textile and khipu as documents of resource management While tupu was a key measure in the productive sphere, another key area in which textiles in the broadest sense were used in the systems of control over diverse productive systems was in record keeping, including internal systems of measures. A number of papers examine this theme from dif-ferent perspectives.
An important theme in Chapter 1 here is my own comparison between textiles and khipu as recording devices, with reference to wider state-controlled systems of documentation and planning of productive activity. A generation of scholars has shown how khipus are expressions of Inka practices of bureaucratic control. As Carrie Brezine ( 2012 ) mentions, it is assumed that whoever controlled the khipu had the information required to exact tribute. The khipu controllers could also verify genealogies, determine labour requirements, and keep track of resources available, for instance in community storehouses. My own interest was to establish how far the documentation addressed in textiles formed part of this same bureaucratic system.
Depending on the level of management within a complex hierarchy, the planning strategies, docu-mentation of productive activities, and the record keeping for these will be different. The control over resources and productive output might be organised at a state-wide level, when we would expect greater evidence of common practices, measures, and com-munication systems, tied to tribute categories and their productive organisation. More work needs to be done to clarify the degree to which these may be predatory models dictating a power to coerce local groups in resource management through real systems of force, as part of the political hegemony of state formations, or alternatively whether we are dealing with more integrative models that provide an invitation to participate in a higher power, as a kind of badge of citizenship, as Espejo and Arnold suggest in Chapter 12 . However, if resource man-agement is more locally organised, we would expect more diverse patterns of practice and communi-cations systems, such as those explored by Rowe and Lau in this volume. At the interstices between each level, we would expect to find more hybrid systems.
In the actual processes of textile making, the consideration of textile designs as forming ‘woven libraries’ that document regional resources
8
Text i les , Technica l Pract ice, and Power in the Andes
pertaining to specific social groups has been proposed for regions other than the Andes. Alfred Gell explores this idea in his book Art and Agency ( 1998 ), in relation to his work in Melanesia, and Susanne K ü chler ( 1987 , 1988 ) has explored similar notions, not related to textiles but in the artistic practices of making the internationally recognised malangan sculptures in Melanesia. It now seems possible that what has been discussed in a former anthropologising language of ‘symbolic power’, attributed to the symbolic nature of textiles (see Bachir Bacha 2012 ), or ‘collective memory’ (Fischer 2012 ), is equally about competition over material resources. These orientations suggest a sense of control and ‘power over’ people and resources, where the role of textiles in both image projection, and in their material basis, holds sway as the sym-bolic force controlling people’s actions.
In Chapter 10 , drawing on decades of work among Qeros weavers in the Cusco region of Peru, Gail Silverman takes this resource-based approach. She explores textile motifs and other compositional components (the plain pampa areas, coloured stripes), especially tocapu designs, as icons of regional productive resources in a visual language that she thinks derives from Inka times. Textiles for Silverman are registers that codify the relation between textile technology and power, both visually and through the woven textures applied.
In Chapter 12 , Espejo and Arnold explore the theme of social integration through cloth, this time through the use of the so-called ‘ladder’ techniques as a productive output coding, marking the type of production (the kind of crop cultivated), the scale of production, the stages in the transformation of food products within the domestic sphere once cultivated (for example from potatoes to freeze-dried chu ñ o ), and comparative data on the ecological zones where this cultivation takes place. In this case, Espejo and Arnold illustrate the wide influence in time and space of common systems of crop colour coding, and above all of counting warp threads by either odd or even techniques, especially in striped food sacks, to mark whether crops are exchanged, or just stored or used again as seed. They suggest that this range of dissemination indicates its original devel-opment during the Middle Horizon, possibly with the expansion of Tiwanaku state power, although regional influences can also be identified in the variations of this system. Certain aspects of this documentary system are still in use today.
It is probable that specific uses of thread spin tautness and twist direction in textiles, as in khipu , were used to document certain aspects of resource
management (Urton 1994 ). Jeffrey Splitstoser alludes to this in Chapter 2 , where variants in spin and twist in the wrapped batons and cords of Cerrillos were possibly used to communicate particular information. In her book Signs of Empire ( 2012 : 169–170), Gail Silverman analysed spin and twist in the textiles of Qeros to indicate the visual language of a systematic differentiation between things received and things given (for me, for you). She argues that ‘S’ spun yarn is related to the math-ematical concept of subtraction, whereas ‘Z’ spun yarn is related to addition, both of these according to the Inka system of distribution. Espejo and Arnold, in their chapter, confirm that differential spin and twist in the threads of food bags provide information about the management of resources, specifically at a domestic level. These possible cor-relates between the material meanings of textile and khipu components have still to be debated.
In a more politicised debate centred on resource location and access, Alonso Barros ( 2012 ) directed his attention towards the ways in which carto-graphic practices have influenced how these are represented. The centuries-old extensive trading movements between the high Altiplano (now Bolivia) and the coast of what is now Chile involved resource obtaining transactions, pilgrimages to bury the highland dead in the desert sands, and a general exchange of produce. Historically Charkas extended from the lakeside region to the South Central Andes, but it is less well known that it also extended from the highlands westward to the Pacific coast. Herrera’s seventeenth-century map (in his Descripci ó n del Audiencia de los Charcas , 1730 [1601–1615]) shows that the Atacama Desert, too, was a historical part of Charkas, and Rostworowski ( 1986 : 127), citing such maps, confirms that terri-tory extending as far south as Tarapaca and on to Atacama also formed part of Collasuyu. Historically, highland groups, as we know from Murra’s vertical ecology model ( 1972 ), often had access to valley or coastal lands and resources. The degree of influence of these movements on textile styles, structures, and techniques during different periods has still to be established (but see Ayala 2001 and Cases and Loayza 2010 ). The ways in which textiles as maps documented the boundaries between chiefdoms is also a subject that demands more research.
Technical relations and social relations
Let us now reconsider specific examples of the nexus between technical relations and social relations.
9
Introduct ion
One aspect of the close articulation between dis-tinct groups vying for power, and possible power concentrations between centres and peripheries, expressed though cloth, is that concerned with notions of ‘identity’ as opposed to ‘alterity’. George Lau has explored this question in relation to the textiles of Recuay, a group based in Peru’s North Central highlands during the first millennium AD (Lau 2010 ). In Chapter 13 , he goes against the con-ventional grain of interpreting textile iconography as linked to aspects of ‘identity’, to argue instead that in Recuay, at least, they are more related to ‘alterity ’ (see also Lau 2013 ). Lau includes the techniques and expressions of textile iconography in Recuay as part of a cross-media impulse to enhance ‘planar surfaces’ on and about chiefly bodies in life and in death. For Lau, the enhancement of surfaces, whether of textiles or ceramics, expresses power. As fancy gifts and funerary wrappings, these are most often associated with burial practices and ancestor veneration. Lau points out how textiles are also expressed by Recuay potters in ‘elaborate ceramic representations of handsomely attired people’, adding yet another layer to the alterity-marking process of artful mimesis. For Lau, making textiles for others implies a predictable imagination of the other, in this case, noble ancestors enshrined for posterity.
Both George Lau and Jeffrey Splitstoser are concerned in their respective chapters with woven surfaces and with the way that wrapping might express power relations through the control of these surfaces, Lau in the textile wrappings of ancestors, and Splitstoser in the wrapping of batons and cords with threads, often in colour, possibly related to the capture of enemy heads. Both contributions make links between wrapping and forms of veneration. However, the emphasis on textile surfaces in Lau’s work is different from my own findings in the South Central Andes, where the three-dimensionality of cloth is more important. I wonder if this is because the high influence in Early Intermediate Recuay of attention to textile surfaces as negative and positive, in a complementary play of figure and ground with added relief, derives from the way they were model-ling ceramics and sculpture. Techniques for colour application in ceramics, the lost-wax techniques of smelting metal, and the modulated reliefs of Recuay sculpture all suggest that something quite different was going on (Lau 2010 : 265–266, 274). In warp-faced cloth, three-dimensionality is much more pronounced.
For his part, Lau regards the wrapping or rewrapping of an ancestor as a revitalising activity,
in turn directed towards the well-being of the descendants. The act of wrapping symbolised a new layer of growth for the ancestor, which accu-mulated through their acts of devotion. The new cloth replaced the old and soiled covering, and so resembled the discarding of spent organic tissue. The cloth wrapping presented a fresh outer surface as newly imagined by the descendant group. As Lau states, ‘As the public countenance for the bundles’ interior potency, as well as the ritual’s community’s commitment, rewrapping basically created a new version of the ancestor.’
In Chapter 2 , Splitstoser interprets the wrapping of the batons and cords found in the Late Paracas Period Cerrillos site as part of an Andean tekhn ē concerning knowledgeable practice and practical knowledge. For Splitstoser, ideas about wrapping and spiral structures were enacted and created through spiral movements and practices, as transform-ational activities. Through ethnographic analogy, Splitstoser cites the work of Valdi Astvaldsson, in the Jes ú s de Machaca region of highland Bolivia, where spiral wrapping produced through circular bodily movements (called in Aymara muyumuyu ) are ritually charged, particularly in the contexts of authority and power relations over others (Astvaldsson 2000 : 207–209).
Another aspect of power relations over others, this time through dress, concerns the body politic and the differential expression of certain parts of the body considered to be more powerful than other parts, as a wider expression of power relations as a whole, ordered through bodily parts. Several chapters in this volume (Dransart, Tiballi, Torrico) allude to the key role of the political use of textiles in clothing in the initial and ongoing conformation of political power throughout the history of the Andean region. Some emphasise particular body parts associated with power (head, shoulders, and the articulation of joints), and others the use of colour and other compositional design elements to express power. Class and gender relations are examined in the differential expression of these elements of power.
Penelope Dransart, in Chapter 8 , proposes that discontinuous warp techniques acquired added value because they are difficult and time-consuming, and examines a range of tunics and modern garments using this technique. Curiously, the construction of the tunics often exaggerates the width of the wearer, as if this were an expression of power in itself, perhaps directly associated with the opening for the head. Dransart also proposes that the use and gradual standardisation of the
10
Text i les , Technica l Pract ice, and Power in the Andes
discontinuous warp technique in garments is an aspect of technical knowledge as power shared by highland communities as far apart as Colombia and the Atacama Desert.
I mentioned how Gail Silverman pays particular attention to interpreting the tocapu designs of the Dumbarton Oaks tunic as part of a visual language concerned with the potential production of a new area brought under Inka domination. Through ethnographic analogy with modern-day Quechua speakers, and their interpretations of these designs today, Silverman interprets these historical tocapu as expressing, with a certain precision at the level of phonemes, a regionally integrating discourse, as if its wearer were speaking this discourse to his audience at some specific event in the past through his clothes, as an expression of power.
In Chapter 3 , R. Tom Zuidema takes another aspect of these integrating productive instructions through clothing in a closely detailed description of woven tapestry tunics from different periods (colonial Inka, Wari, and early Tiwanaku or Pukara). Zuidema argues that in each case these tunics can be read as fourfold almanacs (or quin-cunx), which illustrate yearly cycles, broken down into daily, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, and longer periods, each associated with particular ritual uses. His overall interest is in how technical knowledge and practices of the calendrical domain were articulated to the socio-political domain, including power rela-tions, through cloth. In the Inka tunic, Zuidema argues that the design composition expresses the royal organisation of space and the calendar in the Cuzco Valley. It does this in coordination with the so-called Ceque system, a spatial division that organised ritual tasks assigned to the social groups living within these, as known from ethnohistorical sources. Zuidema proposes that the Inka inherited this visual management of calendrical data from the earlier Tiwanaku or Wari, or else Pukara soci-eties. This kind of esoteric yet practical knowledge among the weavers who wove these elite garments is of course directed towards the management of productive resources through time and space, expressed again in the dress of the user.
However, if we take the cha î ne op é ratoire as our point of departure, the body and indeed the body politic become fused into the textile making process, as opposed to providing corporeal expres-sions for the finished product. Taking this as her starting point, Dobres, like Ingold, argues that ancient technicians were mindful, sensual, socially constituted and gendered beings, making sense of the world – and themselves – by working through
it. Here, the cha î ne op é ratoire provides data on technical gestures and related strategic choices of artifact manufacture, use, and repair, to provide the necessary empirical and interpretive links between the making of personhood and the making and use of products within the body politic (Dobres 2010 : 103).
Textiles and gender relations The links between gender, textiles, and power relations, are discussed in several chapters here, as well as in several conference papers. For example, Zuidema’s chapter mentions in passing gender relations as an aspect of power relations, and its incidence in visual expressions of the solar or lunar calendar on male and female garments respectively.
Carrie Brezine ( 2012 ) argued that khipus , mainly in male hands, were the ‘written’ records of the prehispanic Andes, and that one could argue that being able to ‘read’ khipus was equivalent to what we think of as being literate today. In contrast, weaving in the Andes, mainly in women’s hands, is an important expression of numeracy as a form of skilled knowledge, which is in many ways a cor-relate to literacy, implying an ability to understand, interpret, and manipulate numbers. Brezine used numeracy in weaving in this wide sense of math-ematical knowledge as well as competences and knowledge that go beyond the immediate ability to count. She argued that while khipus may be a specific vehicle of the past that required numer-acy to create and interpret, there are different yet equally complex manifestations of numeracy in Andean textiles and textile making. This demands the intellectual frameworks necessary to create Andean textiles, including the ability to mentally flip, rotate, or shift motifs to create symmetries, generate hierarchical series of binary choices, scale designs to varying numbers of threads, and pattern design repeats into a precise length of cloth.
Brezine’s paper (not included here) was centred on how, mathematically, all of these tasks are non-trivial, highly sophisticated, and based on particular conventions in the kinds of textile technology used to produce cloth. For example, the creation of patterned woven textiles relies on the applica-tion of algorithms, rather than the automation of machinery. That is, rather than memorising how to program a pattern into a loom, Andean weavers have a repertoire of algorithms at their disposal: sets of rules which create various patterns, which they can manipulate at will to tile the plane in various ways. Brezine suggests that similar algorithmic
11
Introduct ion
representations may be at play in braiding and in weaving interlacements, and that there are also highly complex three-dimensional configurations at play in the interrelations between weaving sheds and heddles.
In Chapter 7 , Cassandra Torrico interprets tekhn ē this time as technical competence among young female weavers in ayllu Macha in highland Bolivia, involving skilled knowledge and practice. Torrico argues that it is the fierce competition generated between weavers individually and in kinship groups, centred on their ability to create structurally and technically complex cloth, which provides the stimulus for creating greater com-plexity in cloth through time, as a motor for innovation and change. For weavers themselves, technical competence in weaving is the measure of their aesthetic appreciation and judgements of cloth, as well as being a measure of wilful and focused attention, and visual and tactile prowess. Within Macha society, a skilled and technically competent weaver becomes highly desirable later on as a wife, so technical competence imbues fertility, too, as an important aspect of femininity and status in the community. This importance of technical competence in weaving, and the gener-ation of competition between weavers as a motor for technical innovation and change in cloth, is certainly present in the neighbouring region of ayllu Qaqachaka, as commented on in several works (Arnold and Hastorf 2008 ; Arnold and Espejo 2009 ). However, we also noted a degree of regional variation in the importance given to technical innovation and change, suggesting that technical innovation is dependent on a range of factors, including regional history, the scale of communities of weaving practice working there, outside influences and others. For example, in the Charkas-Qharaqhara region of the ayllus of northern Cochabamba, northern Potos í and southern Oruro (Bolivia) continual innovation is accentuated, and has become even more pro-nounced in recent decades. By comparison, in the region of Omasuyos around Lake Titicaca there is a much more conservative weaving repertory of techniques and structures, and relatively less importance is given to technical competence; in fact certain weaving structures and techniques have followed a particular pattern for centuries (Arnold and Espejo 2013 : ch. 8). Similarly the region around Cusco in Peru is relatively conser-vative, and certain techniques have been prevalent during centuries. As an explanation for this, Gail Silverman suggests that the main difference in
the Cusco region between weaving two and three levels of cloth is the greater religious and symbolic importance given to the latter.
For their part, Espejo and Arnold in Chapter 12 on the use of ladder techniques in food bags call attention to the ways that these specific techniques, combined with the selecting of coloured threads and counting of pick-ups, provide a visual language in the female domestic work of regional record-keeping practices. They view the elaboration of ladder techniques, which act ambiguously as both textile motifs and textile techniques, as document-ing practices which trace the flow of productive resources passing through a household, marking their function in the management of its productive activities and their patterns of use in the house-hold stores. The combination of all these practices allows a woman weaver to tell at a glance what her food bags contain and how their contents are to be destined in household patterns of work.
Textile techniques and class relations Another aspect of relative power concerns class relations, at least those between regional elites and commoners in the Andean past, as expressed through their differential access to greater technical complexity, increased labour input in technical work, and the degree of attention to design and colour in weaving composition.
Regarding access to technical complexity, we have noted elsewhere that in relation to the South Central Andes around Qaqachaka, the Aymara and Quechua terms for ‘simple’ (Aym. ina ; Qu. siq’a ) and ‘complex’ ( apsu in both languages), in a tech-nical sense, are then applied to the social groups with differential access to the use of these in their dress (Arnold and Espejo 2012b : 186). So ina jaqi in Aymara means an ordinary person or ‘commoner’ (Sp. comunario ) limited to wearing cloth with the application of simple techniques, and a more restricted use of colour. By contrast, apsu jaqi refers to a ‘selected person’, one who has access to more complex forms of cloth, and the potential to wear a wider range of colours, including the higher-status colours of reds, blues, and yellows.
In this context, greater technical complexity in Qaqachaka is linked to the greater technical power of one social group over another to wear more layers of cloth, with a greater textural modelling in its surfaces, the use of more colours, and more complex designs. Another way of perceiving this relation could be that the desire to achieve technical power is in fact closely allied to the aesthetic values of a particular society, and this is what foments the
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Text i les , Technica l Pract ice, and Power in the Andes
higher value and status of wearing certain designs and colours over others, in a competitive sense.
The use of indigo blue as a mark of status and value in prehispanic khipu and weaving imagery indicates that the use of this particular colour was associated with power. However, it is also possible that in other contexts, such as in the knotted khipu or in certain textiles (above all food bags), the pat-terns of sequences of colours may be significant, just as much as the colour per se . Torrico ( 1989 ) showed the importance of colour sequences in the food sacks of the Macha llama herders as markers of a series of economic transactions that they control as an economic class and that take place between the products of different altitudes during the course of the year. And Espejo and Arnold in this volume show how colour sequences in food bags can also illustrate the transformations of food products before they are stored in a household’s depository.
Above all, in her chapter on the Dumbarton Oaks tunic, Gail Silverman examines specific links between the colour of certain parts of the textile composition and the kind of soil in the fields to be cultivated, with black as uncultivated land, dark colours as expressing wetter soil, black-and-white chequerboard designs as speckled maize seeds to be planted, light dots as sunlight, and so on. For Silverman and others, textile stripes, like khipu threads, express information categories: a certain food product, an irrigation ditch, to be worked by commoners (see also Arnold 2012 and the chapter by Espejo and Arnold here).
However, it is important to note that Galen Brokaw ( 2012 ) drew our attention to the caveat that the role colour and colour patterns played in any given Andean medium may actually call into question the distinction that Western thought draws between the mimetic and the abstract, or between the aesthetic and the rational. Brokaw argued that the colour conventions of the tocapu , the yupana , and the khipu constitute rather a kind of visual poetry, one that exhibits both rational and aesthetic features, or rather, a semio-aesthetics and an aesthesio-semiotics (Mandoki 2007 , cited in Brokaw 2012 ). This idea can also be applied to the realm of technical complexity.
The materialisation of knowledge and technical power in cloth Another aspect of power relations expressed in cloth is an approach to tekhn ē as a materialisation of knowledge in the productive process and regional organisation of work. This would indicate that the
dynamics, or indeed the constancy and stability of woven forms, emerge from the generative princi-ples embedded in the material conditions of their production (see Dransart 2002 : 92, 122–123), that is to say the structures and techniques used in their making. Most communities of weaving practice tend to work with a limited and identifiable tech-nical repertory. This suggests that the presence of unified or else diverse technical features in a certain region, past or present, might indicate the presence of single or diverse groups of practitioners, through exchange or marriage relations, through patterns of generational renewal, or else through imposition, or a desire to change to a new high status form.
In the past, these technical features making up a materialisation of knowledge may have been at the service of elites to produce their dress and funeral attire. In Chapter 4 , Ann Peters examines a case like this using a method based on the cha î ne op é ratoire to analyse the construction of funerary bundles in the Necropolis of Wari Kayan on the Paracas Peninsula, mainly from the Early Horizon and Early Intermediate Periods. She also identifies various kinds of power in existence there: personal power, ritual as power, power in the making, power over, power to, the powerful, and the powerless. Peters views the materialisation of knowledge as particu-lar ‘ways of doing’ which pervade the techniques and technologies practised in a region over the longue dur é e , and she draws on her extensive work in the Paracas region to explore this. The bundles are organised in complex layers of cloth, from the plain weave outer wrapping layers, to interior layers covered with designs, each layer with its distinct styles and techniques. Peters thinks that the style changes among Paracas Necropolis grave lots are associated with changes in the balance of power among social groups in the region, so the percent-ages and placement of garments in different styles can perhaps best be understood as assertions of both contemporary and ancestral identities in this context.
This approach permits Peters to identify the nature of the communities of textile practice involved in the production of these extraordinary textiles. Apart from the woven layers with distinct styles, Peters notes that when some steps in the production process demonstrate one style grouping and other steps define a different style grouping, this provides evidence of different producers or cat-egories of producers specialised in creating different elements of the textile. The evidence suggests to her that the component elements making up each woven artifact were not products of specialists attached to
13
Introduct ion
high-status elites, or of exchange relations linked to the power and purposes of a state system, but rather created by diverse groups linked by social networks of production and exchange. Peters concludes that the communities of textile production that contrib-uted to the Paracas Necropolis textile assemblages were numerous, highly empowered, and competing in quality, esoteric knowledge, and innovation.
Peters’s conclusion takes us back to Cassandra Torrico’s view of technical competence and con-structive rivalry, in the contemporary setting of ayllu Macha weavers, as primary factors in textile production, and raises the question of which factors in common might be held by the contemporary Macha (and Qaqachakas) and pre-Columbian Paracas, to generate this competitive approach to weaving. I propose that the existence of small endogenous communities of weavers in alternat-ing relations of exchange and competitive warfare might be the answer. There is evidence for this in both Charkas-Qharaqhara and Early Intermediate Period Paracas, although we do not know in the latter case how far this was based on gender rela-tions (see Arnold and Espejo 2009 ).
The coincidence in one location of different textile styles can suggest the presence of diverse weaving groups linked by social networks of pro-duction and exchange, as in Peters’s description of Paracas. Or it can suggest a more hierarchical relationship between local and incoming groups, where stylistic dominance is linked to power rela-tions, associated again with overlapping technical competences. Ann Rowe’s contribution in Chapter 6 deals with an ambiguous case between these two possibilities in weaving communities around the Chillon, Chancay, and other watersheds of Central Peru during the Late Intermediate Period. Rowe’s data-rich chapter examines the technical features of cloth as a significant component of what Lechtman ( 1984 ) calls ‘technological style’. Rowe argues that these technical features are a more reliable indica-tor than woven designs of geographic and stylistic origin, even of local or other ethnic identities, since they are part of a regional repertory, explored in Dransart’s chapter as a form of productive knowledge that is less easily copied by outsiders. Such technical features can therefore be used to reconstruct geographic origin and interaction in a manner that goes beyond other available types of evidence, such as historical records.
For Rowe, the presence in a region of relatively unified styles can indicate the desire to conform to local norms, or to new and prestigious forms, such as those dictated by fiat from the state. By contrast,
intersecting contemporaneous styles in a region might imply the presence of vying power relations, although stylistic dominance does not necessarily mean political dominance. Her claim, supported by a method combining the detailed technical analysis of textiles with ethnohistorical documentation, lays out an important new methodology for archaeo-logical work in general.
Another point of view about the materialisa-tion of knowledge expressed through overlapping textile identities is put forward by Anne Tiballi, who traces in Chapter 5 how the textile technol-ogy which expresses material knowledge is socially constructed. She bases her argument on Dobres’s view that through the unfolding and everyday habitus of artifact making and use for functional (and other) ends, technical activities become an important means for expressing and materialising larger cultural epistemologies and ontologies, as well as identities and differences (Dobres 2000 : 139). Tiballi takes the case of 46 women, probably aqlla or selected weavers, sacrificed and buried in the Cemetery of the Sacrificed Women, associated with the aqllawasi compound in Pachacamac, Peru, to examine the proliferation of hybridised textiles, production contexts, and identities under the Inka. Tiballi questions the traditional models of Inka state service, particularly for the aqlla , which suggest that the ethnic identities of individuals incorporated into the state bureaucracy from subject populations were replaced by a new, Inka identity. Although the Pachacamac aqlla were producing traditional Inka-style textiles for the state, they were also making clothing for themselves in both Inka and non-Inka styles. In the practice of making these textiles, the aqlla engaged in technical gestures that evoked the social contexts of their youth, continually preserv-ing their knowledge of their birthplace, even as they participated in textile production and other shared activities for the Inka state. As a result, both the production and wearing of this clothing indicate that the Pachacamac aqlla embodied aspects of hybrid identity, incorporating their former ethnic identities into their new Inka role.
One of the key areas in which an approach centred on the materialisation of knowledge can shed new light on power and regional relations is that of textile iconography. In general, textile composition has been defined until now by classifi-catory systems that elect a certain thematic content within the context of textile design, composition, form, volume, use of colour, and the tendencies to manage designs in terms of realism, symbolism, or abstraction. While this approach has often
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Text i les , Technica l Pract ice, and Power in the Andes
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15
Introduct ion
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Text i les , Technica l Pract ice, and Power in the Andes
produced interesting results (Solanilla 2012 ), the limitation for us is that it works as a self-referential representational system, outside the actual proc-esses of making cloth.
In Chapter 11 , Arnold, de Diego, and Espejo attempt to overcome these current limitations in the study of weaving iconography by drawing directly on weavers’ practices today to reconsider textile images in terms of the techniques used in their elaboration. This new approach to textile iconography reconsiders textile motifs in terms of their material nature, where an Andean equivalent of tekhn ē would embrace this idea of the material-isation of knowledge. Taking on board Malafouris’s work on palaeolithic art, and his proposal that the cognitive qualities of what once seemed to be just representation-making constitute rather the basis of new and more complex forms of material engagement (Malafouris 2007), the authors propose that textile motifs, too, are not representations in a passive sense, but rather externalisations of the techniques used in their making. They agree with Gell ( 1998 ) that the practice of elaborating textile motifs externalises technique in an abductive way, whereby in contemplating these motifs, both real and imagined, weavers can interrogate their own manual and technical capacities. This is turn may facilitate their possibilities of generating new techniques on a practical level, through experi-mentation with new kinds of corporeal, manual, and instrumental coordinations and operations, in order to achieve the new colour configurations, additional warp layers, more complex techniques, and greater outlining to figures they seek, or indeed the new developments in loom technology needed in order to achieve a desired motif technically.
These ideas suggest that weaving motifs are not limited to being organisative elements of a compos-ition. Rather, through the techniques used in their making, they may constitute part of the generic rules that characterise the woven repertory of each community of practice. In this sense, woven motifs as semiotic signs are never simply abstract repre-sentations to be applied across different media, but rather visualisations of sets of material practices in one medium that can guide visuo-material practices in other media, at an ideological level. In the con-temporary weaving practices of certain regions, the contemplation by a weaver of a new design actually ‘motivates’ her to go beyond her conventional rep-ertory to break new ground by creating techniques and technological developments unknown until then, which are then socialised and disseminated throughout the region.
Organisation of the book
The book is organised in four parts. Part I , ‘Andean textiles as cultural records, and issues in their documentation’, explores the idea of textiles as doc-uments, seeking to close the current gap between the studies of khipus (knotted cords) and textiles, by proposing that they both form part of a wider set of interrelated semiotic practices, based in fibres, what Frank Salomon ( 2004 : 177) has called a ‘semi-osis in common’.
In the opening chapter, Arnold presents a general overview of this comparison, based on evidence in textile terminology. The following chapter by Jeffrey Splitstoser examines the case of wrapped batons and cords of Late Paracas Cerrillos, as an interrelated semiotic practice to that of weaving. Among the theories he puts forward for their possible use is that these may be precursors to the planning instruments called wara ñ a , directed towards the ordering of warp bout layouts in the textile structure, or the application of particular weaving or braiding techniques, or else a kind of proto- khipu . In the future, Splitstoser intends to explore more the degree of articulation between these wrapped batons and cords and the textiles of Cerrillos. Zuidema’s chapter closing this part examines historical woven tunics as records of Andean calendars, with social and cultural correlations.
Part II , ‘Andean textiles, technology, and mater-ial culture: textile technologies and their social consequences’, examines these themes to reveal the degrees of ambiguity in the nexus technology–society. In her chapter, Ann Peters relates the woven layers of Paracas Necropolis funerary bundles to the creation and maintenance of social boundaries, but views these at the same time as being closely articulated through social and exchange networks centred on weaving practice. She studies technical persistence and variation over time, viewed from the perspective of technological style, while challen-ging many previously accepted notions of cultural contact. Anne Tiballi’s chapter views the aqllas ’ work weaving for the Inka state in the aqllawasi of Pachacamac as an institutional configuration that integrates technological practice from diverse settings into the construction of social identity at an individual level, while weaving the body politic at a state level. Ann Rowe’s chapter views the tech-nical interrelations in the late prehispanic Chillon and Chancay watersheds as integrating highland–coastal relations, while defining local technological styles.
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Part III , ‘Woven techniques, instruments, and skilled bodies: being and doing through cloth’, examines the relations between woven techniques, instruments, and bodies, in aspects of being and doing, that is in making textiles and in identify-ing yourself with this task. It explores how woven practice shapes corporeal notions of being and doing, and how in turn weavers in communities of woven practice add value to their products by shaping the contexts in which they are produced. In a contemporary setting, Cassandra Torrico’s chapter studies the close relationship between the increasing complexity of weaving techniques and parallel ways in which competition over managing these emerging techniques is driven by practices of social complexity. For her part, Penelope Dransart’s chapter views weaving with a discontinuous warp and weft as part of productive knowledge in a geo-graphical frame of reference shared by different highland communities of weavers, but apparently not by those in coastal valleys.
In her chapter, Claudia Rivera explores a range of archaeological instruments used during textile pro-duction processes, mainly spinning and weaving, in different regions and periods of the South Central Andes. She has been able to do this by comparing contemporary weavers’ categories of instruments and skilled knowledge using them, to propose general reference criteria that can then be applied to the archaeological past. Rivera also proposes ways in which these instruments can be more clearly identified by archaeologists and located within the productive chain, as well as within different levels of development and complexity in the processes of textile production and supervision. In particu-lar, she suggests how to differentiate the kinds of instruments used in warp- and weft-faced cloth.
Part IV , ‘Textiles as visual records of techno-logical knowledge and worldview’, takes on board the specific relation between textile iconography, textile techniques, and structures, and how these express regional ideas about power, and related ideas about identity and alterity. The chapters here show how many ideas about identity and alterity are expressed in the play of textile surfaces and in the three-dimensionality of textiles structures. These aspects of textile making challenge conventional Cartesian geometrical paradigms, by showing how these plays of inside and outside surfaces express alternative spatial interests with distinct social meanings.
Gail Silverman’s chapter rethinks the textile iconography of tocapus as a mediating language associated with specific forms of production, and
the social ways of organising this. Following on from this, Arnold, de Diego, and Espejo’s chapter rethinks textile iconography contextually and as deriving from weaving practice. They view textile iconography as an integral part of technological style and of woven structures and techniques, and not simply as surface designs. Espejo and Arnold’s following chapter rethinks the iconography of Andean food bags as a documentary language about productive processes. Finally, George Lau’s chapter explores the patterns of textile designs in Recuay as expressions of alterity, with two othernesses in mind: chiefly nobles and ancestral bodies of the esteemed deceased, as perceived by the living.
The book includes general maps of the archaeo-logical and ethnographic sites mentioned in the text, as well as the detailed maps in some chapters (see Figures 0–1 and 0–2 ).
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