Textiles, Techne and Power in the Andes (review)

This Conference, organized by researchers in London and La Paz, was devoted to the study of textiles, culture and identity in the Andes. It brought together a sparkling array of specialists from the region and from other parts of the world, as well as from major museums in the UK. The theme of 'communities of practice', embodying traditions of skill and knowledge, was a consistent thread throughout the three days of the conference, in which 30 papers were presented in both Spanish and English.

Papers on the first day focused on the ways that woven products serve as archives of technological knowledge in which power relations (of politics, class or gender) take shape. In her talk, Denise Arnold (Birkbeck and Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, La Paz) compared khipu (knotted cords) and textiles in the Andes. While the study of these artifacts has traditionally proceeded on distinctly gendered lines - the former appealing to the 'rigorous, rational minds' of male academics, the latter to the more 'esoteric, female domain' - Arnold's plea was to blur these distinctions, investigating both khipu and textiles within their public and private realms. She also emphasized the importance, for textile historians, not only of the finished artifacts but also of the processes of their making, exemplified by patterns of counting, colouring and designing that refer to wider productive and reproductive cycles: 'from the epistemological space formed by the loom and the textile in elaboration, a weaver generates and articulates a series of different kinds of produce, from human babies, to animal and vegetable ones, in the domain she knows and controls'. Jeffrey Splitstoser (Mercyhurst University) expanded this field of inquiry by considering practice and meaning in spiral-wrapped batons and cords from Cerrillos - a civic-ceremonial site in the Ica Valley, Peru, inhabited from approximately 850-350 B.C.E. - which he suggested might have been the origin of the Middle Horizon (500-1000 C.E.) khipu. These objects belong to the Late Paracas Period, ca. 350-200 BCE. They were found in the tomb of an adult individual, probably female. The question of Middle Horizon khipu's roots was also raised by Gary Urton (Harvard University), who convincingly argued that there is evidence they derived from the non-decimal tradition of pre-Inca cord-keeping in Wari territory, the dominant northern state in Central Andean prehistory.

Like Arnold, Rebecca Stone (Emory University) advocated the study of khipu in the larger context of Andean textile arts and language. Focusing particularly on variation of colours, materials, forms and treatments in three khipu examples held by the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, Stone interpreted them through the Quechua concepts of ukhu (the internal, the powerfully hidden, the revelatory) and pachakuti (reversal of the world, the chaos that creates new order), revealing unexpected meanings. In a similar vein, Anne Tiballi (California Institute for Peruvian Studies) presented a methodology for understanding the connection between craft production and subjective identity in textile studies based on the metaphorical figure of the cyborg taken from radical feminist theory. Tiballi considered the types of hybridized identities experienced by the Late Horizon (c. 1450- 1532 C.E.) state-controlled artisans - the aqllakuna - who produced artifacts which blended Inca imperial styles with local ones. Instead of a simplistic one-to-one correlation between hybrid textiles and the hybrid identities of their weavers, Tiballi argued that these hybrid objects were manifestations of and participants in social contexts within which such identities were performed. In a tour de force keynote lecture closing the day, Ann Peters (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology) focused on the textiles found in the Paracas Necropolis in Peru, a vast communal burial site holding 420 bodies that dates to around 300-200 B.C.E. Employing the concept of 'communities of textile production' instead of the more commonly used 'workshop', which connotes centralized ownership of tools and a physical location, Peters revealed that these communities were numerous, highly empowered, and 'competing in quality, esoteric knowledge...