Gender and the Boundaries of Dress in Contemporary PeruSet in Arequipa during Peru's recent years of crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress creates gendered bodies. It explores why people wear clothes, why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. Blenda Femenías argues that women's clothes are key symbols of gender identity and resistance to racism. Moving between metropolitan Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province, the central characters are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking maize farmers and alpaca herders of the Colca Valley. Their identification as Indians, whites, and mestizos emerges through locally produced garments called bordados. Because the artists who create these beautiful objects are also producers who carve an economic foothold, family workshops are vital in a nation where jobs are as scarce as peace. But ambiguity permeates all practices shaping bordados' significance. Femenías traces contemporary political and ritual applications, not only Caylloma's long-standing and violent ethnic conflicts, to the historical importance of cloth since Inca times. This is the only book about expressive culture in an Andean nation that centers on gender. In this feminist contribution to ethnography, based on twenty years' experience with Peru, including two years of intensive fieldwork, Femenías reflects on the ways gender shapes relationships among subjects, research, and representation. |
From inside the book
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... look at my garment . Then I had to have the spy - glass of Anthropology to look through at that . - ZORA NEALE HURSTON ( 1990 [ 1935 ] : 1 ) The gendered and ethnic ambiguities of one kind of dress matter , in part , because of what ...
... look at my garment . " When anthropologists turn a spy - glass on the metaphorical garment of culture , what do we see ? When we look at ourselves within culture and at the same time from outside it , how does the garment fit ? When we ...
... look Indian ” are rarely called Indian if they are middle or upper class , if most other family members " look white , " or both . The visual aspects of race matter in part because they have been used so often to support notions that ...
Contents
Introduction False Borders Embroidered Lives | xvii |
the Crossroads | 78 |
Process | 103 |
Copyright | |
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