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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... daily life experience in several villages near Maca. Caylloma's 39,000 residents, mostly farmers and herders, are clustered in fifteen villages in the Colca River Valley.2 My investigation concerns the ways they use objects to represent ...
... daily on the bodies of the powerless.5 Combining military force and neoliberal reform, President Alberto Fujimori's government struggled to retain control. From 1991 to 1993, I lived in urban Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province ...
... daily I took half-hour bus rides to Alto Cayma and La Tomilla, established neighborhoods (urbanizaciones) where migrants from Caylloma cluster (Figure 3). I made periodic sojourns to new shantytowns (pueblos jovenes) in the barren ...
... daily routine was remarkably uneventful. I kept right on doing fieldwork. With only four months remaining of my eighteenmonth research period, I needed to accelerate in the homestretch. My colleague, Flora Cutipa, and I met hundreds of ...
... daily life, the well-worn path of fieldwork. Every day I had to pass the bombed-out recruiting office, just two blocks from my house. The door blown off its hinges had been replaced by the time I reached Chivay. The damaged roof of the ...
Contents
Traveling | |
Identity in a Region at | |
Visual Domain and Cultural Process | |
Representation and the Embodiment | |
Transvestism and Festivals as Performance | |
Ethnic Symbols and Gendered | |
Gender and Production in a Workshop | |
Exchange Identity and the Commoditization | |
Conclusion Why Women Wear Polleras | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |