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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... especially grateful to the Embassy of Peru in Washington, DC, and to Allan Wagner, then Ambassador of Peru to the United States, for inviting me to speak in 2002. Stimulating discussion with faculty and students resulted from invited ...
... especially the gendered and ethnic concepts they embody, contains the irreducible tensions in which their value lies. Questions of meaning are questions of power. Objects do not float detached from cultural values, but acquire their ...
... especially women, do weave fine textiles, which they use and sell.15 Caylloma's documented, five-century association with cloth was one reason I chose to do research there. Alpacas abound in Caylloma; their fiber is highly prized ...
... especially cloth, and with “costume.” More broadly, I inquire why nonindustrial, premodern lifeways and technologies are such common markers of ethnic and racial difference. The categories of “Indian” (indio, indigena), “white” (blanco) ...
... especially images of clothed persons in other media, led viewers to reflect on the past. Dozens of photographs from the 1931 Shippee-Johnson Peruvian Expedition, archived in the American Museum of Natural History, were influential; four ...
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 | |