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
Results 1-5 of 62
... role in society The Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series is supported by Allison, Doug, Taylor, and Andy Bacon; Margaret, Lawrence, Will, John, and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; the Temple-Inland Foundation; and the National ...
... roles of exemplary scholar, museum director, and mentor. Nicholas Townsend cheerfully shared the junior faculty ... role model with enviable grace. Preliminary studies and different versions of parts of this book have been published ...
... role. Some urban elites suggested that I develop and market crafts for the improvement of the poor. Others, assuming I was with a development agency, told me not to waste my time trying to help “those Indians,” because they were too ...
... role in the coup. Was Fujimori a dictator or a puppet?7 My own 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 ...
... roles in Cayllominos' lives. That is how I came to view them as a genre, a unified form of cultural expression. Now ... role for rural Peruvians, it coexists with capitalist extraction, multinational development, and a vast informal ...
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 | |