Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories
4/5
()
About this ebook
Related to Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands
Related ebooks
The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEdible Flowers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCosas: Folk Art Travels in Mexico Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tattoo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCreate Naturally: Go Outside and Rediscover Nature with 15 Artists Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHonor the Earth: Indigenous Response to Environmental Degradation in the Great Lakes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Short, Hopeful Guide to Climate Change Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTattoo: Journeys On My Mind Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNaturally Radiant Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPocket Nature: Mushroom Hunting: Forage for Fungi and Connect with the Earth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNatural Processes in Textile Art: From Rust Dyeing to Found Objects Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art with a Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWriting as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seasons for the Soul - Spells of Nature: The Embroidered Art of Julia van den Bosch Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUseless Knowledge about Crafts: Curious facts and amazing details about old and new crafts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWeaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBest Tent Camping: Minnesota: Your Car-Camping Guide to Scenic Beauty, the Sounds of Nature, and an Escape from Civilization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeaf Tea Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlayful Peg Loom Weaving: A Modern Approach to the Ancient Technique of Peg Loom Weaving Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Breathe the Breath of Isis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wild Sonoma: Exploring Nature in Wine Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWeaving with Wire: Creating Woven Metal Fabric Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Weaving of Harold Jenkins Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMessages from the Wild: An Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Art of Cloth in Mughal India Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Creative Instigator’s Handbook: A DIY Guide to Making Social Change through Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Teachings of Flowers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Art For You
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art 101: From Vincent van Gogh to Andy Warhol, Key People, Ideas, and Moments in the History of Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shape of Ideas: An Illustrated Exploration of Creativity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And The Mountains Echoed Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Draw Like an Artist: 100 Flowers and Plants Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Botanical Drawing: A Step-By-Step Guide to Drawing Flowers, Vegetables, Fruit and Other Plant Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shakespeare: The World as Stage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Erotic Photography 120 illustrations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Designer's Dictionary of Color Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Art of Living: The Classical Mannual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands
8 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands - Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez
WEAVING
in the PERUVIAN
HIGHLANDS
DREAMING PATTERNS, WEAVING MEMORIES
Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez
Preface by Wade Davis
WEAVING
in the PERUVIAN
HIGHLANDS
DREAMING PATTERNS, WEAVING MEMORIES
Editor: Linda Ligon
Translator: David Burrous
Copy editor: Veronica Patterson
Illustrations: Ann Sabin Swanson
Cover design: Susan Wasinger
Interior design: Elizabeth R. Mrofka
Production: Trish Faubion, Nancy Arndt
Cover images: Three generations of weavers from Accha Alta, and belt loom weaving from Chinchero.
© 2007 Center for Traditional Textiles Cusco
All rights reserved.
Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco
Avenida Sol 603
Cusco, Peru
Thrums llc
306 North Washington, 104
Loveland, Colorado 80537
Printed in China by Asia Pacific
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Callanaupa Alvarez, Nilda.
Weaving in the Peruvian highlands : dreaming patterns, weaving memories / Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: Handwoven fabrics comprise the living history and culture of the Peruvian highlands from Cusco to Machu Picchu and beyond. Fabric patterns with evocative names reflect the landscape and events in vivid color, evolving over time. The weavers who create these fabrics in the time-honored way are keepers of the culture and sustainers of a noble but difficult lifestyle in tune with the earth. They raise llamas and alpacas for fiber, collect plants for natural dyes, spin yarn on primitive spindles, and weave acres of cloth on simple backstrap looms just as their forebears have done for thousands of years. They weave clothing, rugs, bedcovers, potato sacks, hunting slings, and sacrificial fabrics for themselves and their villages, and for sale to supplement their meager incomes. Travellers visiting the area (hundreds of thousands a year from North America alone) are drawn to this authentic, well-crafted work and given the opportunity to collect it at every street corner and rail stop. Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands is their guide to quality, understanding, and appreciation. They will learn how pattern names such as meandering river or lake with flowers relate to the geography and history, and how the traditional natural materials and colors enhance the value of the work.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9838860-3-7
978-1-5073-0255-2 (Epub)
1. Hand weaving—Peru. 2. Indian textile fabrics—Peru. I. Title.
848.A7155 2007 2007028581
746.1 40985-- c22
10 9 8 7 6
Dedication
To my family: my husband and my two sons, from whom I took time to do my research. To my parents, especially my mother, who was an important part of my weaving life. And to all my extended family.
To my foreign friends who shared their cultural and textile experience and appreciation.
To the weavers in all the communities, especially the elders.
This book is also dedicated to the memory of Edward Franquemont, weaver, scholar, friend.
Department of Cusco
An Affirmation of Continuity
In the winter of 1982, while engaged in ethnobotanical research with a team of anthropologists and botanists, I was fortunate to live among the people of Chinchero, a traditional Andean community located some twenty miles by road from the ancient Peruvian city of Cusco. When I first met Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez and her wonderful family, she was twenty-two but seemed wise beyond her years. I wasn’t the only person to sense in her a young woman marked by destiny. She taught all of us many things that first season and has continued for more than twenty-five years to be my friend and guide to the extraordinary Andean world, with its fusion of past and present. In that world, pre-Columbian ideas and themes have been forged into a new amalgam inspired by both the winds of modernity and the pious cloak of Catholicism that has enveloped the mountains for more than 500 years.
Simply put, Nilda is one of the most remarkable individuals I have known. She is a woman who transcends culture, who exists out of time and space, an artist and scholar of immense vision and achievement. But what makes her truly great is her integrity, the fact that despite any number of alluring temptations she has remained utterly grounded in a spirit of place, loyal to community and landscape. More than any other, this trait links her to the distant past—to the archaic memory and currents of ritual that have fundamentally informed her life.
I recall vividly those first weeks in Chinchero. We were there at the invitation of Chris and Ed Franquemont, anthropologists and weavers who had lived in the community for several years and raised their children there. Chris, in particular, had a fascination with plants and would go on to become an authority in Andean ethnobotany. Our immediate task under her leadership was to complete a thorough survey of the useful plants of the Chinchero region, whose small hamlets are spread over some 135 square kilometers at elevations ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 meters.
By day we worked furiously, collecting medicinal herbs on the flanks of the sacred mountain Antakillqa, edible algae from the pools and ponds scattered upon the rich plains and verdant fields of Yanacona and Ayllupungo, exotic ornamentals among the gorges of Yanacona, where wild things thrived and rushing streams carried the rains to the Urubamba, the holy river of the Inca. By night we mostly had fun, drinking and dancing, exchanging kintus of coca leaves and blowing the essence to the wind. Nilda’s mother, Doña Guadelupe Alvarez, famously asked whether any of us had been born of mothers. She was perhaps reassured about us on the day when we stood side by side beneath the vault of the church, in a space illuminated by candles and the light of pale Andean skies, with newborn children in our arms. We held boys and girls swaddled in white linen as an itinerant priest dripped holy water onto their foreheads and spoke words of blessing that brought the infants into the realm of the saved. That afternoon three of us became godfathers, assuming ties of expectation and reciprocal obligations that would forever link us to the community. From me, my compadres hoped for support for my godchild’s education, perhaps the odd gift, a cow for the family, a measure of security in an uncertain nation. From them, I wanted the chance to know their world, an asset far more valuable that anything I could offer. It is a relationship that I have always cherished.
Though the highland flora was spectacular and the agricultural skills of these descendants of the Inca nothing short of genius, what impressed me most about Chinchero was the daily round, the accumulation of gestures that together spoke of an intimate and profound reverence for the very soil upon which the village lay. The village, of course, was not merely the adobe and thatch houses clustered around the small church. It was the totality of the people’s existence—the ancient ruins that ran away from the village and hung like memories at the edge of cliffs overlooking the river, the fields cut into the precipitous slopes of Antakillqa, the lakes on the pampa (plain) where sedges grow, and the waterfall where no one went for fear of meeting Sirena, the malevolent spirit of the forest.
For the people of the village, every activity was an affirmation of continuity. At dawn, the first member of the family to go outside formally greeted the sun. At night, when a father stepped back across the threshold into the darkness of his small hut, he invariably removed his hat, whispered a prayer of thanksgiving, and lit a candle before greeting his family. Before the morning labor in the fields began, there were always prayers and offerings of coca leaves for Pacha Mama (Mother Earth). The men worked together in teams forged not only by blood but by reciprocal bonds of obligation and loyalty, social and ritual debts accumulated over lifetimes and generations, never spoken about and never forgotten. Sometime around midday, the women and children would arrive with steaming cauldrons of soup, baskets of potatoes, and flasks of chicha (corn liquor). The families feasted together every day, and in the wake of the meal, work became play, the boys and girls taking their place beside their fathers—planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting. At the end of