Traje, the brightly colored traditional dress of the highland Maya, is the principal visual expression of indigenous identity in Guatemala today. Whether worn in beauty pageants, made for religious celebrations, or sold in tourist markets, traje is more than "mere cloth"—it plays an active role in the construction and expression of ethnicity, gender, education, politics, wealth, and nationality for Maya and non-Maya alike. Carol Hendrickson presents an ethnography of clothing focused on the traje—particularly women's traje—of Tecpán, Guatemala, a bi-ethnic community in the central highlands. She covers the period from 1980, when the recent round of violence began, to the early 1990s, when Maya revitalization efforts emerged. Using a symbolic analysis informed by political concerns, Hendrickson seeks to increase the value accorded to a subject like weaving, which is sometimes disparaged as "craft" or "women's work." She examines traje in three dimensions—as part of the enduring images of the "Indian," as an indicator of change in the human life cycle and cloth production, and as a medium for innovation and creative expression. From this study emerges a picture of highland life in which traje and the people who wear it are bound to tradition and place, yet are also actively changing and reflecting the wider world. The book will be important reading for all those interested in the contemporary Maya, the cultural analysis of material culture, and the role of women in culture preservation and change.

Spanning the backs of choir stalls above the heads of the canons and their officials, large-scale tapestries of saints' lives functioned as both architectural elements and pictorial narratives in the late Middle Ages. In an extensively illustrated book that features sixteen color plates, Laura Weigert examines the role of these tapestries in ritual performances. She situates individual tapestries within their architectural and ceremonial settings, arguing that the tapestries contributed to a process of storytelling in which the clerical elite of late medieval cities legitimated and defended their position in the social sphere.Weigert focuses on three of the most spectacular and little-studied tapestry series preserved from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Lives of Saints Piat and Eleutherius (Notre-Dame, Tournai), Life of Saint Steven (Saint-Steven, Auxerre [now Musée du Moyen Age, Paris]), and Life of Saints Gervasius and Protasius (Saint-Julien, Le Mans). Each of these tapestries, measuring over forty meters in length, included elements that have traditionally been defined as either lay or clerical. On the prescribed days when the tapestries were displayed, the liturgical performance for which they were the setting sought to merge the history and patron saint of the local community with the universal history of the Christian church. Weigert combines a detailed analysis of the narrative structure of individual images with a discussion of the particular social circumstances in which they were produced and perceived. Weaving Sacred Stories is thereby significant not only to the history of medieval art but also to art history and cultural studies in general.

This collection of essays brings together a wide range of Spanish and Portuguese academics and writers exploring the ways in which our encounters with literatures in English inform our assumptions about texts and identities (or texts as identities) and the way we read them. Mapping, examining, reading and re-reading, fashioning and self-fashioning and, especially, weaving appear as appropriate images that convey the complexity and the nature of creative writing. Such a metaphor has been fundamental for the history of world literature since the Roman poet Ovid had included a tale in his Metamorphoses in which weaving, narration, uncertain identities, and the risks of telling uncomfortable truths all figure prominently. As such, these essays trace the intertwined patterns that knit texts together, weaving identities as well as undoing them and, in the process, interrogating established and official truths.

A unique collection of recipes from the Yucatán region of Mexico, from home kitchens and rural market towns.

This volume explores women’s literary and cultural production in Latin America, and suggests how such works engage with discourses of identity, nationhood, and gender. Including contributions by several prominent Latin American scholars themselves, it seeks to provide a vital insight into the analysis and reception of the works in a local context, and foster debate between Latin American and metropolitan academics. The book is divided into two sections: Women and Nationhood, and Models and Genres. The first section comprises six chapters which examines women’s responses to, and attempts to carve out space within, national discourses in a Latin American context. Spanning the nineteenth century to the present day, the chapters offer an insight into the ways in which Latin American women have constructed themselves as modern subjects of the nation, and made use of the ambiguous spaces created by modernization and national discourses. The section starts firstly with a focus on the Southern Cone, covering Chile and Argentina, and then moves geographically northward, to Colombia and Bolivia. The second section, Models and Genres, consists of six chapters that examine how women writers engage with, and critically re-work, existing literary discourses and paradigms. Considering phenomena such as detective fiction, fairy-tales, and classical mythological figures, the chapters illustrate how these genres and models–frequently coded as masculine–are given new inflections, both as a result of their deployment by women, and as a result of their re-working in a Latin American context.

Crafting Identity goes far beyond folklore in its ethnographic exploration of mask making in central Mexico. In addition to examining larger theoretical issues about indigenous and mestizo identity and cultural citizenship as represented through masks and festivals, the book also examines how dominant institutions of cultural production (art, media, and tourism) mediate Mexican “arte popular,” which makes Mexican indigeneity “digestible” from the standpoint of elite and popular Mexican nationalism and American and global markets for folklore. The first ethnographic study of its kind, the book examines how indigenous and mestizo mask makers, both popular and elite, view and contest relations of power and inequality through their craft. Using data from his interviews with mask makers, collectors, museum curators, editors, and others, Pavel Shlossberg places the artisans within the larger context of their relationships with the nation-state and Mexican elites, as well as with the production cultures that inform international arts and crafts markets. In exploring the connection of mask making to capitalism, the book examines the symbolic and material pressures brought to bear on Mexican artisans to embody and enact self-racializing stereotypes and the performance of stigmatized indigenous identities. Shlossberg’s weaving of ethnographic data and cultural theory demystifies the way mask makers ascribe meaning to their practices and illuminates how these practices are influenced by state and cultural institutions. Demonstrating how the practice of mask making negotiates ethnoracial identity with regard to the Mexican state and the United States, Shlossberg shows how it derives meaning, value, and economic worth in the eyes of the state and cultural institutions that mediate between the mask maker and the market.

Contrary to the negative assessments of the social order that have become prevalent in the media since 9/11, this collection of essays focuses on the enormous social creativity being invested as collective identities are reconfigured. It emphasizes on the reformulation of ethnic and gender relationships and identities in public life.

"Chapters provide detailed information on manufacturing (spinning, weaving, dyeing, decorating); communicative significance (ethnicity, identity, tradition, rank, geographic origin); and marketing and commercialization among contemporary groups of indigenous descent"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

In this volume, anthropologists, art historians, fiber artists, and technologists come together to explore the meanings, uses, and fabrication of textiles in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from Precolumbian times to the present. Originally published in 1991 by Garland Publishing, the book grew out of a 1987 symposium held in conjunction with the exhibit "Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and Textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America" at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.