Weaving Life. The Textile Collection of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia, following the productive chain

Description

In the present volume, in coordination with the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, in La Paz, we decided to remedy this situation by proposing a new focus towards the woven objects located in the museum deposits, this time centred on making these textiles within the productive chain of weaving, taking into account the social life of the weaving communities of practice in the region, and in addition the social life of textiles as both objects and subjects. We considered it necessary to adopt this approach for various reasons: First, museum collections are notoriously decontextualised. In only a very few cases, do we know with any confidence the provenance of a piece, its region, period or cultural affiliation. Knowing at least the processes in its making helps us contextualise better an object, and understand the relations between its component elements during its construction. Previously it was sufficient to say that a textile ‘had’ a certain colour. Now we could say in the catalogue that the colour of a textile had been introduced through dyes of a certain nature (by natural fibre tone, or a natural or artificial dye). And we could identify the processes in the construction of the woven object, by identifying the combination of structural components (the basic elements), added components (the majority of which are sewn on to the structural component) and extended components (a fringe for example). Second, textile-making historically has demanded the development of one of the most complex productive chains in the world. It is not a coincidence that the very complexity of this chain has served as the model for the development in Japan of the automobile industry and the industrial production of paints during the early twentieth century (Arnold and Espejo, 2013a: 38-40, 80). Third, a weaver does not work in isolation, but within the complex networks set up between different communities of weaving practice. These communities of practice, in turn, have been able to generate links historically with the wider access networks to raw materials that make up regional productive chains of weaving production. Fourth, the practices of textile-making depend on the availability to weavers of a range of technological and technical elements that have their own histories and processes of development. Knowledge of the productive chain thus includes knowledge of historical developments in loom and instrument technologies, and of regional weaving structures and techniques used over different periods