A view from the weaver’s fingertips: the technical and creative come together in a pioneering study of Andean weaving The warp-faced weaves of the Andes are the most complex in the world. While existing studies of Andean textiles use a technical language derived from other textile traditions (mainly tapestry from Europe and the Near East), this book takes as its starting point the technical terms in the Aymara and Quechua languages used by Andean weavers themselves. The result is a completely new way of understanding one of the great craft traditions of the world. Authors Denise Y. Arnold and Elvira Espejo have worked with weavers across the region to understand this technical language and have studied more than 700 textile samples in world-class museums and private collections (including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and collections in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile). The Andean Science of Weaving is a work of groundbreaking scholarship, technically detailed, but also a celebration of one of the most gorgeous and sophisticated weaving traditions in the world. It will be of great interest to practical weavers, museum curators, anthropologists, art historians, archaeologists, and anyone with a love for Latin America and its rich craft traditions. 450+ illustrations

The Andean Science of Weaving: Structures and Techniques for Warp-Faced Weaves

Humor & Entertainment

Arnold, Denise Y.

Espejo, Elvira

Pop Culture

Thames&Hudson

The Metamorphosis of Heads: Textual Struggles, Education, and Land in the Andes (Illuminations, 74)

Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture. The Metamorphosis of Heads explores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings--weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor. The Metamorphosis of Heads acknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.

The Metamorphosis of Heads: Textual Struggles, Education, and Land in the Andes (Pitt Illuminations)

History

Americas

University of Pittsburgh Press

Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes

The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this synthesizing work, cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf examine the cult of heads in the Andes―past and present―to develop a theory of its place in indigenous cultural practice and its relationship to political systems. Using ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork, highland-lowland comparisons, archival documents, oral histories, and ritual texts, the authors draw from Marx, Mauss, Foucault, Assadourian, Viveiros del Castro and other theorists to show how heads shape and symbolize power, violence, fertility, identity, and economy in South American cultures.

Hastorf, Christine A.

Routledge

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Re-situating Andean colonial history from the perspective of the local historians of ayllu Qaqachaka, in highland Bolivia, this book draws on regional oral history combined with local and public written archives. Rejecting the binary models in vogue in colonial and postcolonial studies (indigenous/non-indigenous, Andean/Western, conquered/conquering), it explores the complex intercalation of legal pluralism and local history in the negotiations around Spanish demands, resulting in the so-called "Andean pact." The Qaqachaka's point of reference is the preceding Inka occupation, so in fulfilling Spanish demands they seek cultural continuity with this recent past. Spanish colonial administration, applies its roots in Roman-Germanic and Islamic law to many practices in the newly-conquered territories. Two major cycles of ayllu tales trace local responses to these colonial demands, in the practices for establishing settlements, and the feeding and dressing of the Catholic saints inside the new church, with their forebears in the Inka mummies.

Situating the Andean Colonial Experience: Ayllu Tales of History and Hagiography in the Time of the Spanish (Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and South America, 700-1700)

Arc Humanities Press

Vocabulario aymara del parto y de la vida reproductiva de la mujer (Spanish Edition)

Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara

Río de vellón, río de canto: Cantar a los animales, una poética andina de la creación (Colección Academia) (Spanish Edition)

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Books by Arnold, Denise Y.