Weaving Identities
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Weaving Identities
Author: Carol Hendrickson
language: en
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Release Date: 2010-01-01
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.
Weaving Identities
Author: Carol Hendrickson
language: en
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Release Date: 1995-12
"An innovative ethnography of Maya traje that describes the social life of cloth, its role in the construction of identity, and its part in the changing structure of regional gender relations. Traje empowers, brings women into the global market, and is an enduring of symbol cultural knowledge."--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.
Construction of Personal and Social Identities Through Contemporary Appearance
The study documents how five Ghanaian women in the United States utilize clothing and other items related to their appearance to construct, reaffirm, and modify personal and social identities within the context of their daily lives. To understand appearance and its associated practices is to seek to understand the social and cultural meanings which are associated with appearance practices. Such meanings are affected by traces of Ghanaian culture as well as cultural contacts in American society. Comprehending these meanings is essential to understanding their use in the construction of personal and social identities with respect to the context of time and location appropriateness. To better understand how Ghanaian women contemporarily construct social and political identities through their appearance in the context of the “everyday,” theoretical and methodological underpinnings of interpretive inquiry were utilized. The guiding interest of interpretive science is to clarify, authenticate, and uncover, or bring to full human awareness, structures of meaning in everyday experiences. The aim is to identify human cultural activity and experience from the perspective of those who are living the experience. Moreover, interpretive inquiry allows for the uncovering of rules, social action, and other phenomenon that must be explained by placing it in an appropriate context of a cultural system. In this regard, I draw upon ethnography. The process of obtaining of thick description allowed me to uncover how Ghanaian women interpret, assign, and encode meanings to aspects of objects within their environments and their motives which address certain perceptions, interpretations, and interactions. This study explicates the ways in which Ghanaian women employ appearance and clothing practices to achieve a sense of personal and social identity with respect to Ghanaian values and culture while in the United States and abroad and provides a way of understanding the everyday practices and cultural heritage of Ghanaians which (1) inform non-Ghanaians and (2) serve as a way of thinking about the interrelationship between culture and practices across disciplines and traditions, i.e., situating this study within the philosophical grounding or conceptual framework which will allow for the explanation of human actions.
