By Catherine Joslyn, MFA Textiles, cjoslyn@clarion.edu

The late anthropologist Ed Franquemont wrote, “No other people in history put so much cultural energy into fiber arts as the Andeans. Even though the superlative weavers of the contemporary Andes are only the impoverished reminder of a far more brilliant past that is gone forever, cloth remains the quintessential Andean art and the best forum to enter into a dialogue with the remarkable Inca mind.” Schoeser writes that the ancient Andeans in the earliest known New World urban centre, Caral (ca. 2600 BCE), used “knotted reed bags filled with stones to form the inner walls of buildings.” (2003:13) Not only clothing, and the unique texts made from knotted cords called quipus, but even buildings were made using textile techniques and materials. These were peoples who were deeply in touch with the nature of textile fibers and what their hands and imaginations could craft out of them. Textiles were made in techniques so elaborate, so difficult to achieve, so time consuming and labor intensive as to take one’s breath away. Likewise the Andeans were--and the modern Runa or Quechua speakers still are--in close touch with the natures and needs of the animals and plants from which the fibers came, how to cultivate and care for them, how to utilize certain plants, insects and minerals as dyestuffs to color them, to produce exquisite or utilitarian textiles for any type of need from everyday carrying bags to exquisite offerings for the gods and divine rulers.

Now in this contemporary age, after centuries of oppression at the hands of European conquerors, more and more indigenous groups in the Andes have dedicated themselves to taking control of their own destiny. Visitors to Cuzco, Peru, for example, can visit a young museum and shop, the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cuzco, directed by its indigenous founder, Nilda Calleñaupa of Chinchero.

Chinchero is a well-known weaving town fifty minute drive from Cuzco and has 12,000 inhabitants divided in four communities cultivating potatoes, beans, wheat, and barley for the brewery in Cuzco, as well as sheep and cattle; at the higher altitudes they tend llamas and alpacas (1991:36). There is a school since 1920, and a health center, police station, municipal office, justice of the peace, administrator and tiny shops. Touristically Chinchero is noted for its Inca ruins, colonial church, and its market, with a small museum and a restaurant. Ten years ago, I spent most weekends for the better part of a year in Chinchero. Victoria KusiHuaman is a traditional weaver I got to meet; there are three weavers associations. The town’s big annual festival takes place in September.

One of Chinchero’s oldest motifs, called loraypo (Isabel Huaman Puma, personal communication, 1997), “is a diamond divided into four by the addition of four smaller diamonds, one placed at the top and bottom of the larger diamond, and two found in the middle.” (1991b) “According to Chinchero men, (it) refers to the four part division of Chinchero into suyus (regions) as well as denoting the water sources in each part.” It also shows the agricultural fields with their ridges. Ancestrally I suppose it also stood for the four suyos of the Inca empire, whose name Tawantinsuyo meant four regions.

A skilled weaver since childhood and the first Chincherino to get a university education, Nilda Calleñaupa has devoted her life to preserving Peru’s textile heritage. I met her in 1997, when her Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco was a year old. Now she works with at least 800 weavers in nine communities.

By “community” I mean tiny villages often many hours by foot from the nearest small rural town. She shows the weavers fine antique examples, encouraging their best production, and works hard at developing the market for their products. Through the textile preservation project she has given weavers a means to support their families. Nilda encourages excellence, and the level of quality in the weavers’ production has grown exponentially.

During my visit last May I was astonished at the fineness of handspun, traditionally dyed weavings, particularly coming from the community of Chahuaytire, especially compared with the weavings of factory spun synthetic yarns that I observed just ten years before. Some of them are getting up to the quality of Bolivian weaving now. As Nilda documents in her newest book, “The weavers of Chahuaytire now wear their traditional garments with pride. They report that people in the cities sometimes come up to them and greet them with, “Brother, how good that you are wearing our traditional clothing and keeping it alive.” “If people in the cities still try to discriminate against them, they resist.” (2007: 20) She quotes a woman of Pitmarca: “We no longer feel we have to accept these insults. If we hear some bad comment about us, we immediately tell the speakers that we are people equal to them and that there is no difference between us. We can say that because of us, there are enough tourists in Cusco.” (2007:19)

Other groups in the Cuzco region are having success too: the weavers of Parobamba—you have to ride for 5 hours in a 4-wheel drive to get there from the city. Also Crisantino Montes of Ayacucho is weaving wonderful tapestries of handspun baby alpaca dyed with traditional dyes.

In Bolivia, Artesanía Sorata is an indigenous women’s cottage industry producing and selling a variety of high quality handmade items to better the quality of life of the women’s families. Likewise, the indigenous people of Otavalo, Ecuador, have gained economic and political power in recent years, and are working to improve their artisanry production. These situations exemplify native peoples’ determination to succeed on their own terms, holding on to native culture and determining their own values and defining success in their own terms. In many of these communities we see the expression of Andean concepts linking humans with nature and the cosmos.

“There are many ways in which cloth can serve as historical text. It can be an alternative means of encoding cultural information. Aspects of ethnicity, economic relationships, and personal data are all proclaimed in cloth and clothing." (Berlo 91:447) The imagery in traditional textiles consists of symbols that can still be read by the most traditional weavers and shamans, the ones who bear traditional knowledge at the deepest levels. The motifs present a kind of precursor to pictographic writing, with the ability to document many kinds of information about space and time as well as history and accounting.

It is important to realize that the meanings of the images come from oral tradition, in which details are guarded in the memory of the one who knows how to read them. In the case of the knotted quipus that accounted for stored goods, among other things, Cummins (1993:106) reminds us that “The quipu also communicated through (its keeper/reader) “but in an oral form, and the information it represented could be extensive.” (my translation) and not only that, but many Quechua terms convey complex meanings that take many words to explain in a western language.

Even the imagery of the deliciously varied patterned beans in a cloth from the Nasca culture of the first 650 years CE, though they obviously speak of the importance of farming and foodstuffs, according to Frame the symbolism goes much deeper. She says that beans and severed heads appeared interchangeably in Nasca imagery. The desert culture was naturally preoccupied with water, and the Nasca people buried severed heads, the associated flow of blood made as an offering to ensure the water supply. “This practice, and the associated blood flow, may equate with the sowing and watering (of) seeds in the ritual domain.” (1999:262)

Since ancient times Andean cultures have had an extraordinary relationship with the natural environment. As shown by Spina (1994:6) in his studies of Peruvian anthropologist Jose María Arguedas’ works, the native peoples of the Andes do not conceive of humans as separate from nature. In fact, they see themselves as intended to collaborate with nature. The natural state of humans is to be civilized, that is to plant and tend animals and work in close harmony with the natural world. When they encountered forms in nature that spoke to them of their world of ideas, they didn’t hesitate to modify those forms to create images that reflected their worldview. Just as they didn’t see themselves as separate from nature, nature also included the supernatural, especially in transitional images that bridge worlds.

In her cataloguing of designs used by the weavers of Choquecancha, Seibold found the largest category to be religious and cosmological designs (169). Andean cosmology was organized around sky, earth, and water deities that weavers still put into textiles, which she characterizes as woven prayers due to the significance of the imagery. The sky was primarily represented by the condor, the earth by the feline, and the water by the serpent or toad (170).

The condor not only is a giant bird, but more importantly it eats carrion and therefore is not like other birds. Runa of Choquecancha, according to the author, “say that the condor flies up from Pachamama” (Mother Earth/Time) “and lives with the Apus” (sacred mountain lords)… (that condors) “guard the Incan treasure buried in the earth; that drinking the blood of a condor will make your teeth grow again; that a condor flying over the church is a harbinger of death…and that when weavers use a pick made of condor bone, their fingers fly in picking designs.” Other creatures considered both inside and outside the category of birds, and therefore extraordinary enough to include in these woven prayers—include bats, considered rats changed into birds whose blood will cure epilepsy; and owls, which like bats fly at night and rest in the daytime. The owl is a harbinger of death, according to Seibold. The hummingbird hovers, flying and yet remaining in one place; the butterfly seems to cross between insect and bird categories; the duck is equally at home in water or air; the tinamou, a large-bodied bird that can fly, and yet--unlike most birds-- prefers to run to safety.

Going on to transitional power symbols relating to the cosmological realm of the earth, Seibold and others mention the feline as the most ubiquitous one. It is a powerful animal because it is a preditor and undomesticatable. (175) The city of Cuzco itself is laid out in the form of a puma, with the sacred center located at its genital organs.

Special qualities of water animals, relating to the lower world, made them magical as well, such as the snake as a symbol for the earth and for rivers, since snakes transform themselves by shedding their skins. A magical snake could convert itself into a river. It also has the same form as a bolt of lightning, and this form of light, akin to the reflected light of the moon, was thought to have magical power just as important as the radiant light of the sun. In fact a person who survives being struck by lightning is automatically considered to have been transformed into an insipient shaman. Returning to Seibold, “The category of transitional power symbols includes those animals with some social distance from the runa that are either related to the coming of the rains (the toad, lizard, and serpent” who hibernate until the rainy season) “and those which inspire awe on their own merits (the condor and predator felines.)”

She continues, “As one shaman explained it to me, the designs of the sky, earth, and water correspond to the three worlds of the Runa universe: Kay Pacha, the middle world the Runa and the Apus inhabit; Hanan Pacha, the world in the sky in which live God, the sun and moon; and Ukhu Pacha, the underworld, which is a great sea, the world the dead inhabit. Another (ritual specialist) told me that lightning and rainbows link the three worlds. The condor, as represented by the woven motif, lives in the sky above the Apus. The feline… represents the earth and lives firmly on this earth with the Runa. And the water animal motifs, the serpent, toad, and lizard, hibernate underground in (the earth,) Pachamama, returning to Kay Pacha with the coming of the rainy season. The zigzag water motif, representing lightning and the river, and the thin colored stripes, representing the rainbow, connect the three worlds together. Based on what the weavers and shamans told me, the heavy concentration of sky, earth, and water designs in the (shawls) emphasizes (their) purpose as a prayer to the spirit world. By visually linking the three worlds in one textile and connecting it to a request for agricultural fertility during the dry season festivals, the weaver is directing her message to the supernatural world. (177)

Andean cultures likewise had a very special relationship with textiles which grew out of that special relationship with nature itself. Their understanding of the native camelid fibers such as alpaca, vicuña, guanaco and llama hair, as well as plant fibers like cotton, was so intimate that spinners and weavers were capable of making garments waterproof or as soft as butter, or to make patterns visible in yarn all of one color but made with alternating stripes of oppositely twisted yarns. Their royal and sacred textiles were made using incredibly labor-intensive techniques, as the investment of labor gave them the high value that was appropriate for their sacred or royal use. Many of their favorite motifs revolved around their perceptions of their relationship with nature and the supernatural, and thereby reveal that multitude of varieties of bean, for example, or the of the fields that provide other important foodstuffs. The few cultural heirs of pre-conquest peoples that remain continue that special relationship with their materials, as well as continuing and in some cases relearning textile techniques their ancestors used.

In the Department of Cuzco, it is in the remote province of Q’ero that the most traditional ways of the ancestors have been preserved. Rowe points out that Q’ero is the only place in Peru where a special ceremony to bless textiles has been documented, indicating their high level of cultural importance (2002:15). Her book with John Cohen makes use of his travels there beginning in the 1950s when he was a graduate student in painting at Yale. Josef Albers and his wife Anni, who was herself an expert in Peruvian weaving, encouraged students to study such things.

Q’ero shamans retain knowledge of the oldest meanings of textile designs. In fact Q’ero has the same name as the Inca and pre-Inca cups that had tokapu designs on them that could be read just like the ones on Inca tunics. For example, this Inca tokapu motif signifies a soldier, being a miniature copy of the actual tunics soldiers wore. Between this and the quipu of symbolic knotted cords, it isn’t too much of a jump to think of Andean textile imagery as pictographic writing.

Silverman’s work with Q’ero textiles shows that they maintain a complex form of weaving mostly lost in the rest of the region. For example the inti, or sun (1994:72): “…the diamond placed inside the rectangular frame is called Inti, the sun…when referring to temporal ideas; and llacta, village, when referring to spatial concepts….The diamonds placed one inside the other in decreasing size are called pata, elevated land, and pupu, time period. Sevaral (sic) Q’ero weavers related pata to the three ecological zones…they exploit:” the highest zones above the tree line, or puna, where certain potatoes are grown and where alpacas graze; the qheswa or temperate zone where most crops can be grown; and the yunga lowlands where warmer weather crops thrive “in this way: ‘Field. River. They are in three high parts.’ They say that the light rays are “the rising sun…while the dark colored lines signify the setting sun….Last, the series of triangles” bordering both sides the weavers refer to as mountain points while the men call them Apu, mountain diety.” Silverman explains that “the natives (sic) reading of these two…motifs illustrates the dual” (nature) “of the sign” alluding “to spatial ideas such as the mountain peaks” bordering “the Q’ero highland village, with their” mountainside “fields in the different ecological zones in which they live and work, and the second” meaning denoting “ideas about the rising and setting sun in relation to the mountain peaks in order to tell daily and seasonal time.” (1999: 814-15) Her informants say designs from other less traditional parts of Cuzco that do not represent both space and time are of absolutely no value. (816) .

Silverman demonstrates that the Q’ero preserved the legacy of this inti motif from earlier cultures, at least the pre-Inca horizon Wari tapestries originating in the modern-day Ayacucho area, and Tiahuanaco ceramics (from the Lake Titicaca region), meaning that it has been important over a great deal of space and time.

Silverman lived with the Q’ero for some 20 years. She asked informants why they weave motifs in the shawls, coca bags and ponchos. A response taped in 1985 was “We know how to read like that.”

Silverman writes that in Q’ero textiles, men read in “listas” records of descriptions and quantities of goods, such as a black stripe for black llama wool or a black variety of potato, and red for red wool or corn. She says lista is woven in other places as well, for example, “A woman living in Markapata read the listas woven in a belt sample…I made as denoting a color classification for corn….the yellow stripe (was) for a furrow of yellow corn…the white stripe…for white corn placed in a furrow…the red one for red corn, and so on….While the multicolored …stripes are signs for goods, the alternating white and red stripes are signs for people. She has no doubt that the stripes are similar to the knots and color coding in the quipu, and she thinks both are related to the same concept from which contemporary bar coding arose. That is, that they can be read as a book of cultural knowledge that shows how people view their world.

Seibold points out that an important feature of Runa textiles is not just symmetry, which we can notice immediately, but the principle of dualism, of which bilateral symmetry is one aspect, and “the male-female, sun-moon dichotomies are” another. She goes on, “Andean dualism is heavily documented”…as “a cultural principle that structures the Runa universe and life within it....In textile design… dualism appears in the positive and negative patterning, where the background becomes just “as important as the design itself, the two working dynamically together to form one identifiable whole.

These examples demonstrate some of the ways in which textile designs can be read to understand Runas’ perception of their relationship to the natural world.

References

Arguedas, Jose María. 1978 Deep rivers. Translated by Frances Horning Barraclough from Los ríos profundos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1958. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Berlo, Janet. 1991 Beyond Bricolage: Women and aesthetic strategies in Latin American textiles. In Margot Schevill, Janet Berlo and Edward Dwyer, eds. Textile traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: an anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, Pps. 437-479.

Callañaupa Alvarez, Nilda. 2007 Weaving in the Peruvian highlands; dreaming patterns, weaving memories. Cuzco: Center for Traditional Textiles of Cuzco

Callañaupa Alvarez, Nilda. 2005 Weaving lives: traditional textiles of Cusco preserving the textile tradition

Cummins, Thomas. 1993 La representación en el siglo IVI: La imagen colonial del Inca. In Enrique Urbanor, compiler Mito y simbolismo en los andes: La figura y la palabra. Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas.” Proceedings of the 46th Congress of Americanists.

De la Jara, Victoria. 1967 Vers de Dechiffrement des Ecritures Anciennes du Peroú. Paris: Sciences Progress.

Frame, Mary. 1999 Textiles of the Nasca style. In Jose Antonio de Lavalle Vargas and Rosario de Lavalle de Cardenas, eds. Ancient Peruvian textiles. Lima: AFP Integra

Franquemont, Ed. 1991 Dual-lease weaving: an Andean loom technology. In Margot Schevill, Janet Berlo and Edward Dwyer, eds. Textile traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: an anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, Pps. 283-308.

Kauffmann-Doig, Federico. 1969 Manual de Arqueología Peruana. Lima: Edicciones PEISA.

Rowe, Ann Pollard. 1978 Warp patterned weaves of the Andes. Washington, D.C.: Textile Museum.

Rowe, Ann Pollard. 2002 Hidden threads of Peru: Q’ero textiles. Washington, D.C.: Textile Museum

Schoeser, Mary. 2003 World textiles: a concise history. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Silverman, Gail. 1991 Chinchero pallay. Lima: CONCYTEC

Silverman, Gail. 1994 El tejido andino: un libro de sabiduría. Lima: Banco Central de Reserva del Perú

Silverman, Gail. 1999 Cusco and it’s (sic) relation to Inca tocapu. In Jose Antonio de Lavalle Vargas and Rosario de Lavalle de Cardenas, eds. Ancient Peruvian textiles. Lima: AFP Integra

Silverman, Gail, Sergia Chauca, Nilda Callañaupa. 1991 Chinchero pallay. Lima: CONCYTEC

Spina, Vincent. 1994 Nature in the Andean cosmology of Jose María Arguedas and in the contemporary ecology movement. Paper presented at the Diversity and Dreams Conference, SUNY-College at Oswego, Oswego, NY. 2008 Personal communication.