EAA 2018: Abstract

Spinning is a practical and embodied knowledge. Different body positions and the particular use of textile tools learnt since childhood make spinning a culturally determined practice. It demands disciplined movement, skill and concentration. The proficiency of Araucanian spinners amazed Spanish colonisers and chroniclers since their first arrival in Chile. Women were capable of spin while walking! Despite the establishment of textile factories, tailor’s guilds, and laws in the Americas aiming at controlling the production and consumption of clothing, traditional textile practices and knowledge continued among indigenous communities in Chile. Spinning and weaving reinforced, particularly among the Reche-Mapuche women, technologies of the self and became technologies of resistance against the Spanish colonial rule (1540-1820). Precisely because of the importance of spinning and weaving for being and becoming a Reche-Mapuche female, those textile technologies were taught to and shared with enslaved Spanish women. Spanish captives were forced to marry indigenous leaders and to procreate with them, as well as to dress like a native woman and to carry out the female economic activities within the community, such as spinning and weaving. Through the analysis of textile tools, iconography and ethnographic accounts, this paper explores indigenous textile practices and knowledge as a conscious strategy of resistance against colonial rule on the one hand, and as a punishment and imposition onto Spanish female captives on the other.

Spanish colonialism; Textile practices; Reche-Mapuche;Gender

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Beatriz Marin-Aguilera¹