Mind’s Eye and Embodied Weaving: Simultaneous Contrasts of Hue in Isluga Textiles, Northern Chile

Abstract

This article examines the use of hue in textiles woven during the twentieth century in Isluga, a bilingual Aymara/Spanish-speaking community of herders of llamas, alpacas and sheep in the highlands of northern Chile. It pays tribute to the weaving skills of Natividad Castro Challapa and other weavers of her generation, born early in the twentieth century. Aniline dyes were already known to them but, in the course of their lives, they witnessed increasing amounts of industrially manufactured, pre-dyed acrylic yarns arriving in the community. The article explores how weavers incorporated these brightly hued yarns in their textiles to form accents of colour alongside undyed yarns spun from alpaca and llama fibre. Taking into account the environmental context of ambient lightness and darkness, it addresses the forms of contrast the weavers used, based on principles of extension, saturation, complementarity and simultaneity. This study of Natividad Castro Challapa’s weaving career provides a rare opportunity to demonstrate how local concepts concerning the use of hues have undergone historical change with the arrival of global resources in an ethnographic context that otherwise provides the researcher with little documentary evidence. In presenting the written version of my paper given during the 2018 Textile Society of America meeting in Vancouver, first of all I wish to thank the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations owners for their blessing in welcoming me to their land. My theme explores colours in textiles and how light falling on the folds of cloth has the capacity to enhance or diminish them. More specifically, I wish to explore the powerful effects that can occur when hues interact with each other. Without light, the human eye cannot see such differences and the philosopher Francis Bacon remarked “All Colours will agree in the Darke.” In mythical Haida time before there was light, Raven, the transformer, stole the sun, where it had been kept in a box, and let it out to illuminate the world. The box belonged to a father who, living in the dark, wondered if the beauty of his daughter was as the fronds of hemlock seen against the rising sun or ugly but homely, like a sea slug. There is, of course, a paradox. In the absence of light, how did he know that, allegedly, the plants were beautiful and sea slugs repulsive in appearance? The symposium organisers invited participants to explore the interaction of what they called “the deep local” and global contacts. They defined the deep local as “knowledge, beliefs, 1 Francis Bacon, “Of unity in religion,” in Bacon’s essays and colours of good and evil (London: Macmillan and Co, 1892 [1597]), 8-13. 2 Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, The raven steals the light (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1984). doi 10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0063 resources, and practices that are profoundly anchored in particular communities and places”. In accepting this invitation, I offer a perspective on how weavers in Isluga, a highland community of northern Chile, bordering with the Plurinational State of Bolivia, articulate textile designs by setting up visual contrasts, bearing in mind that dyes and pigments are substances deeply implicated in cross-cultural contact situations. The context of my contribution is that light is an inconstant phenomenon yet vital in the life cycle of carbonbased organisms. For spinners and weavers in Isluga, working in the media of fleece – of llamas, alpacas and sheep, as well as of dyestuffs – lightness and darkness provide particular environments affecting the appearance of their loom products. Bacon’s observation that, in the absence of light, visual distinctions cannot be observed has an antithesis: in the light, colours can disagree. His use of the word “colour” in a metaphorical sense (“the colours of good and evil”) underlines its longstanding conceptual importance in the English language. People in Isluga are bilingual and they speak an Aymaraized form of Spanish in addition to Aymara itself, a language which does not possess a term for “colour”. Pointing out that speakers of a considerable number of languages in the world do not talk about colour because their languages do not possess relevant terms, Anna Wierzbicka discusses how Walpiri people in Australia instead talk about visual phenomena in reference to qualities such as conspicuousness, patterning or brilliance/shine. The Aymara language, then, is not unusual in having to borrow a term for “colour” from Spanish, and for using the term “blood” (wila) for what, in English and Spanish, has a specialized term for “red” or “rojo” as a specific hue. Nevertheless, red has particularly potent associations. People speak of a former mythical world age of redness, dimly illuminated by the light of the moon, which came to an end with the arrival of the sun. The redness – described as the colour of a mass of boiling red-pigmented quinua seeds – refracted through the white light of daylight, produced a full range of hues in all their distinctiveness. Self-evidently, I am making use of English to write this article. Here I tend to favour the term “hue” over that of “colour”. This distinction does not translate easily into Aymara. “Hue” derives from the Old English hīw, hēow (“form,” “appearance,” or “aspect”) and is related to the Swedish hy (“skin,” “complexion”). According to the Oxford Dictionary, only in the mid nineteenth century did it acquire the meaning it now has referring to a specific colour quality, as in the redness or greenness of, say, a thread. One of the reasons for choosing the term is 3 “Theme,” The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global. Textile Society of America’s 16 Biennial Symposium, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 19-23 September 2018. https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/tsa_symposium/symposium-2018/ (accessed 24 January 2019). 4 Gabriela Siracusano, El poder de los colores. De lo material a lo simbólico en las prácticas culturales andinas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005); Elena Phipps, “Textile colors and colorants in the Andes,” in Gerhard Wolf, Joseph Connors and Louis Alexander Waldman (eds), Colors between two worlds. The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún (Florence, 2011), 256-280. 5 Under the dominant influence of Spanish, Aymara dictionaries sometimes list the term samiri or variants on its root form as an equivalent for “colour;” Manuel de Lucca, Diccionario práctico aymara-castellano, castellano-aymara (La Paz/Cochabamba: Los Amigos del Libro, 1987) at p.146. Literally, samiri means someone or something who/that blows (soplar in Spanish). It can conjure up mistiness or dissipate it; see Penelope Dransart, “The sounds and tastes of colours: hue and saturation in Isluga textiles,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Colloques, 07 juillet 2016. http://nuevomundo.revues.org/69188 6 Anna Wierzbicka, “Why there are no ‘colour universals’ in language and thought,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(2) (2008), 407-425. 7 Penelope Dransart, “Coloured knowledges: vision and the dissemination of knowledge in Isluga, northern Chile,” in Henry Stobart and Rosaleen Howard (eds), Knowledge and learning in the Andes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002a), 56-78, 61-62 and 74. 8 Oxford Dictionary https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hue (accessed 24 January 2019). doi 10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0063 that its etymology draws attention to chromatic appearances, which is a characteristic that Isluga weavers exploit in their textiles. In the context of Wierzbicka’s discussion, it can be noted that Isluga weavers organize a textile visually in stripes, using specific forms of dissimilarity, expressed as contrasts between light and dark, combined with contrasts of hue. It is intriguing that Wierzbicka links Walpiri disinterest in what English speakers might call “colour talk” to an “absence of any ‘colour practices’ such as dyeing.” Aymara speakers, in contrast, are inheritors of millennia-long traditions in exploiting the colours of camelid fleece as well as dyestuffs. Their vocabulary is rich in terms for specific colours of llama and alpaca fleece. Hence Isluga spinners and weavers are deeply committed to “colour practices.” Yet if they talk about these practices and the choices they make to create patterns, it is often in relation to sounds and tastes, rather than referring directly to colour as a generic concept. Natividad Castro Challapa’s career in weaving This article honours the work of Natividad Castro Challapa and other weavers of her generation. In particular, it focuses on how they set up visual contrasts through the use of hue in their textiles. She was born in the first decade of the twentieth century and passed away in 1989. I met her first in 1986, when I started to do fieldwork in Isluga, a highland community in the Comuna de Colchane in northern Chile. Isluga territory is divided into two moieties, called “upper” (Araxsaya) and “lower” or “inner” (Manqhasaya). During much of the twentieth century, young people tended to choose their marriage partners from within their own moiety. Mama Nati’s mother was from Caraguano and, after the death of her first husband, by the 1980s she was living with her second husband in Enquelga. Both these communities are in Arax Saya; they are located either side of a large area of moist pastures where herders watch over their llamas, alpacas, and sheep. The preference for endogamous marriages within one’s moiety of origin does not mean that people remained within its territorial limits. Mama Nati made frequent trips to the valleys west of Isluga with a caravan of llamas to trade with people there. She also wove textiles for them in exchange for agricultural products, such as peaches, which cannot be cultivated at high altitude. In Isluga, girls first learn to spin and, after the age of about eight years, they start to weave. In a conversation held in 1987, Mama Nati told me that she bega