Janet Catherine Berlo

Beyond Bricolage: Women and Aesthetic Strategies in Latin American Textiles

Historians of ethnographic art and anthropologists are currently redefining our relationships with other cultures and reexamining the often biased premises on which their disciplines have been built.1 In this ongoing dialogue about the nature of culture, the study of cloth has moved closer to center stage than ever before. Whereas previous generations of textile scholars focused on technology and taxonomy, a new generation sees textile arts as eloquent expressions of womens concerns with cultural tradition and transmutation, as well as a host of other topics.2 At last, cloth is recognized as fundamental to studies of gender, social identity, status, exchange, and modernization (Schneider 1987; Schneider and Weiner 1986; Weiner and Schneider 1989; Schevill, Berlo, and Dwyer1991). In the light of these new investigations, can postcolonial Latin American textiles still be considered prime examples of bricolage? Often constructed with more creativity than grace, they reveal a stratigraphy of influences: wool and wild cotton; acrylic and metallic yarns; indigo and aniline dyes, yard goods, rickrack, ribbon, and lace; gauze and polyester; indigenous brocade and machine stitch. As L?vi-Strauss defined it, inherent in bricolage is the notion of making do: the bricoleur works with a heterogeneous assortment of materials, based on the limited possibilities at hand. (S)he is a jack-of-all-trades rather than a scientist (see L?vi Strauss 1966: 16-29). It is increasingly apparent, however, that all of the cultural crosscurrents and overlays in the textile art of Latin America are not simply a passive response to five centuries of colonialism: they are deliberate and sometimes culturally subversive. They are the essence of an indigenous textile aesthetic.3 As a mode of self-presentation, textiles assert personal, ethnic, religious, and economic identities. Textiles are also eloquent historical texts, encoding change, appropriation, oppression, and endurance, as well as personal and cultural aesthetic visions. In the current scholarly dialogue about postcolonial modes of expression and representation textiles offer a provocative focus.4 Yet for indigenous Latin Americans?especially women?cloth has always been an alternative discourse. Only recently have we really begun to listen.