"Mesoamerican Cultures and their Histories: Spotlight on Oaxaca!"
WEEK 3 (from the online syllabus)
http://blogs.uoregon.edu/mesoinstitute/about/syllabus-2/
Topics:
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Textiles as Cultural Expression for Women: Text, Subtext, Context, and Intertextuality
Ceramics as Cultural Transmission: Then and Now (also links to Week 1)
Outside the Museums and Galleries: Street Art as the Search for a Voice
Sister Schools: Connecting Indigenous Oaxacan Youth with U.S. School Groups
Guelaguetza Dance Festival as Cultural Preservation (and Stereotyping?)
Humanities Questions:
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Historically, literacy has been restricted to a small elite in indigenous communities,
and even today, with federal support for education through the sixth grade,
indigenous boys rarely attend school for more than a few years and girls are even
less likely to attend. Given that, how have Mesoamericans preserved and
disseminated cultural knowledge through other means, such as the arts?
What are the “folk arts” and how are they distinguished from the “fine arts”?
Is there an iconography for “reading” these forms (something akin to the iconography
of reading manuscripts)?
How have women and men embedded or encoded meaning in the textiles they
weave?
How do the natural environment, religious beliefs, or ways of thinking about gender
find representation in the arts of indigenous cultures?
How has pottery become a hallmark of culture in certain communities? On the other
hand, how are potters (or weavers, etc.) responding to tourism and market
influences, innovating on ancient traditions while also retaining a unique identity?
How has photography played a role in recording culture, whether to preserve its
history or to cast it through a frame that “others” the people on the opposite side of
the lens? (This latter question runs over into the fourth week, as well.)
Questions for the Readings:
The readings for this week are divided between textiles, ceramics, and urban
/protest/street art, the three units that Professor Lynn Stephen has chosen.
1) Stephen, Chapter 1: Notice the emphasis on unity and community but also the
hierarchy/inequality inherent in the quotes at the beginning. How do these attitudes
(and more that arise in Stephen’s work) compare with what Terraciano found in colonial
Oaxacan indigenous communities with regard to the big house and reciprocal labor?
2) Stephen’s research on textiles has as its focus the town of Teotitlán del Valle, which
we will visit. This is a Zapotec town, and Stephen speaks about the “commoditization of
Zapotec ethnicity.” What are the pros and cons of textile production such as this for a
global market in terms of indigenous cultural survival (and/or indigenous cultural
reformulation)? (Note Stephen’s explorations of “culture,” “ethnicity,” “authenticity,” and
“resistance” within a “hegemonic” context.)
3) Stephen, Chapter 2: Take a look at the meaning of “guelaguetza” at the local level.
4) Stephen, Chapter 6: What more do we learn in this chapter about weaving as a type
of “heritage” that is affected by the economics and politics of promoting tourism and
indigeneity? Consider, too, discussions of “folk art” and whether it actually has preHispanic roots, (sometimes) Spanish colonial ones, or even more recent (e.g. alebrijes).
Note the excitement with which women of Teotitlán speak about innovation in their
textile designs. Note also the intentional replication of historic designs from friezes/frets
in Mitla, the use of all natural dyes, and even Navajo designs that were marketed as
indigenous/traditional.
5) How does the museum (“our house”) in Teotitlán promote the town’s cultural heritage
in a more locally-managed and pride-building way, drawing from archaeology and
codices (distinct from the pressures of the global marketplace that we have just
witnessed)? A study of this type of shaping of memory, which seems widely embraced
by the community, would be an interesting project.
6) Stephen, Chapter 7: Here we learn about how women’s co-ops have helped open
spaces for marginalized women weavers. We may be able to visit a women’s co-op, if
time allows, or you can return on your own time if this is of interest to you.
7) Eli Bartra, “Engendering Clay,” helps us transition from studying the production of
textiles within indigenous communities of the modern day to the production of ceramics,
where we can see again the disconnect between tourist-collectors and producers, the
marginalization of women, and another example of how a town found it profitable to reconnect with “pre-Columbian” pottery designs after not producing pottery for 600 years!
8) The Wasserspring and Ragan introduction broadens our education about the
production of ceramics for the international tourist trade, this time referring to
indigenous communities in Oaxaca that would be easy for you to visit. Here we learn
that “Oaxacan pottery is essentially a woman’s art,” more than 60% of older Oaxacan
women are illiterate, 80% are said to be economically “inactive” (really, it is often
hidden and devalued labor), and life expectancy in the state of Oaxaca is the lowest in
the Mexican nation. The sale of pottery in Ocotlan, Coyotepec, and Atzompa can make a
huge difference in very real lives, and yet pottery garners the lowest profits of all the
folk arts.
9) Please note: the ceramics town we are visiting, San Marcos Tlapazola, well off the
beaten path, is not primarily producing for tourism. The women there are making
comales, cooking griddles, for other indigenous women, much as they have done for
probably more than a thousand years. But they are also now making figurines to sell to
tourists in the markets of Oaxaca.
10) We have very little to assign at this point about street/urban/protest art, but we do
hope you will explore on your own and help us develop this unit. One thing to keep in
mind is the teachers’ movement in 2006 and the boost this gave to street art, and how
things have evolved since then, toward more studio/museum work, and what this means
for the stylistics, content, and composition of the artist cadre (considering class, race,
and gender, for instance).