International Conference: Textiles, Techne and Power in the Andes

This conference arises from the AHRC-funded project Weaving communities of practice. Textiles, culture and identity in the Andes, based at CILAVS in collaboration with the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara (ILCA) in La Paz, Bolivia.

The Conference aims to expand the scope of the ideas developed during the project, by sharing ideas with more than 30 leading international experts in the field, including textile scholars and curators from a variety of overseas and UK museums. This conference seeks to generate an Andean contribution to current debates on history, materiality and technology. Through specific thematic approaches, the conference will explore the ways woven products served as records of technological knowledge, and socio-cultural and productive relations. Textiles are examined here as historical and contemporary media where power relations - political, class or gender relations - are expressed and played out, whether in dress or other hierarchies of social categories. The conference also explores textiles as expressions of world-view and the sacred, as well as a part of a regional and a world heritage.

Keynote speakers

• Ann H. Peters (Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, USA)
• Tom Zuidema (Anthropology, University of Illinois, USA)