Andean weaving instruments for textile planning.pdf

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Denise Y. Arnold and Elvira Espejo
*
Andean weaving instruments for textile planning:
The
waraña
coloured thread-wrapped rods
and their pendant cords
Abstract:
Recent studies on the Andean knotted threads, called
khipu,
consider
their use not only as records of quantity, but also as more general recording and
documenting devices, with integral planning aspects. This possibility has been
explored in relation to
khipus
as finished artifacts and as composite objects un-
der construction. However, until now, studies of Andean textiles have tended to
restrict their analysis to the semiotically constituted construction of already com-
pleted artifacts, with less attention to their relation to this wider administrative
domain. Here we consider textiles as part of wider productive networks, in their
totalities and their constituent parts. We reconsider some archaeological and his-
torical weaving instruments, called
waraña
in Aymara, from this point of view,
using ethnographic analogies to suggest ways in which these instruments might
have been used in the past in these wider planning and administrative systems
overseeing textile production.
Keywords:
Weaving instruments, textiles,
waraña, khipu,
Qaqachaka, Bolivia,
Andes, pre-Columbian era - 21
st
century.
Resumen:
Estudios recientes sobre las cuerdas andinas anudadas, llamadas
khipu,
analizan su uso no solamente en tanto sistemas de contabilidad, sino tam-
bién como sistemas de registro y documentación, incluso con aspectos de plani-
ficación. Esta hipótesis ha sido trabajada en relación con
khipus
entendidos como
objetos acabados y como objetos compuestos no acabados. En todo caso, hasta
*
Denise Y. Arnold (PhD 1988, University College London), an Anglo-Bolivian anthropologist who
specializes in Andean studies, has been Leverhulme Research Fellow and ERSC Senior Research
Fellow. She is currently Research Professor at Birkbeck, University of London, and named re-
searcher in the AHRC-funded project “Weaving communities of practice”, and Director of the
Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara, in Bolivia.
Elvira Espejo, born in ayllu Qaqachaka (Abaroa province, Oruro, Bolivia), is a painter, weaver,
poet, singer and storyteller. Her first book of oral tradition was a finalist in the Indigenous Litera-
tures Competition in the Casa de las Américas, Cuba, and published by Unicef (1994). In 2007, she
received a prize for her first volume of poetry in the Fourth World Festival of Poetry, in Venezuela.
A graduate of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in La Paz, in 2010 she represented Bolivia
with an installation in the international exhibition “Principio Potosí” in Spain, Germany, and Bo-
livia. Her DVD of Andean songs with Álvaro Montenegro, “Cantos a la casa/Utan kirki”, was
mentioned in the recent competition Disco-Cuba.
INDIANA 29 (2012): 173-200
174
Denise Y. Arnold and Elvira Espejo
ahora, los estudios de los textiles andinos han centrado su análisis en la construc-
ción semiótica de objetos ya completados, y han prestado menos atención a su
relación con el más amplio sistema administrativo. Aquí analizamos los textiles
como parte de más amplias redes productivas, teniendo en cuenta tanto su totali-
dad como sus partes constituyentes. Desde esta perspectiva sometemos a un nuevo
examen algunos instrumentos de tejido arqueológicos e históricos, llamados en
aymara
waraña,
usando analogías etnográficas para indicar la manera como estos
instrumentos podrán haber sido usados en el pasado en estos sistemas más amplios
de planificación y administración en la producción de textiles.
Palabras clave:
Instrumentos de tejido, textiles,
waraña, khipu,
Qaqachaka, Bo-
livia, Andes, época precolombina - siglo
xxi
.
Recent studies on the Andean knotted threads, called
khipu,
consider their use not
only as records of quantity, but also as more general recording and documenting
devices, with integral planning possibilities (Urton 2003, Salomon 2004, Urton &
Brezine 2007). This planning function has been explored in relation to
khipus
as
finished artifacts and as complex objects under construction (Conklin 2002). In com-
parison, studies of Andean textiles have tended to restrict their analysis to the semi-
otically constituted construction of already completed artifacts, with less attention to
their relation to or function within this wider administrative domain.
In particular, the exploration of textiles as forms of “text”, influenced by the
wide interest in semiotics in the 1970s (Cereceda 1978), while raising interesting
theoretical issues, has obscured the nature of textiles as composite objects. In prac-
tice, the diverse components of textiles often derive from quite different sources in
complex systems of production, managed by diverse populations participating in a
region-wide community of practice. In this operative chain, distinct natural resources
(plants, ore, fleece) are converted to raw materials (dyes, mineral mordents, thread)
that undergo a series of transformations (in the case of thread: spinning, plying,
dyeing) before textile elaboration (warping up, weaving and finishing) even begins
(Arnold & Espejo 2011).
In this paper,
1
we view textiles on a par with
khipus
as part of these wider produc-
tive and reproductive processes, in their totalities and constituent parts. Our interest
is in how the different elements in textile design are assembled in phases, modified,
restructured and reused with new functional and indexical associations, or indeed
1
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/
G012180/1). We thank R. Julio Ruíz, Director, Casa de la Moneda Museum, Potosí (Bolivia), for
permission to refer to objects in the collection.
Andean weaving instruments for textile planning
175
dismantled and recycled in new sequences (managed by archaeologists or museum
curators), once their original entanglement with a human life history is over. Build-
ing on studies of the complex relations between people and things (Appadurai 1986,
Dobres 2000, Descola 2002, Latour 2007), we examine how many interactions in
the social life trajectories of textiles as artifacts are planned in their making, while
continuing to play an integral part of the biography of textiles as finished objects.
1. Textiles and weaving instruments as part of wider administrative systems
Existing studies to date on textiles as forms of document, record, or plan, make little
reference to the wider productive systems of which their composite elements formed
a part. This is a serious omission, considering that textiles were as much a part of
Andean economic systems as agriculture or herding, constituting a vital resource in
the flow of tribute from peripheries to centres of power, possibly from the Late Inter-
mediate Period onward. It has been argued that Late Horizon Inka tributary systems
simply built on administrative systems already well-established to deal with these
flows of goods (Day 1978: 191). And we know that Inka administrative structures
were used well into the colonial period (Julien 2000). These complex state-adminis-
tered phases of textile production were planned, documented and recorded. In some
cases textiles seem to have been planned on knotted
khipus
(Ascher & Ascher 1997:
122). In others, specific instruments for planning textile production formed part of a
wider repertory of secondary communication media with similar semiotic functions
(Brokaw 2010: 6-7). We argue elsewhere that some of this planning information
is embedded in the nature of weavings themselves (Arnold 2012). This system of
knowledge continued into the colonial period, as Sophie Desrosiers shows in her
interpretation of an appendix to Martín de Murúa’s
Historia del origen y genealogía
real de los Reyes Incas
(1946) as a list of warp counts for making a Coya’s belt in
double cloth (Desrosiers 1986).
Another aspect of textiles that needs further study is their relationship to wider
technological systems. In her work on Andean technological systems, Lechtman
(1983: 246) argues that, unlike the hardware-directed technology of the West, these
systems were complex, region-wide, and directed towards the management of natural
resources and the social units of production. If weaving instruments were embedded
within such systems, and regional weaving hardware technologies mediated between
natural and human resources in the way that Lechtman describes, then this would
generate certain kinds of networks of knowledge, access and material exchange at
both levels that we could examine. The dynamic nature of these interacting systems
would also be a measure of changing social interactions over time.
176
Denise Y. Arnold and Elvira Espejo
Our understanding of this mediating role of technology, with reference to textile
production and weaving instruments, also draws on Nelson Goodman’s observation
(1976), examined by Frank Salomon with reference to
khipu
design in his book
The
Cord Keepers
(2004), that in order to understand fully the phenomenon documented,
you should take into account not only the formal properties of the medium (or sign)
but also the formal properties of the cultural scheme, as the set of referents (Salomon
2004: 32). The documentary uses of
khipus
have been studied much more than those
of textiles. However, if we begin to study textiles from this point of view, we can
sense this articulation between the formal properties of textiles as documentary sup-
ports, and the formal properties of the cultural schemes of which any one textile, as
artifact, forms a part. We also have the additional challenge of understanding how
the formal properties of weaving instruments (in their composition, units, sections,
layouts) articulate with those of textiles, and how both sets of properties are articu-
lated with the cultural schemes of textile planning, production and distribution.
We reconsider some archaeological and historical weaving instruments from
this point of view, using ethnographic sources to suggest ways in which these
instruments were used in these wider planning and administrative systems. We focus
on the highland regions of Northern Potosí and Southern Oruro in contemporary
Bolivia, particularly the Aymara-speaking ayllu of Qaqachaka (Abaroa province,
Oruro department), once part of the historical federations of Charkas-Qharaqhara
and Killakas-Asanaqi, where these instruments have been used until recent times
(Arnold 1993, Arnold & Espejo 2011). See Figure 1. We examine primarily the
application of these instruments to warp-faced cloth, as this is the most complex
cloth in the Andes, and possibly the world.
A number of weaving instruments were used in these wider productive systems.
We examine just one kind, the
waraña,
first locating their use in an ethnographic
setting, where social memories still record their use within regional networks of
textile production. Then we consider some archaeological examples of what seem to
be similar instruments. We conclude with some general remarks about the regional
dynamics of technological change.
Andean weaving instruments for textile planning
177
Figure 1.
The region of Qaqachaka in Southern Oruro, Bolivia.
2. The
waraña
in ethnographic settings
Waraña
is the Aymara verb for tipping something liquid, and by analogy copying
something and transforming it into a similar form.
Waraqaña
refers to copying
something down on paper, such as transcribing a historical document into a newer
version, when the original is referred to as the “mother” (tayka)
document and the
copy as its “baby” (wawa)
(Arnold & Yapita 2006: 172).
Waraqaña
as a verb also
means copying something woven;
waraña
as a noun is the physical model used to
make the copy. Its Quechua equivalent is
away yupana:
“the counting of textiles”.

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