Continuous Threads: Prestige and Identity in Latin America

Continuous Threads: Prestige and Identity in Latin America 

I went the Minnesota Institute of Arts to exhibition “Continuous Threads: Prestige and Identity in Latin America” which offer the history of Latin American woven textiles. On that day, because the weather was beautiful, so there was no problem to drive there.

                                   

What a nice sunshine !

         

This is the entrance of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts !

When I got into the building, the first thing that I saw was information desk. I got a guide map and before I saw the exhibition, I had to leave my backpack.

This is information desk.

This is where I left my back pack.

When I got into the exhibition, I was surprised because it looked different from what I expected. There were so many different kinds of cultural exhibitions from different countries such as China, Japan, Latin and so on. I wanted to watch everything in there but I just went to Latin section since I was running out of time. When I arrived at the section of "Continuous Threads: Prestige and Identity in Latin America", I was excited to see and little disappointed as well because the size of exhibition was smaller than other exhibitions. I think there were some messages from hosting this event. First message was to inform or introduce  Latin's special history of textiles to people who came to watch this event. There may be many people who don't know anything about Latin as same as there may be many people who don't know anything about Korea which is really small country. So, this event offer a change to people for getting some knowledge about history about Latin. Second message was to allow people to compare this event to their own culture. Each country has different culture, so we need to study cultural differences to communicate each other. 

There were many different textiles, but I thought the purpose of these textiles were to make cloths before I read all explanation in each textiles. Obviously, clothing or warming were one of the most important purposes of textiles, but Latin also communicated with their special textiles. Different style of textiles represent different age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, and social rank status. 

For gender, there were some special textiles that both man and women wore, but most textiles for men were different from textiles for women. Basically, they identified their gender with different textiles. I think many different countries have different clothing between men and women, but gender roles can be different. For example, men lead their society in some culture such as history of Korea, but there are equal roles between men and women in some culture. At this point, I got a question about Latin culture that "Were there different gender roles between men and women?" 

Left : This was traditional everyday dress, traje, which is reserved for men. As they wore it, they could identify themselves as a member of the cofradia(religious group). Younger men had smaller size for reflecting their youth and inexperience

Right : This was traditional every for women. This dress had three parts, skirt (corte), sash (faja) and blouse (huipil).

This picture shows a group of religious man's group in Latin.

Different textiles represent not only gender, age but also their social rank status, and economic status. People from other countries can perceive different textiles in Latin that these are just different colors, styles, or materials. However, different textiles actually reflect different rank status and wealth for some reasons. First, some textiles took so long time to create. Second, several other professionals were required for creating textiles. Finally, some textiles were made of special animal which was hard to get. In this point, I tried to integrate what I saw with contexts from my intercultural communication class. First, textiles were their cultural value which was one of the way to communicate with each other. Second, I also thought that their textile culture had a collectivism rather than individualism because textiles were not only for individual style of fashion but also reflecting their social status which requires agreement in society. Lastly, Latin culture was a large power distance cultures because people accepted to different rank status by dressing different textiles. 
This event made me have a question about Latin culture that "were high rank people in Latin able to notice their prestige and privileges?" Obviously, there were different privileges between people or power because it was a rank society that people accepted inequalities. In the video which I watched in the class "The Color of Fear", different racial people who live in the U.S. or were born in the U.S. said that "being a white is a privilege" and American said that "American doesn't know and doesn't even have to think what are their advantages to being whites" So, privilege is hard to know. 

This is one of the textiles which represent great prestige and high rank status.

This image is a ceramic which has clues about the textile tradition. This ceramic is representing an elite couple. They are wearing luxurious patterned garments.







Comparing Latin history of textile to my culture, even though style of dressing and communicating with textiles can be different, I think there are some similarities. First of all, Korea was strong masculine culture in the past. I don't know if Latin was masculine or feminine culture but when I considered that there were different rank status and different dressing between women and men, I assumed that Latin was masculine culture. In the past, Korea had great inequality and different gender roles between men and women. For example, women had limit for getting education and they couldn't be high rank even though they were smart. Second, Korea was large power distance society and had collectivism because it was rank society. People who were high rank expressed their rank status by wearing expensive cloth or ornamentation. People in Korea accepted their inequality.