Abstract
Anthropological and ethnographic scholarship examining textiles in Mesoamerica has traditionally focused on gender, cultural continuity, space/place, its semiotics, and its reproduction of the universe. Literary studies approaches interpret this corpus as another form of literacy, discourse, and ontologies. Recently in Indigenous movements, weaving and textiles have acquired a more politicized edge. In 2019, the question of textiles inspired a flurry of discussions around intellectual property, and, especially, copyrights. This article examines the epistemological divides between authorship and weaving, commons and community, temporality and ancestors and how decolonizing the tenets of intellectual property law may help protect indigenous weavings.
Highlights
Anthropological and ethnographic scholarship examining textiles in Mesoamerica has traditionally focused on gender, cultural continuity, space/place, its semiotics, and its reproduction of the universe
The designer leading the iconic fashion house in New York sourced some of its fabric motifs from indigenous Mexican weaving patterns
The missive demanded a public explanation for their use of “patterns that are part of the cosmovision of peoples of specific regions in Mexico”, asking PUIG, the Spanish corporation that owns the brand to “clarify whether the communities that carry these garments will benefit from the sales proceeds of this collection”
Summary
Trademark, and patents all fall under intellectual property law. intellectual property concerns in Europe originated in the fifteenth century, it is the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, finalized in l886, which established the main provisions nation-states adhere to in their legislation. Writer, and designer Estercilia Simanca Pushaina stressed in our recent telephone conversation that copyrights protect those who plagiarize — not the indigenous communities that produce textiles even when sui generis laws are in place.16 She underscored that globalization and the economic needs by women compound the problems.. Like Ruperta Vásquez’s work, Maya Cu’s poems make clear that both tradition and novelty come together on the page and on textiles These textual productions are both individual and collective, similar to the weavings of molas in the Panamanian context that Guna scholar Sue Haglund writes, “capture a piece of history and a moment in time, passing them down from one generation to another, [engaging] an evolutionary movement that is reciprocal between both the artist and the image itself [. Contemporary indigenous poets engage in an epistemological and linguistic play by destabilizing the formal association of author/authority and text/textile, affirming weavers as producers of knowledge (Chacón 2006, 2007a)
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