Lace Makers Research Articles

To catch the uncatchable/to capture the intangible. Reflections on selected problems of safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Example of the Koniaków lace making skills

The 2003 UNESCO Convection for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage has given impetus to intensive work on the disappearance of cultural specificity in many countries. As a result of taking safeguarding measures taken for expressions of intangible cultural heritage, the necessity to redefine existing practices in this matter has also shown up. The text refers to reflection on selected problems of documentation and popularisation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with particular regard to the example of the Koniaków lace making skills. This handicraft, despite the changing reality, has been an uninterrupted manifestation of the region's tradition for more than 100 years. Local lace makers adapt their forms to new emerging needs. The educational or commercial activity concentrated around lace makes these skills an important bonding element for the local community. The lively activity of dissemination and promotion of the Koniaków lace brought an entry to UNESCO's National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2017.

The Role of Stakeholders in Practicing Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Example of the Koniaków Lace

This article analyzes activities focused on cultural heritage resources, undertaken from a local position. The theoretical considerations refer to the example of the Koniaków lace. This handicraft, despite the changing reality, for more than 100 years has continuously been a manifestation of the region’s tradition. Local lace makers adapt their forms to new emerging needs. The educational or commercial activity concentrated around the lace makes this skill an important bonding element for the local community. The lively activity of dissemination and promotion of the Koniaków lace resulted in an entry to UNESCO’s National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2017. The Koniaków lace also became one of the elements representing the Silesian region at the 2022 EXPO in Dubai. These events are the result of cultural policies implemented at the level of the institution and the result of the activity of the local community, influencing and shaping the frequently emotional relationships within it. The purpose of this article is to present practices using Koniaków lace, which are related to such issues as cultural policy, heritage management, or community empowerment.

Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity

Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity

Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity, Anna Sznajder (2020)

Abstract Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity, Anna Sznajder (2020) London: Lexington Books, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-49858-431-9, £75.00

Tohtpits pole tohust pits / Birch Bark Lace is not Lace Made of Birch Bark

Birch bark lace is Estonian needle lace. Structurally it resembles needle lace as it is known elsewhere in Europe. It uses the same stitches and there are similarities in the material used in the embroidery. However, the technology employed is unique in certain remarkable respects – it has adapted to local needs and possibilities. Whereas traditionally contour thread was tightened onto a strong textile, or in earlier times also onto parchment, in Estonia a strip of birch bark was used as a base material instead. Birch bark has many advantages as a base material: it was always available on farms and cost nothing; also, it was easy to process into a suitable size. While European lace makers were forced to cover a light-coloured base material with a dark textile or paper, the lower surface of the birch bark used for making lace was naturally darker and as such provided a suitable background for the white thread. Birch bark also gave this type of lace its name – birch bark lace.Birch bark lace is characterised by a simple geometric pattern. The joining of various motifs is not used in the birch bark lace technique. To the best of our knowledge, birch bark lace was embroidered in one piece between contour threads. Of the various lace stitches, birch bark lace uses the buttonhole stitch and twisted buttonhole stitch. The pattern is formed from the holes left between tight buttonhole stitches. Birch bark lace net differs from other birch bark laces for its net-like material of paired buttonhole stitches that could be decorated with running stitch embroidery. Ornaments are characterised by geometrical motifs that can be stitched with either white or red thread.The birch bark lace technique is not particularly well known in Estonia. No distinctive surveys have been published, but birch bark lace has been comparatively discussed alongside other lace techniques used in Estonia or introduced with a brief overview in descriptions of how to make national costumes. Hence, neither the region where it was once used nor its uses are known. The problem is that Estonian language literature has never given accounts of systematic instructions on how to use the technique. Therefore, there are few experts who are familiar with the techniques of making birch bark lace and who can distinguish objects in this technique from other museum textiles. Birch bark lace may, depending on the stitches used, be visually similar to crochet lace or filet lace. For this reason, it is possible that our museums hold more objects decorated with birch bark lace than we are currently aware. This article provides an overview of the objects decorated with birch bark lace identified in the collections of the Estonian National Museum and describes three birch bark lace techniques.

Iz istorii razvitiya kruzhevnogo promysla chernozemnogo yuga Rossii (2-ya polovina XIX – nachalo XX v.)

The author studies the specifics of lace in the territory of the South Black Earth Russia in the 19th - early 20th centuries. The author has analyzed the history of lace crafts in the Yelets and Mtsensk districts of the Orlovsk province, and in the Zadonsk district of the Voronezh province. Based on archive materials the article determines such features of lace crafts development as the uniqueness of lace; the dependence of the growth of the influence of buyers on the pace of industry development; presence of the qualitative indicators of the manufacturing process inversely proportional to the quantitative; expanding the range of manufactured lace; the expansion of the sales area of lace; activation of the attention of individuals and public institutions to revive the specificity and individuality of local products lace. It was concluded that the impact of identified features on the pace of development of the lace industry in the South Black Earth Russia and on the development of Russian business in general. Analyzing the history of lace crafts, the author describes the conditions of industrial activity lace, which showed the formation of the capitalist forms of lace makers' work. The features of the capitalist forms of labour which characterized crafts activity are pointed out. The peculiarities of lace sales organization in local and distant markets are studied. In addition to interprovince and interdistrict markets the author investigates the material on exporting goods abroad. The main reasons for the expansion of sales geography determine the change in product mix. The author raises the issue related to the history of the preservation of unique lace made following the traditions of Russian folk art of their ancestors. The problem consisted in the fact that the buyers were not interested in the originality and identity of the goods. As a result, this led to the reduction of the original performance by increasing the amount of work on the standard models.

Traditional knowledge and processes of innovation and creativity: Brazilian pottery and bobbin lace makers

Using a qualitative approach, this article sets out to clarify how innovation and creativity are changing the customs in two traditional Brazilian communities: the pottery makers of Goiabeiras, of the city of Vitoria, Espirito Santo, and the bobbin lace makers in Florianopolis, Santa Catarina. Primary data from observation and semistructured interviews with pottery makers, lace makers and agents from public institutions responsible for the projects in the communities were used. Secondary data sources, derived from digital documentary analysis (websites) were also used. In order to analyze the data, the research uses methodological triangulation with two categories: tradition (maintenance) and resources and innovation (its discourse elements). The study shows that to remain in their communities, these people use the knowledge of their ancestors to create sustainable livelihood strategies and income generation.

“Fiddling with Threads”: Craft-based Textile Activities and Positive Well-being

Craft-based textile activities such as knitting, crochet, tatting, and lace making have provided challenges, physical and mental stimulation, creative outlets, and social interaction for generations. The role of craft and the relationship between craft and maker vary across cultures, geographic groups, and gender. However, a common thread is that craft practitioners are often emotionally invested in these activities and many continue to make through all stages of life and into old age. Given the ageing of the global population, activities that can be carried out by people with reduced mobility and increasing physical or mental limitations as a result of ageing, and which can promote healthy ageing and positive well-being, are now becoming increasingly important. Existing research has established a link between creativity and health and well-being. But, it is only recently that multidisciplinary research involving arts and crafts, social science, and medical and health scholars and practitioners has begun to show the importance of activities, such as craft textiles, for positive well-being. The relationship between craft activities, creative engagement, mental and physical stimulation, social interaction, self-esteem, and, therefore, positive well-being has been insufficiently explored. This article reports findings of a study of lace makers at the Lace Study Centre at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, that examined how craft activities contribute to well-being in a variety of ways. This research, which focused on female practitioners, found that craft-based textile activities and associated social practices provide insights into the individual and societal importance of “everyday creativity” for promoting positive well-being and general good health.

Design Project for the Resignification of Peniche's Bobbin Lace

Peniche's bobbin lace has been a victim of the lack of demand for the product and the decrease of artisans who wish to manufacture it. The Bobbin lace is primarily generated on a small scale and most of the times for personal consumption. Apart from a few occasional orders these are the reasons that still maintain the artisanal production of bobbin lace. Identifying the problem of discontinuity of traditions and the lack of framing of these with contemporaneity arises combined with the remoteness of younger generations. In what design can it contribute to change this mercantile perspective?Getting the lace makers motivated for the production of different types of bobbin lace, using new materials, preserving at the same time the cultural heritage, it will be, in our opinion, one of the opportunities to reverse its decline status. We also believe on developing contemporary products to appeal the younger consumers, we’ll be capable of doing a direct association with bobbin lace. Therefore, the bobbin lace could be associated to other components outside the textile context by creating objects with materials like iron, plastic or rubber, not merely ornamental, but useful to the eyes of the final consumer. This resignification of the bobbin lace appeals to another meaning, more contemporary than the usual napron

Desenvolvimento Participativo de um Suporte para Almofada das Rendeiras de Bilro do Município de Saubara, Bahia

The solidarity economy's has emerged as alternative source of employment and income, which in essence there are values of cooperation, democracy and solidarity. In solidarity economy's concern with social inclusion that generates economic benefits and improved health and work. Based on that thought there was the ergonomic analysis of work (EAW) of bobbin lace makers of the Association of Artisans Saubara, a city in Reconcavo Baiano. The results of EAW for bobbin lace makers proved inadequate postural conditions during the render, an aspect that can damage the spine and upper limbs. From the analysis of these data was proposed to create a support for the cushions, where rents are made by the method of participatory design. It is hoped that this support can improve quality of life of bobbin lace makers of Saubara, Bahia and that this initiative can be replicated by the lace makers in other regions of Brazil.

David Hunt . Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2008. Pp. x, 272. Cloth $80.00, paper $28.95.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Department of Defense commissioned the RAND Corporation to interview political prisoners of the South Vietnamese government (GVN), defectors from the North Vietnamese army, and defectors from the National Liberation Front (NLF). Between 1964 and 1968, over 2,000 Vietnamese were interviewed. David Hunt has worked on the the “DT Series,” which consists of interviews of 285 people from the Mekong delta province of Dinh Tuong. As he sets out to uncover the daily realities of village life during the Vietnam War, Hunt rejects the impression that peasants simply reproduced the rhetoric of political elites. He is attentive, instead, to the intellectual autonomy of rural Vietnamese. Hunt presents his research in a broadly chronological manner, with the material on the Tet Offensive of 1968 in the last chapter, but the book is structured by themes rather than events. For example, in chapter two, “An Itinerant Peasantry,” Hunt chronicles how frequently rural Vietnamese traveled back and forth between the hamlets and villages of Dinh Tuong and the provincial capital of My Tho. Some even went regularly to Saigon. This itinerancy, Hunt argues, played a critical role in the revolution because it allowed rural Vietnamese, including fruit sellers, brick layers, lace makers, carpenters, and others, to appreciate their collective strength. In chapter ten, “The Fate of the Liberated Zone,” Hunt describes the tension between veterans of the Resistance War, who were accustomed to clear boundaries between Viet Minh areas and those controlled by the French, and the new generation of village activists forced to contend with more complicated conditions. “Rather than living in separate domains,” Hunt observes, “GVN and NLF adherents shared the same space and lived so closely intertwined that they were generally able to see and hear each other” (p. 174). In other chapters he examines the peasant revolt of 1959–1960, contested unities, generational conflicts, feminism, the escalation of violence, and the flight of rural Vietnamese from the countryside to urban settings.

On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization of Production

This article is both a review of, and an intervention in, the literature on gender and the globalization of production. Via a discussion of six key texts analyzing export-oriented manufacturing, ranging from Maria Mies's Lace Makers of Narsapur to Melissa Wright's Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, I show that, over time, the focus has shifted from an emphasis on the feminization of manufacturing as a defining feature of globalization to an appreciation of the diverse and contingent ways in which gender matters for offshore production. While this recent scholarship highlights variability in gendered labor regimes at the global-local nexus, I argue that it is also critically important to ask what is similar about the many locations on the global assembly line that have been studied. Specifically, we must look to how gender, as a set of context-specific meanings and practices, works within the macrostructure of the global economy and its systemic logic of capital accumulation. In other words, while capitalism does not determine the concrete modalities of gender that exist in a given locale, it is essential for explaining the gendered dimension of transnational production as a patterned regularity of contemporary globalization.

Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (review)

Reviewed by: Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic Douglas Mao Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Elizabeth Outka. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 214. $45.00 (cloth). Of the many tensions animating the creature we call modernism, one of the most discussed has been the pull between an embrace of commodification on the one hand and various rhetorics of aesthetic autonomy on the other. Another has been that between embrace of the modern and anxious nostalgia—between the look forward and the look back. In Consuming Traditions, Elizabeth Outka examines the intersection of these two antinomies by focusing on what she calls "the commodified authentic," a development of the later nineteenth century in which "[n]ew objects and places were packaged and sold as mini-representations of supposedly noncommercial values: nostalgic evocations of an English rural past; appeals to an original, genuine article; and images of a purified aesthetic free from any taint of the mass market" (4). As Outka cannily argues, the appeal of these things lay not in some achieved projection of impossible age and rarity, but in their paradoxical uniting of "noncommercial aura" with availability to acquisition. Indeed because "these new hybrids were accessible, controllable, and … tantalizingly modern," there were even senses in which they could seem "better than the original" they incompletely simulated (4). Where was the commodified authentic to be found? Outka devotes a good deal of her study to the model towns of Bournville, Port Sunlight, and Letchworth (chapter 2) and to Selfridges department store in London (chapter 4). Brainchild of the chocolate baron George Cadbury, Bournville offered company workers and other residents a way of life that boasted the best of modern invention while harking back architecturally, and in certain features of its social organization, to an old village life free from the unhealth and alienation characteristic of industrialized Britain. But Bournville is compelling to Outka for more than its interplay of past and present; also of interest is how the town's homey authenticity was used to market Cadbury products. In ads for its cocoa, for example, Cadbury seemed to be marketing a lifestyle—grounded in its celebrated model town's purity, comfort, and evident sustenance of tradition—as much as a commodity. Port Sunlight, conceived by William Lever, similarly helped to sell Lever Soaps. And although Letchworth, a consciously utopian project inspired by Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898, 1902), was not tethered to a maker of mass produced goods, it did have to be marketed to potential residents. As Outka shows, its promoters sought frankly to wed the time-honored excellences of sunshine and fresh air to the newer attractions of material convenience and sheer innovation: as one pamphlet had it, Letchworth was "the first completely new town in England" (quoted 55). Like the model towns, Selfridges (which opened in 1909) was propelled by the assumption that one virtue of the past lay in its relative freedom from strident commercialism. Not only did Gordon Selfridge's inventive temple of commerce mix cutting-edge floor plans and fenestration with classical iconography and the durability of old stone; it was marketed as something more—or elegantly less—than a place where goods were sold. Prices were, on the whole, more discreetly indicated than at other houses, and customers ("or guests, as Selfridges called them" [103]) were supplied with reception rooms, a library, free use of pen and paper, and other amenities, the better to make the place seem a domestic sanctuary or kindly village amid the urban bustle. Meanwhile, Selfridges' merchandise was represented as evading the taint of mass production—annual in-store exhibitions of "Old-time Industry" showed Turkish rugmakers, "Flemish lace makers in traditional costumes," and others at work on their crafts—even as the complete availability of the merchandise was reiterated (112). An ad from the year of its opening, [End Page 245] for instance, explained that "Selfridges' will sell nearly everything that any man, woman, or child may require or desire from the day of birth and throughout life" (120). The commodified authentic proffered by Bournville and Selfridges is important not least, Outka argues, because a version...

“Traditional—with Contemporary Form”: Craft and Discourses of Modernity in Slovakia Today

Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted among lace makers in contemporary Central Slovakia, this paper compares and contrasts the lived experience of women engaged in craft production with scholarly discourses on the impact of postwar modernization on craft. Two existing interpretative frameworks are examined using this method: Deema Kaneff's (2004) concept of the “re-contextualization” of peasant traditions into reified folklore by socialist institutions; and the ethnological approach to modernization as the cause of fragmentation of local traditions and practices. While craft is generally described as modernity's traditional “other,” this study seeks to understand the manner in which lace makers have incorporated their understanding and experience of modernity and modernization into their practice, products and (professional) identity. Thus, it seeks to critique and develop scholarly approaches to contemporary crafts using ethnographic material gained from the world they are meant to describe.

European Women and Preindustrial Craft ed. by Daryl M. Hafter

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 249 here cannot be represented as a well-integrated whole” (p. 6). In­ deed, they are not; they are a hodge-podge of thoughts that fail to advance knowledge of humankind’s achievements very far. Fre­ quently based on misinformed views of history, the essays are, in fact, often misleading. Mansel G. Blackford Dr. Blackford teaches business history at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Rise ofModem Business in Great Britain, the United States andJapan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988) and eight other books. European Women and Preindustrial Craft. Edited by Daryl M. Hafter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. xv+204; illustra­ tions, figures, tables, notes, index. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Revisiting the problem ofwomen’s work and industrialization, this collection of ten monographic essays emphasizes continuities and their meanings, but does not neglect change. Daryl Hafter provides a useful introduction to place the studies in their historiographic context, and notes five common themes on the relation of technol­ ogy and society that motivate their authors. These are: the relation­ ship of women and gender to technical skill; the extent of markets for women’s products; the moment and conditions in which the no­ tion emerged that women are less able than men in technical mat­ ters; the economic and social meaning of domestic craftwork for entrepreneurs, women workers; the ways and means by which female work was socially embedded. Despite the generalizing efforts of the editor, the chapters vary both in the weight they give to the themes mentioned and in their approach. Although many of these essays are excellent and persua­ sive in their individual arguments, together they do not form a cohe­ sive whole. The chief messages I detect in the first section of the collection, titled “Handicraft and Invention in the Eighteenth Century,” are that women were sometimes skilled workers in preindustrial manu­ facture (here the skilled women verdigris producers of Montpellier discussed by Reed Benhamou are emblematic); that sometimes women’s preindustrial skill translated into a skilled position after industrial change (here Inger Jonsonn’s case of Swedish scutchers is salient); and that women’s ability to perform the central craft ofa productive process, despite their exclusion from formal apprentice­ ship, made them critically important to the household production unit in a period of deterioration of guild protection and privileges (here the silk weavers of Lyons so well described by Daryl Hafter are the case in point). In this period of transition to industrialization, there were many trajectories for industries and workers, men and women. 250 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The message in part 2 (“The Persistence of Handicraft in the In­ dustrial Age”) is more general. All of the chapters trace continuity in the 19th century of handcrafting. The role of women and the extent of their agency in the process varies, however. John F. Sweet shows that in Le Puy, where lace making had a long tradition, women sometimes served as intermediaries between the merchant capitalists who ordered particular patterns and types of lace and marketed it, and the poorly paid lace makers themselves, about whom much less is known. Despite their vulnerability as wage earners, the lace makers were able while the industry throve to make deals for better pay. The problem, of course, was that handmade lace, despite its long survival, finally succumbed to a mixture of changing fashion and machine-made lace. Whitney Walton’s study of white embroidery in Lorraine reveals some aspects in common with lacemaking. Interestingly, when Swiss competition loomed, based on more efficient and higher quality embroidery done with a wooden hoop stretching the cloth on which the sewing was done, rural women resisted its introduction. This effort failed, as it simply made the frame costly and unrewarding to merchant capitalists who in turn could not compete in the international market; lace manu­ facturers fought free trade, arguing for the moral value ofhomework as away to “supplement” agricultural incomes. In the city of Nancy, women used the frames, and that branch of the industry stayed more competitive. Nevertheless, shifting fashions, the disappearance of U.S. markets in the Civil War period, and a switch...

The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market.

The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market.

The Lace Makers' Society.

The Lace Makers' Society.