Costume and History in Highland Ecuador

Ann Pollard Rowe has edited a fascinating volume that traces the evolution of indigenous costume in highland Ecuador from its pre-Columbian origins to the modern era. The book employs diverse sources and interpretive lenses to meet the demands of its broad subject matter and temporal scope, drawing upon early ceramic sculpture, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century textile remains, colonial-era wills and tribute records, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel accounts and pictorial representations, as well as costume, photographs, oral histories, and ethnographic research from the twentieth century.In the book’s first chapter, which focuses on Ecuador’s Formative Period (circa 4000 AD) through 1463 (just prior to the Inca conquest), Karen Olsen Bruhns and Ann Pollard Rowe detail the highland Indians’ gradual shift from nudity and body painting to the wearing of loincloths, skirts, and tabards spun from cotton and camelid hair. That highland Indians were prolific cotton weavers is especially remarkable considering that the fiber was not indigenous to the highland region; this suggests the preponderance of active trade networks between highland and lowland (coastal) Ecuador. However, as Rowe shows in the second chapter, camelid-hair weaving began to predominate in the highlands after the Inca conquest of the region. In addition to adapting to the Incas’ fiber preference, highland weavers spun clothing styles that suited Inca expectations as well, with men wearing the unku (tunic) and yaqolla (mantle) and women wearing the anaku (wrapped dress) and lliklla (pinned shawl).With the arrival of the Spanish and the subsequent fall of the Inca Empire, highland Indian women’s costume underwent little transformation, perhaps because Spaniards deemed Inca-style dress sufficiently modest for women and in need of little revision. Change was visible, though, in the fabrics used for such costumes, with some higher-status Indian women’s wills listing versions of the anaku and lliklla made with Castilian silk and damask, as well as with other fabrics produced elsewhere in Ecuador rather than locally. The highland Indian man’s unku, however, was largely paired with Spanish-style pants, particularly for men having close dealings with Spaniards, who objected to the amount of skin exposed by traditional tunics. In the third chapter, Suzanne Austin and Lynn A. Meisch argue that highland Indians’ costume generally retained its Inca influence through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with men and women wearing the same basic costumes as their ancestors.The eight remaining chapters primarily focus on the twentieth century and provide rich details about the cuts, colors, and evolving styles of male and female costumes, as well as their variations according a wearer’s marital status, ethnic group, province, and socioeconomic position. At times, however, the authors miss opportunities to fully explore changes to the social function of dress over time. This is particularly evident in the sixth chapter, in which Rowe notes that in the Otavalo Valley of Imbabura Province (about 65 miles north of Quito) during the early twentieth century, indigenous boys frequently wore only tunics to school. Their dress reflected a widely held belief in the region that putting pants on a boy too soon would trigger his sexual urges and desire to get married. The discussion prompts several questions: Where did this belief come from? Did indigenous boys also manage to avoid wearing pants during the colonial period? Did the wearing of pants to suit Spanish standards of male decency in dress trigger the kinds of urges and desires twentieth-century highland Indians hoped to avoid?Similar questions attend Rowe’s description in the same chapter of a large Spanish-style shawl known as a rebozo. The rebozo first emerged among Spanish women and mestizas in eighteenth-century Quito and eventually spread throughout the highland region. By the 1920s, married indigenous women wore the rebozo with the ends crossed over their shoulders and chests; an untied rebozo draped over a woman’s left shoulder meant that she was still unmarried. Yet by 1979, when Rowe traveled to the region for fieldwork, indigenous women informed her that the untied rebozo no longer held the same meaning. By what means did indigenous women first begin wearing the rebozo? Did Spanish and mestizo women adopt a similar style differentiation among married and unmarried women? What was its purpose? Did it serve to highlight a single woman’s availability to potential suitors, or simply to deny her a sartorial privilege associated with marriage? Did the practice fall out of fashion because single or married women (or both) failed to properly adhere to it?Perhaps such questions are difficult to answer, but in not posing them the authors blunt the potential for the study of costume to enhance or even complicate our understanding of Spanish colonialism and its legacy. Nonetheless, the book marks a significant step toward bridging the gap between the study of a region’s costume and the study of its history

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Clothing · CONQUEST · Ethnography · Indigenous · Painting · ROWE · Sculpture · Tribute · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · History

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