Textile design--Bolivia

The textiles of Jalq'a and Tarabuco, from Bolivia, are known worldwide for their beauty and complex designs. While most academic attention has concentrated on weaving techniques and esthetics, this thesis explores the semiotics of the designs, not only in an ethnographic context, but as an expression of ideology, cosmogony, and the indigenous groups' cultural history. In addition to reading colonial Andean sources on the pre-Inca and Inca weaving traditions, I analyze the symbolic elements of a sample of acsus, women's traditional skirts. I link the symbols still used today to depictions of pre-Inca mythology and the cultural inclusions from Hispanic culture that have created a syncretism from processes of transculturation.