How Embroidery Can (Un)Stitch Ethnography?

• In Event: What is ‘(Un)making’ STS Ethnographies? Reflections (Not Exclusively) from Latin America

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect upon how ethnographies, directed towards understanding the role of textile crafting as feminist embodied and publicly engaged feminist practices in Colombia, are affected and shaped by the material doings of textile crafting practices themselves. In particular, the paper focuses on textile crafting associated with public engagement as is the case of costureros de la memoria (memory sewing-circles) and cases of public knitting and embroidery related to community building. I pay special attention to three processes that are constitutive of textile crafting but that are not always seen as central parts of textile crafts as final products. These are: processes of stitching as writing, of de-threading and unraveling, and of mending and darning. I argue that these are world-making processes through which ethnographies become otherwise: they allow the making of ethnographies as more than deep descriptions embedded into texts, they open the possibility of embracing ethnographies as therapeutical and accompaniment research practices, they question research temporalities and subjectivities.

Author

• Tania Pérez-Bustos, National University of Colombia