Reviewed in Ethos 35.3 by: W. Warner Wood, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and Museum Studies, Central Washington University

Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas is at once an exhibition catalog, personal memoir, mother-daughter collaboration, multigenerational (for both researchers and subjects) study, and collection of absolutely beautifully photographed Maya women weavers, their daughters, and textiles. In short, there’s nothing else quite like it out there. That makes it a difficult monograph to place in a single literature—all the better, as it makes important contributions to several literatures (not to mention the museum exhibition world).

Written as a catalog to support an exhibition of the same name developed with the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (due to open in late Fall, 2008), Weaving Generations Together offers an approachable and relatively jargon free account of Greenfield’s nearly three decade long research on weaving and cognition among Maya women and their daughters in Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico. The conversational tone of Greenfield’s prose and her straightforward (and brutally honest) discussion of how her research team set out to do their research, what it was like to take young children into the field, her involvement in the wider Harvard Chiapas Project headed up by Evon Z. Vogt (“Vogtie” as Greenfield refers to him), among other topics, will surely capture the imagination of a wide variety of readers. For those with interests in psychological anthropology it offers rich detail, background, and nuance to the already well-known story of a pioneering study. Greenfield’s focus on the ways that the changing wider social context of weaving is tied to the changing nature of the apprenticeship process itself is especially interesting. Noteworthy here is her focus on how the emerging tourist market helps to create social value for aesthetic innovation and independence in practice among weavers that, in turn shapes how daughters (and older sisters) work with those learning to weave.

For those familiar with the research that Greenfield published with Carla Childs and Ashley Maynard, this monograph is a gold mine offering a multitude of insights into the motivations, field conditions, practicalities, and results of that earlier work (and a “follow-up” study). In fact, overall the monograph focuses on Greenfield’s multiple field trips to Zinacantan and the narrative develops chronologically beginning in 1969 with her first work in Zinancantan, following the work of her team through 2003 (when she made her final trip to Chiapas). The result is expansive and has an easy flowing breadth coupled with an eye for illustrative detail because the narrative so successfully combines research and personal anecdote in the how’s and why’s of field “experiments” and their outcomes; offers a basic ethnography of life in a rural indigenous community in the highlands of Chiapas; combines the work of a leading scholar with that of her daughter who photographed many of the stunning images that truly set this volume apart (how many of us involve family members in our research who happen to be professional photographers!); and provides insights that a seasoned field worker and researcher brings to topics as notoriously fuzzy as “creativity.”

While Weaving Generations Together is retrospective, it is not a retrospective. There’s much that is new here. This is especially true of the work that Greenfield and her team conducted through the 1990s and early 2000s that is the subject of the final chapters. That work focused on the emergence of elaborate embroidery and radical changes in color over a very short period. Here again, her sweep is broad and, at the same time, her eye keen for detail as she moves easily from discussing Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s work on universal patterns in color terms to addressing how women’s weaving cooperatives that have more recently emerged in the Chiapas highlands are, somewhat contradictorily, an important agent of change, pushing production beyond older communal patterns of working and learning to weave. In short, she doesn’t shy away from the messy details (for example, how coops reintroducing “new” old designs are thereby adding to the changes that foster “individuation”) that could easily upset the trajectory of a narrative bent on telling a easy, single, moral story (tradition/good, change/bad). To the reader’s benefit, Greenfield tells a complex and fascinating story.

Weaving Generations Together is all of these things, but there are a number of things it is not. It is not a contribution to the growing literature on tourism and the changes that “globalization” is bringing to Maya communities in Southern Mexico and Guatemala. For example, the issues of commercialization of their textiles through mass tourism, exploitation at the hands of middlemen, market influences on the work and designs of weavers, among other issues, are discussed but there’s little attention (and fewer references) to the work of other scholars. At the same time, Greenfield provides an utterly fascinating discussion of how Zanacantecos, who have become an important market for blouses produced by women in the nearby community of San Andrés, themselves influence the work and designs of other Maya women weavers.

There is some slippage in her discussion of tradition. Case in point: when discussing changes in design and the emergence of colorful embroidery, Greenfield clearly characterizes (p. 90) such changes as a possible return to more individualized expressions of weaving creativity that may have accompanied changing market conditions on various occasions, remarking that “what needs to be explained is the period of lapsed decoration, rather than its presence in the 1990s.” What might otherwise have appeared to be relatively less decorated “traditional” blouses of a static “ethnographic present” (of her first fieldwork in 1969), then, may simply be characteristic of one period (1920s-1970s) in a longer history of change. At other points in the text (pp. 97 and 149), however, she sometimes frames changes that have taken place in Zinacantan since her first fieldwork there as the encroachment of “Western” culture and ideals on a seemly unchanging Maya life way and worldview. Overall, though, minor points such as these (slips rather than falls) are few and far between in an otherwise fascinating (and beautifully illustrated) monograph.