I.

I have been wearing a certain kind of bag, known as “mochila” in Colombian Spanish[1] ever since I was a child. In fact, my favorite one of the bunch that I own is peaking behind my computer screen as I write this. These particular bags are understood as an implicit symbol of national identity both within and outside the country. In fact, they often appear hanging around models in advertisements for Colombian tourism or coffee.  I remember my surprise when I first went in 1992 to a mountainous range in the North Eastern Coast of Colombia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and found out that the Ika that live in the Indigenous Reserve there, approximately 18,000 people, are the ones who provide the whole country with these bags.

I interrupt my account though, for it is interesting at this early stage of the paper to realize that as I try to explain my Ika bag, I have already shifted away from the actual “world of materials” towards the materiality of the bag, in Tim Ingold’s terms.[2] This means that I am not referring to “the stuff that things are made of,” but rather to the realm of the ideal which we cannot touch. How can I explain “the bagness” of my bag? “Stoniness,” points out Ingold, “is not in the stone’s ‘nature,’ in its materiality. Nor is it merely in the mind of the observer or the practitioner.”[3] But it emerges in the engagement of the stone with its “total surroundings – including you, the observer- and from the manifold ways in which it is engaged in the currents of the lifeworld.”[4] Thus, Ingold notes how “the properties of materials… are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational”[5] and furthermore, “they are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced.”[6]

By engaging with my Ika bag as I write this article, I would like to explore Ingold’s view of its material (which as he notes comes from the Latin word “mater” which means “mother”,)[7] and the experience of it. He suggests, “Far from being the inanimate stuff typically envisioned by modern thought, materials in this original sense are the active constituents of a world-in-formation.”[8]

My Ika bag encompasses a world of dark brown, lighter brown, gray and off-white threads of wool intertwined and in balance with respect to each other. The Ika families that make these, sit around the furry sheep and as they are shaved one by one, they run away looking stark naked and very pink. The wool is then washed and when it has dried up, the process of spinning begins. The smell of the wool and the sound of the spindle as it rotates on the earth floor of the house bring back the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to me in its full presence: that instant when the sun-browned hand sets the spindle turning with the material in apparently ceaseless motion.

The spindle is a pointed wooden shaft with a central whorl to keep it rotating as the growing thread is pulled out. The thread opens out from the centre, as if embracing everything in its path. Then it closes up again as it accumulates around the shaft. As the spinner keeps drawing out the thread and winding it up in regular rhythm, she seems to be accompanying all the other activities going on around her in the peaceful space, enclosed in walls with no windows and a fire, day and night, surrounded by three stones that are placed exactly in the centre of the house, just below the apex of the thatched roof. The Ika call this “the navel” of the house, through which a life force enters through the rays of the sun from above and converges with the life force of the hearth from below, like the movement of the spindle itself.

The life force or “yui” is what nourishes every element in the world. It is described as a whiteness which takes expression in things as different as the snow, the semen, the white gold of the ancestors, the sun light or the thought of a Mamu. A Mamu is perceived as the person who concentrates and carries the knowledge of the Ika people, both as priest and authority. The Mamus often tell the story of the beginning of life on Earth when,

the Mother planted her gigantic spindle across the highest peak and said: ‘this is Kalusankua [Kaku Serankua in Ika], the central post of the world.’ As she said that, a thread began to surge from the tip of her spindle…

This thread is said to be the umbilical cord of the Universal Mother and the act is described as one of creation. As the thread rotates it emerges through the center of the snow peaks and becomes the life force which irrigates every bit of her body, as it descends 18,942 feet, from the very tip of the peaks through 30 main river basins each opening up into various branches, all the way to the Sea where the cycle begins.

It is for this reason that the life force must be properly cared for and not wasted, explain the Mamus. This means that each person must concentrate the life force in them: their thought and sexual energy, which is why the spindles in this small house continue rotating like a dance that will never stop around the hearth as long as women, men and children converge. As the women’s thoughts concentrate in the thread of the spindle, the men’s thoughts do so in the neck of the gourd containers which they hold in their hands as they chew roasted coca leaves. These gourd containers are known in Spanish as “poporos,” and they are said to be the Mother’s womb which they are inseminating through their growing thought. With a wooden rod, the men extract the lime which comes from burnt and crushed sea shells, and is held inside the container. They then wipe this white powder onto the coca leaves tucked away in one of their cheeks and rub the neck of the gourd container with the same rod, as if they were inscribing their thoughts in circular motion. The Mamus explain that the life force that comes from the Universal Mother (and again I recall the Latin term “mater” which gives birth to material, according to Tim Ingold), is conceived in this way, by the women through their spindles, and inseminated by the men through their gourd containers.

II.

When the thread is ready, a second movement begins with one needle. “Before you begin there is nothing,” say the Iku, but from the moment you have the idea of what you want to make, “the mochila already exists in anugwe.” “Anugwe” is where the life force begins. The Mamus explain that it is the “thought and spirit” of the Mother which materializes in the “thought and spirit” of every living being. So the physical beginning of the mochila, “anugwe a’ yusi,” marks the moment of conception or materialization, and then as each stitch continues growing, so its life force grows. The moment of conception of the bag is when the needle makes the first knot, it carries the “anugwe” of the person and like a creative force it brings the bag into existence. As the needle turns, the knot or stitch becomes two, and then four until it is a flower which grows into a spiral of thoughts.

In the process of weaving, writes Tim Ingold, the surface is not so much transformed but built up, and does not strictly speaking have and inside and an outside. The correspondence between the surface of the baskets (he is referring to any form of coiled basketry) and the surface of the materials is not straightforward; it “is the result of a play of forces, both internal and external to the material that makes it up,”[9] and not as it is usually thought, the result of an idea which is imprinted on the material like “a genetic ‘blue print’ from the very moment of conception.”[10]

The moment of conception is vital amongst the Ika but not because of a pre-established idea that is replicated. On the contrary, conception, like Ingold suggests, is an ongoing play of forces which allows growth. Once you have the beginning or the “anugwe a’yusi” in “the navel of the mochila” then the material can develop like a fetus in the womb. The mamus explain that a bag has nine stages like the nine stages of development of a baby or like the nine levels that comprehend the Universal Mother.

One of the greatest courtesies a woman can do for another one is to give her the beginning of a mochila: it is as if she were sharing her life force. When a woman sews part of another woman’s mochila, she is incorporating her thoughts and spirit in it and thus, acknowledging her friendship. The women say that when you sew a series of stitches in this way, you should finish the thread and not hand it back hanging loose for that would be “to steal the Mother” away or its “anugwe”, making it much harder for the owner to finish the bag. If the thought-spirit or “anugwe” of the person is balanced then the mochila will be an even, well rounded and stable bag. The Ika believe that someone with the ability to see “thought and spirit,” such as a mamu, can read a mochila’s “anugwe.” It is for this reason that the women will always wash them in the river which takes the life force with it, before giving them away.

III.

Spinning and sewing are ongoing activities which young girls are encouraged to learn as soon as they begin to walk.  In fact, sewing a bag is compared to walking. “When you sew you’re walking your thoughts and breathing your spirit,” explain the Ika. A good mochila comprises what the maker sees, understands and feels at each point. The first time I stayed in an Ika community called Windiwa, the Ika women would say to me: “you need to learn to walk.” I tried to follow their footsteps. I noticed how they walked up and down the paths with such constant rhythm; the women stitching their bags and the men rubbing their poporos as they walked. After a while, I became aware of this rhythm embedded and growing out of everything they did. It was not just their way of walking but their way of weaving, spinning, speaking, entering a house, sitting down, standing up. However, as I tried to follow each person’s movements, I kept tripping, slipping and falling down those steep, muddy cliffs in the middle of the humid forest. The children laughed observing surprised that I was so grown up and yet I walked like a toddler. “Did your parents not teach you to walk?” they would ask. I tried to imitate their steps and then ask them if I was finally walking correctly. They would laugh again and say that I still had much to learn.

As months went by, I forgot my intention of being able to walk as gracefully as any Ika woman around me. One day I went on a trip with the Mamu’s wife: Zati. We stopped to look at the cutting edges of the mountains. I thought she was just tired so I waited, resting my thoughts on the landscape for a long while. Suddenly, I was startled by her voice when she turned around, smiled and said: “you are walking now.”

When you walk, you think. When you think, you walk, point out the mamus. “Each stitch is like a step which in turn corresponds to a thought in the world of anugwe”, of spirit and thought. As you’re stepping your way through the material, you’re thinking your way through the spirit, explain the mamus. Learning to walk didn’t mean that I had to walk like the Ika, since each person has a different step anyways. It meant that I had to become aware of my own steps and find my own rhythm without ignoring my surroundings. After the trip with Zati, I suddenly began to realize how the movement in the slopes was reproduced in the outline of the roofs, the drawings of the bags, and many other elements of daily life amongst the Ika. As my own transformation and recognition came about, it became clearer to me how everything was interwoven.

To return to Tim Ingold’s basket weaving, he suggests that the form unfolds within a kind of force field in which the weaver is caught up in a reciprocal dialogue with the material. Thus the actual concrete form of the basket arises “through the gradual unfolding of the field of forces set up through the active and serious engagement of practitioner and material.”[11] Throughout this process “the developing form acts as its own template.”[12] Ingold calls this “a process of autopoiesis, that is, the self-transformation over time of the system of relations within which an organism or artifact comes into being.”[13] He refers to Heidegger’s idea of dwelling within our surroundings, and quotes him: “‘Only if we are capable of dwelling,’ he declared, ‘only then can we build.’”[14] Dwelling in the world, suggests Ingold,

is tantamount to the ongoing, temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the manifold constituents of our environment. The world of our experience is, indeed, continually and endlessly coming into being around us as we weave. If it has a surface, it is like the surface of the basket: it has no ‘inside’ or ‘outside.’[15]

IV.

Webb Keane also emphasizes the notion of surface in a world-in-formation. He takes the example of clothing which, as he points out, has an intimate relationship to persons, and yet it is often conceived as superficial because it is believed to be an external material that distracts us from the spiritual inside. Why should materiality turn into a moral question? asks Keane. Part of it, he answers, is the ontology that defines subjects in opposition to objects. But even further, he continues: if it results difficult to treat objects as no more than illustrations of something else it is because “we remain heirs of a tradition that treats signs as if they were merely the garb of meaning – meaning that, it would seem, must be stripped bare.”[16]

Daniel Miller illustrates Keane’s point with the story of the emperor without clothes. “We assume that to study texture and cloth is by default to study symbols, representations, and surfaces of society and subjects.”[17] In Social Anthropology clothes are signs of social relations. But if you strip away the clothing you find no such thing as society or social relations lurking inside, notes Miller. In other words, it is not just that the emperor has no clothes, but the clothes have no emperor. The clothing does not stand for the person but rather there is an integral phenomenon which is the clothing/person relation. The subject is the product of the same act of objectification that creates clothing. Miller concludes: “we are not just clothed; rather, we are constituted by our clothing.”[18]

Seeing language as something which occurs in a plane of reality different from nonlinguistic things, asserts Keane, reduces language to coded meanings that must be deciphered. Similarly, clothing seems more superficial to those who take signs to be the clothing of immaterial meanings. By following Charles Peirce’s semiotics, Keane moves away from a Saussurian interpretation of language and constructs a theory of signification, as Miller points out, in which material is integral and not subservient. In this way, continues Miller, Keane seeks “an approach to the sign that takes the tangible and sensual aspect of our engagement with the world and respects its evident centrality to the way we think and practice in the world.”[19]

When you travel to the coastal city of Santa Marta, described by many as a hot and dusty urban centre in between the sea and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the midst of this urban landscape the tourist’s eye will catch sight of the whiteness of Ika clothing. When you see the Ika in groups of families, friends or committees visiting Santa Marta, they appear like moving clouds in the midst of grey trails of smoke-filled traffic and oily puddles. Many non-indigenous children and adults wonder why they are only dressed in white, “what is its significance?” (in Spanish: “cuál es el significado?”) But the clothing is not the garb of meaning, as Webb Keane says, but the whiteness itself which is the life force that originates in the Mother’s “thought and spirit.” The same whiteness that is running up the shaft through the centre of the mountain all the way to the snow peaks and refreshing every bit of her body, including ourselves. It is, as I mentioned before, the whiteness of the sun, the snow, the thread, the gold, the semen and the concentrated thought of the Mamu, amongst other things.

The Ika men are the weavers of this cloth. In fact the loom is a central element in Ika life because it is what brings all threads together. Each thread is a path through the loom of life, explain the Mamus, and as you fulfill your destiny you are weaving your part into existence. Each walks his path, fulfils his mission, and together make the textile of life. Weaving (“gavun”) and sewing (“isun”) are two different terms in Ika, like in English, but not like Spanish in which “tejer” refers to both of those activities. Many Ika people say that no matter where you find yourself, it is necessary to weave, spin and sew, for this is the material (“mater” or “mother” I am tempted to repeat) that the ancestors left in order for life to continue. When you weave you have to “to know where you stand,” and to do this your vision and comprehension of life must be all-inclusive: you must “see how each part relates to the whole.” However small an element of life may be – an ant, a leaf, a person, a house, a stream, a breeze, a look, a sigh, an action, a thought – it is part of a larger whole: a group, a village, a river, a wind, a force, a network or a spirit. This in its turn relates to a wider order – living beings, water, the atmosphere, energy – until it reaches the totality.  

V.

Tim Ingold refers to the Yekuana people of southern Venezuela[20] whose craftsmen weave the world in everything they do. I wonder however, if David Guss who studies their baskets and basketry is hearing a translation of the all-encompassing Spanish term “tejer” and in turn, translating it into English when he writes this. In any case, notes Ingold, this world-weaving goes from building houses and canoes to fabricating manioc graters and baskets. However, Guss does distinguish between their world-weaving things and commercially made things. In making this division, points out Ingold, the symbolic capacities of artifacts outweigh their functional value. This is something which Ingold disagrees with, for according to him, it reflects the same epistemology which presupposes the idea of a surface to be transformed as separate from the cultural imagination that transforms it, once again opening a gap between material and ideal.

It was “Ati Naboba”, the ancestral Mother of the mochilas, who first taught Ika women to sew them. Because of her vast experience, it takes various days and nights to transmit her story in which she had sex with many creatures and conceived many lakes and sacred places. However, it is after her misconduct that she is finally able to conceive one of the most useful skills for Ika women today: sewing all the bags with their respective drawings. Part of the initiation that women go through when they menstruate is to receive their own spindle and with it, the long story of Ati Naboba. This is because in order to have the spindle that allows you to conceive the life force of the Mother as you spin the thread, it is necessary to comprehend a certain state of mind, which allows you in turn, to acknowledge the anugwe (“thought and spirit”) where this life force is arising.

It is at this point at which I would question Ingold’s dichotomy between transmission of rules and experience. Practice says Ingold is not a matter of executing identical movements. He provides the example of the Telefol people of Central New Guinea who make a string bag or bilum. Ingold notes that these skills are rediscovered rather than passed on at a very early age. In other words, novices “grow into” the skills and so the novice needs to know not just how these “look ‘from the outside’” but also how they “feel ‘from the inside’”[21] Then he concludes:

It seems, then, that progress from clumsiness to dexterity in the craft of bilum-making is brought about not by way of an internalization of rules and representations, but through the gradual attunement of movement and perception.[22]

I do not think movement and perception exclude the internalization of rules. On the contrary, it is all part of the acknowledgement that allows for both experience and matter to grow out of the same process.

When you begin to sew you are developing a skill which is inherited from “your ancestors,” the Universal Mother, the “matter,” the material. In this way, you are awakening in you the possibility to let the material grow, and this is done through very elaborate means of apprenticeship that both girls and boys experience when they receive the tools that are passed on to them by the mamus, through stories and materials.

Today the mochilas made by young Ika women include the most innovative designs, motifs and even drawings of mobile phones. It is a veritable world-in-formation as the world changes and with it the narrative. As Ingold points out, “weaving together, in narrative, the multiple strands of action and perception specific to diverse tasks and situations…” speech is the skill of skills which develops along with the growth of the organism. “If one where to ask where culture lies,” he concludes, “the answer would not be in some shadowy domain of symbolic meaning… but in the very texture and pattern of the weave itself.”[23]

It is at this intersection of stories and materials that I can begin to understand my Ika bag. My Ika bag is a “kunzamunu a’ mia,” which means “female being.” It consists of a range of shades from lighter to darker, which complement each other in growing thought and movement. If the design is read horizontally, each line rises a little and then flattens out. If it is read diagonally, which is what the Ika do, it moves like the mountain ridges which rise, flatten out and then fall, like waves. It is when I was able to walk this movement in my thoughts, that I received my “kunzamunu a’mia” from Zati.

As I held it on a moonlit night, an Ika man pointed to the mountains. They were so clearly defined that their silhouette was almost transparent. “Take a good look at that,” he said. I could discern the ascents, plateaus and descents of each individual ridge. “Look at the roof,” he went on, indicating the house roof which reflected the ridge behind it. “You see? It’s the same. The shapes are different, but they all go up, flatten out and then come down.” Even as we watched, the mountain ridges around us were transforming, becoming gigantic and imposing. “It’s like a person’s life,” continued the Ika man. “If I’m climbing I know I’ll reach level ground, however difficult the ascent may be. Some slopes are steeper than others, but still one knows. Each ridge has a beginning and an end.” With all the clarity imparted by our surroundings he went on: “the important thing is to know where you stand, and not to start climbing before you reach the slope. If there is clarity in your anugwe, you have no need to worry about what other people say. It’s always the same: whatever you do, some people will like it and others won’t. The whole of life is a series of paths. Everyone is walking their anugwe, which grows as you hold it.”