Journal articles on the topic 'Indian embroidery'

The needle art or embroidery was the famous time pass of Indian woman folk. Many of these home-grown techniques have taken a place in the larger canvass of Indian art. Chamba rumal of Himachal Pradesh is one of them. It is narrative theme & technique, and commands a special place in the Indian embroidery world. Chamba rumal is embroidered on off white cotton cloth with untwisted silk threads. Although we find two styles of embroidery in the Chamba valley, the classical one is the style famous in the art world with the name of Chamba Rumal. The classical style of the embroidery was developed under the patronage of Royal families of the Himachal Pradesh. This embroidery style and Pahadi painting developed parallel to each other. This is the reason that the scenes depicted on these Rumals have striking similarity with Pahadi paintings. There are many examples showing the alikeness and similar theme between Chamba rumals and Pahadi Paintings. A Chamba rumal with Gangavartaran theme alike to the Pahadi painting is in the collection of Bharat Kala Bhavan museum in Banaras Hindu University. This has the depiction of the famous story of Holy river Ganga’s flow from heaven to the earth on the request of King Bhagirath who did much of penance & austerities to bring Ganga on earth to get salvation for his forefathers.

This study tries to integrate marketing, backward–forward linkages and agency support to handicraft cluster in Meerut. The cluster has a large artisan base and opportunities of large domestic market and export potential. However, it lacks transportation facility, an organized infrastructure, networking, production line approach and designer input. There is a need for technological upgradation. The case throws light on the development of embroidery, presenting a broad view of Indian embroidery history with its diversity and the turning point in embroidery with the advent of new technology. The case takes up for study Meerut embroidery cluster with objectives of identification of areas of intervention for inclusive growth by integrating marketing with product development and designing.

Geographical Indications and traditional knowledge associated with Chamba rumal in the state of Himachal Pradesh are the current research subjects. A visual art form characterized by characteristic embroidery, Chamba Rumal arose and flourished in Chamba, Himachal Pradesh, during the 17th and 18th centuries and is being practiced today. Rumal is a Persian name that refers to a square piece of cloth that is used as a handkerchief in traditional Persian culture. Paintings influence the fundamental structure and themes of Chamba Rumal; there is a prevalence of God depictions, notably of Vishnu in his numerous incarnations, which is a theme that runs throughout the collection of paintings. Dorukha-tanka embroidery is an extremely rare and one-of-a-kind stitch that has never been seen before in the history of Indian embroidery. The Dorukha-tanka stitch is a double satin stitch that is employed in Chamba Rumal embroidery. The present research attempted to determine the degree of public awareness of traditional knowledge connected to GI Chamba rumal in the state of HP. This study also sheds light on the historical context of Chamba rumal and the many topics and traditional knowledge associated with Chamba rumal, among other things.

TitleQuality Tailors, Textiles and Embroidery (QTTE).Subject areaInternational business, emerging markets, strategy.Study level/applicabilityYear 3 and 4 university level.Case overviewKevin, an Indian citizen living in Oman, is the founder and president of Quality Tailors, Textiles, and Embroidery (QTTE). He is faced with a number of questions, including whether or not to establish a new division, in what direction to take the three existing divisions, and how to work with an organization culture that is resistant to change and reluctant to make decisions without his involvement. Perhaps, most pressing is the fact that the company's sponsor is demanding increased payments, since under Omani law, a foreign‐owned company must have an Omani sponsor who is entitled to a share of the profits and, in the extreme, can take over ownership and control of the business.Expected learning outcomesUpon completing this case, students will practice: identifying and using proper tools (5‐forces, SWOT, VRINE) to analyze the external and internal environments of the company; identifying key issues in the case, both long‐ and short‐term; identifying feasible alternatives and evaluating each alternatives for its feasibility, pros, and cons; and proposing an implementation plan with a time line.Supplementary materialsTeaching notes.

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family's honor, reputation, and good lineage.

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family's honor, reputation, and good lineage.

Luxury Brands industry has undergone series of dynamic changes in last 20 years. India’s luxury market is set to grow USD 30 billion from USD 23.8 billion by the end of year 2020 attributing to growing influx and expose to international brands, high purchase power of Indian upper class consumer in tier II and tier III cities. According to study by Assocham, Indian Luxury market is expected to expand five folds in next three years and the number of millionaire expected to multiply three times. India, has rich fashion history of bright colours, exotic saris, elegant embroidery, and stunning jewellery, that has been an inspiration for designers around the world. Hence, many international luxury brands recognize the potential of the market of Indian owing to the growing number of billionaires and the rise of the urban elite class. The industry has faced challenges from technological advancements, high import duties and counterfeits products. The purpose of this research paper is to highlight the main areas of concern for the future of luxurybrand industry in Indian market with its challenges, trends and opportunities.

Punjab, one of the diverse states of India, is known for its composite culture, impeccable hospitality, delish food and incredible history; having been the site of great partition, it is also replete with the stories of loss, suffering and resilience. While Punjab can be seen and comprehended through various vantage points, the current paper proposes and focuses on the proposition that ‘Punjabiyat’- the essence and way of being a Punjabi, is reflected specifically through its attire-folk embroidery (Fulkaari and Baag), Folk-Dance and Music Art forms (Sammi and Jaago) and the focal point of hospitality (Saada Pind). Phulkari, literally translated as flower shape, is a folk-art embroidery that originated in 15th c by rural women in Punjab, and is popularly arranged on Dupattas135. “Many Punjabi women used phulkari (literally, “flower-work”) embroidery to decorate their daily garments and handmade gifts in the nineteenth century. Illustrations only partially convey the vibrant visual impact of phulkaris, and even color photographs fail to capture fully the sheen of the silk thread. The embroidery ranges from striking geometric medallions in reds, shocking pinks, and maroons, through almost monochromatic golden tapestry-like, fabriccovering designs, to narrative embroideries depicting people and objects of rural Punjab”.136 Initially intended to be given away to daughters in marriage and holding a strong emotional value, the use of Fulkaari has widened and transitioned in the recent past. This study asserts that it can now also be seen as a cultural symbol and an artefact, to convey the bright and cheerful attitude of Punjabis and their general happy disposition towards lifeCarpe Diem. Similarly, the folk-dance art form of Sammi- a dance performed originally by tribal women of Punjab, represents the true culture and spirit of Punjabiyat- the friendship, longing, celebration of love and a sense of optimism for life. While Bhangra and Giddha folk dance art forms have gained wide popularity; folk dance art forms like Sammi and Jaago too need representation and space in academic and historical discourse. This paper also intends to trace these two relatively lost dance art forms as signifying essentiality of ‘Punjabiyat’. Further ‘Saada Pind’- roughly translated as ‘my village’; conveys a sense of oneness, camaraderie, raw emotion and a place in time-space continuum where each stranger is welcomed with ‘Ji Aaayan Nu’137. This study would establish how ‘Punjabiyat’; and consequentially ‘Indian’ cultural art forms can be a possibility of re-looking at the lost values of friendship, camaraderie, connection with the outside real world rather than a disparate and robotic connect with the monotonous clicks on our smart devices.

The Indian folk arts with printing and embroidery play important role in creating new designs. Escalating demands of consumers requires modification in the fashion industry with respect to design, colour, style and technique.So an attempt was made to develop a design pool using folk art of Uttarakhand (aipan) for applique work. This also provides the opportunity to use the adapted traditional motifs on textiles and to preserve the beautiful traditional folk art. Aipan motifs were adapted for center design, border design, and buti design. Total thirty motifs / designs were developed keeping in mind their suitability for articles like bags, pencil purse and mobile holder. All the developed designs were subjected to visual evaluation for selection of two best designs in each category by the panel of thirty judges to find out the suitability of the developed designs for appliqué work. Thus total six motifs were selected for preparation of the five arrangements for each article. Four final selected arrangements with appliqué work were prepared using different embroidery stitches (slip hemming, couching, buttonhole and chain stitch). Plain red poplin and left-out fabrics were used to prepare articles. Finally articles were prepared by using selected arrangements and these prepared articles were highly appreciated by the consumers.

By the turn of the seventeenth century a generation of Andean natives, both Inca and aboriginal, had made lifelong homes within the strongholds of the European invaders. As they entered old age they inhabited an urban landscape whose “Indian” sector had become very diverse. In Quito and other colonial cities some of them dwelled in old pre-hispanic settlements whose closeness to new Hispanic centers had turned them into multiethnic “Indian” ghettos. Quito's Añaquito and Machángara are examples. Many others had settled illegally but permanently inside the Spanish nuclear city, so much so that in the 1580s Spaniards remarked on the growth of a “big shanty town” in its midst. Notarial records show, too, that center city streets housed colonies of “Indian” artisans specializing in European arts like iron working, embroidery, and tailoring. Rich enclaves of Inca and aboriginal nobles lived close to Spanish clerics and officials. Specialist traders delegated by native lords, and native entrepreneurs in the Spanish economy, rented permanent workplaces and dwellings downtown. Finally a large contingent, especially of women, lived as servants or concubines in Spanish houses or had usufruct of separate urban houses. In 1600 there were probably more different ways to be an urban Indian than there are today.

AbstractThe Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

This case is about an Indian female entrepreneur, Ms.Pavit Sidhu Puri, who was attempting to profitably create opportunities for impoverished women producing traditional hand-crafted products and environmentally-friendly, homemade traditional Indian delicacies. She was CEO of 2 businesses — Lyall Farm Store (LFS) and Desi Fusion (DF). LFS was established by Gursharan Kaur in 2004. It mainly dealt in traditional hand-made food items likes herbs, spices, pickles and other staple foods, while DF was launched in 2011 by Pavit Sidhu Puri, the daughter in law of Gursharan Kaur. DF’s products gave a modern twist to the traditional Phulkari (the handmade embroidery work of the Punjab) by converting it into products like laptop and mobile covers, handbags, wines covers and tissue boxes. Both businesses have been doing very well. They have been profitable so far, but the number of orders had been decreasing. They have encountered problems involving sourcing the right raw material, ensuring the availability of labor keeping the costs low, as well as creating awareness and acceptance among customers. After the death of Gursharan Kaur, Pavit was left alone to surmount the problems at both companies. She had inherited a legacy and as well as initiated her own venture. Now she was at a juncture where she had to overcome the present problems and place both ventures on growth trajectory.

While the men worked in the fields in the wine-like [winter] air, the women sat in the afternoon sun spinning and embroidering while they sang together, before starting to cook for their men. They embroidered phulkaris….” (Tandon 1968, 65). These stereotypes of feminine and masculine work in Prakash Tandon's memory book Punjabi Century illustrate dominant literary representations of economic production in Punjab, a province of the British Raj from the mid-nineteenth century until it was partitioned between independent India and Pakistan in 1947 (see fig. 1). Many Punjabi women used phulkari (literally, “flower-work”) embroidery to decorate their daily garments and handmade gifts in the nineteenth century. Illustrations only partially convey the vibrant visual impact of phulkaris, and even color photographs fail to capture fully the sheen of the silk thread. The embroidery ranges from striking geometric medallions in reds, shocking pinks, and maroons, through almost monochromatic golden tapestry-like, fabric-covering designs, to narrative embroideries depicting people and objects of rural Punjab. Women stitched phulkaris generally on handwoven cotton cloth (khadi), and phulkaris shared linked construction techniques, a dominant embroidery stitch (the darning stitch), and several distinctive motifs (Frater 1993, 71–74; Yacopino 1977, 42–45; Askari and Crill 1997, 95–101).

India is known for its textiles and embroidery all over the world. Indications of cotton fabrics have been found at the site of the Mohen-jo-Daro excavations and the finest muslins and silks are seen represented in the murals of the Ajanta and Bagh caves. The art of embroidery has been practiced since the remote ages in India. At the excavations made at Mohen-jo-Daro, bronze needles have been found which were most probably used for purposes of embroidery. Ancient literature and sculptures also prove the antiquity of the art of embroidery in India.

भारतीय संस्कृति एवं कला का अटूट संबंध है जहां संस्कृति की बात आती है वहीं भारतीय कला का रूपांकन नेत्रों में आ जाता है। भारतीय कलाओं में से एक है रंगोली कला। यह भारतीय पारंपरिक फ्लोर आर्ट है जिसे मुख्य द्वार के सामने तथा आँगन में किसी विषेष अवसर अथवा उत्सव व त्यौहारों पर बनाई जाती है, रंगोली न केवल आंगन की सजावट थी अपितु यह ईष्वर के आषीर्वाद प्राप्त करने के लिए, सौभाग्य के लिए एवं अतिथियों के सत्कार के लिए बनाई जाती है। रंगोली के कई प्रकार हैं, उसमें से एक है संस्कार भारती रंगोली जो महाराष्ट्र में अत्यधिक लोकप्रिय है। इसमें कई हिन्दू मान्यता एवं संस्कृति से संबंधित चिन्हों का प्रयोग किया जाता है। संस्कार भारती रंगोली में उपयुक्त होने वाली डिज़ाइनों का होम फर्निषिंग टेक्सटाइल उत्पाद पर विभिन्न वस्त्र अलंकरण जैसे- फैब्रिक प्रिटिंग (ब्लॉक, स्क्रीन प्रिटिंग, स्टेन्षील प्रिटिंग), फैब्रिक प्रिटिंग, एम्ब्रायडरी का उपयोग करना जिससे फैषन उपभोक्ता के लिए अद्वितीय डिज़ाइन बनाने अथवा पारंपरिक कला में उपयुक्त रंग, डिज़ाइन अथवा शैली का उपयोग कर रंगोली कला की डिज़ाइनों को संरक्षित करना है। संस्कार भारती रंगोली में उपयुक्त होने वाली आकृति को वर्ग, डिज़ाइन, समूह डिज़ाइन, के लिए अनुकूलित किया गया था।लेख के लिए कुल दस डिज़ाइन चयनित कर विकसित किए गए थे और फैब्रिक पेंटिंग के द्वारा होमफर्निषिंग टेक्सटाइल पर बनाने के लिए सर्वश्रेष्ठ 05 डिज़ाइन का चयन किया गया। उपभोक्ता के द्वारा भारतीय रंगोली कला संस्कार भारती रंगाली कला का उपयोग कर बनाए गए उत्पाद बहुत सराहे गए। संस्कार भारती रंगोली कला वस्त्रोत्पाद पर प्रयोग करके लेख तैयार किया गया है। Indian culture and Art Share an unwavering Connection between them. Indian art providespicturesque Slide view of Indian culture, Rangoli Art is one of the most prominent art amongIndian Art forms. This is a floor art, which were basically designed and embossed at mainentrance and courtyards. On various auspicious occasions and festivals Rangoli was designed togrant divine blessings of God as well as signifies the prosperity and heartwarming welcome ofguests. There are many varites of Rangoli in IndiaSanskar Bharti Rangoli is one of the most popular rangoli art of Maharashtra. This art formcomprises of many Hindu aesthetics, artifacts and cultural symbols. These symbols bring adistinct feature to Sanskar Bharti Rangoli. This paper aims at conservation of Rangoli art formby shifting its inclination to fabric embossing. These art form can be consummate by fabricprinting (Block, screen printing, stencil printing), fabric printing and embroidery can be used byfashion enjoy to uplift the unique experience of traditional colors, designs and styles to conservethese rangoli art formsSanskar Bharti Rangoli is designed to facilitate compatibility of shape, area design and groupdesign which brings appropriateness to art form. Ten art designs developed for this paper, on thecounter part, five best fabrics painting finalized to paint on Home furnishing Textile. FashionUsers appreciated the products designed with traditional Indian Rangoli art , Sanskar BhartiRangoli. This paper elaborates the efforts and significance of Sanskar Textile fabric,

Traditional choliof Haryana,locally known as aangi,is rare to be seen in today’s time. This upper garment was worn by women before the adoption of kurta. It was tied at back with two pairs of strings and worn by teaming with daaman. It was usually stitched by using ten to twelve pieces of fabric. Aangis were usually multicolored as these were made from various leftover fabric pieces available at home. That is why they sometimes lacked any symmetry of colour. These different pieces were joined together by finishing the seams with magji, rick-rack, gotta or embroidery to give it a unified look. A lot oftime was spent in preparation and decoration of this attire. Aangi was a highly intricate garment depicting the talent of women in this craft. The present study was conducted to assess the market potential of this traditional choli of Haryana in thismodern era.For this purposeanaangiblouse was constructed by the researcher in which constructional features of the traditional aangiwere incorporated. Cotton blend fabrics of yellow, red and blue colours were used as base material while herring bone stitch and mirrors were used for embellishmentas per experts’ suggestions. The aangiblousewas assessed for marketability by 200 respondents including Indian as well as foreign visitors and stall owners/exporters in the International Trade Fair, Delhi. Acceptability of aangiblouse was found to be excellent on all parameters i.e., traditional value (WMS 3.89), aesthetic appeal (WMS 3.75), workmanship (WMS 3.69), colour combination (WMS 3.67), utility (WMS 3.64) uniqueness (WMS 3.57) and fabric (WMS 3.41). On an average acceptability was found to be excellent.This aangiblouse can be teamed with a transparent saree for creating a unique style statement.Some respondents suggested to modify aangi as top or to use original form of aangi under transparent top.

Malavika Sharma, an Indian woman rural entrepreneur, founded Avika, a venture which produced traditional, hand-embroidered Indian garments. Avika grew rapidly and now provides employment to over 700 rural women. This case highlights various challenges that an entrepreneurial venture run by a woman, in a rural location within a traditional patriarchal society such as India, faces. The case also helps understand the inevitable inter-twining of business and social issues, given the rural context.

The development of embroidery art has been worldwide in general and India in particular for many centuries. From handmade production to digital manufacturing, embroidery products have been commercialized into consumer market as part of modern fashion. As a result, consumer preference proves decisive on purchasing embroidery products but makes demand forecasting in embroidery industry more difficult compared to general consumer goods industry. Many factors are influencing purchase of embroidery products. There is a shift in trend to buy machine made products than handmade ones. To find out from young college going girls their preference for different embroideries and to know about their mode of making purchase decisions this study was carried out in Jamshedpur city. It was found that there is preference for machine embroidery over hand embroidery. Electronic and print media are very influential in purchase decisions. Price is an important factor considered by all.

AbstractEmbroidered craft in Indonesia is believed to be carried by many traders from China and India who carry out lots of buying and selling transactions in Indonesia, that's when these traders began to introduce embroidery crafts and their techniques. One of the leading industrial sectors is handmade products in the form of embroidery craft where initially in Probolinggo there was a center for embroidery industry but after the monetary crisis occurred in Indonesia since 1998 many craftsmen could not survive due to the high raw materials and the lack of buyers and the inability of craftsmen to reach other markets, leaving only a few that still exist today. This Community Service Activity Partner is Rizza Bordir. To achieve this goal, theCommunity Service activities are carried out using the Participatory Rural Appraisal Model (PRA), Community Development Model, through Persuasive and Educational Approaches. The results of this activity concluded that: Solving financial problems experienced by partners is to make software software, 2) Creation of new markets through online media in the form of Websites, Youtube, and Social Media is done by re-uploading files and images on IG, Facebook, Update Youtube Appearance and Start looking for Subsribe by promoting it through WA groups and Facebook, and Giving Hastage #RizzabordirProbolinggo so that the media will start to know Rizza Embroidery and can be read by Google.com and 3) That the help of tools in the form of Machines and E-commerce is expected to be maximized by Partners to be able to develop their business and increase turnover.Keywords: Rizza Embroidery, Handmade, E-Commerce

AbstractStudies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India's economy is the growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization processes.

Chikankari is an ancient and traditional embroidery technique that originated in Lucknow, a city in north-eastern India. The artisans of Chikan embroidery are outspread in Lucknow and nearby villages of Sitapur district. The rural people of Sitapur villages are largely dependent on the Chikankari embroidery for their livelihood and the embroidery is very popular among rural ladies. Socio-economic status of a person is the economic and social position of the person based on education, income and occupation in relation to others. It was found in the study that age group 20-40 were dominating in Chikankari work as they faces low health problems as compared to higher age group. Modified Kuppuswamy Socio-economic scale updated for the year 2019, was used to calculate the socio-economic status of the respondents. Socio-economic status of the worker shows that they were mostly upper lower class (60%) and lower middle class (40%). Nearly all subjects (99%) had income below 5000/month and the average income from Chikankari is rupees 2566.66/month/person, while the income of the family/household income mostly range between rupees 19516-29199/month and the average income was rupees 20542.91/month. Most of the Chikankari workers had kuchha houses and uses wood for cooking on traditional chulha. Public hand pumps were the source to drink water. They had very small or no land holding and daily wages are the source of income to fulfill their daily needs.

The present study focuses on two specific sites of the Gems and Jewellery industry in West Bengal, namely Domjur (Howrah) and Manikanchan (Rajarhat, Kolkata). Domjur Gems and Jewellery industry is the sole ‘Growth Pole’ in West Bengal includingPanchlaZari and Embroidery industry. On the other hand, Manikanchan is the sole Special Economic Zone in the Gems and Jewellery industry in India.

India have a rich Art and Culture heritage, Our cultural and Traditional art speaks about how sensible our Ancestors are, they have Beliefs and reasons behind every art and culture work they do or create. We have varieties of Art forms like painting, sculpture, pottery, and textile arts such as woven silk are one of our Rich Cultural Heritage which makes our India Incredible. One of The Traditional Art is Mandana Art which i used in the redesigning of Mandana Motifs through painting on women’s apparels and high light them by Traditional Embroidery -Kantha Work.

AbstractIn Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism, Urmila Mohan explores the materiality and visuality of cloth and clothing as devotional media in contemporary Hinduism. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the global missionizing group “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” (ISKCON), she studies translocal spaces of worship, service, education, and daily life in the group’s headquarters in Mayapur and other parts of India. Focusing on the actions and values of deity dressmaking, devotee clothing and paraphernalia, Mohan shows how activities, such as embroidery and chanting, can be understood as techniques of spirituality, reverence, allegiance—and she proposes the new term “efficacious intimacy” to help understand these complex processes. The monograph brings theoretical advances in Anglo-European material culture and material religion studies into a conversation with South Asian anthropology, sociology, art history, and religion. Ultimately, it demonstrates how embodied interactions as well as representations shape ISKCON’s practitioners as devout subjects, while connecting them with the divine and the wider community.

Based on an empirical study, this article narrates the condition and status of women workers engaged in the unorganised sector in Surat. The city, considered Gujarat’s economic hub and business capital, is known for its small- and medium-scale industries (SMSIs) especially those connected with weaving, dying-printing, embroidery and diamonds. A number of non-industrial, informal sector livelihood activities, known as the fringe sub-sector, are integrated with the city’s main industrial activities. Studies reveal that a high number of migrant workers from all over India eke their livelihood from this wide spectrum of economic activities combining both these sub-sectors in which women constitute a significant proportion of this workforce. The article firstly describes their demographic profile as well as their working conditions. It also takes into account not only their contribution in terms of an economic income but also outlines their impact in the social sphere. The article argues that though the work milieu of the unorganised sector is as exploitative and oppressive for women workers as it is for men, to a certain extent there is an element of liberation for women in their social existence.

In the presented article, the features of the reflection of folk art culture in the cinema are considered. The author examines films that reflect the folk art culture of the American Indians, Udege, meadow mari, residents of the village of Palekh, as well as the folk art culture of the colonial countries, China and Japan. This article examines the films of both foreign and Russian directors, as the author refers to global trends in cinema. The author identifies several stages, considering the evolution of folk art culture, starting from films of the early twentieth century and ending with modern cinematography: “Folk art culture in early films. Ethnographic cinematography”, “Criticism of the urban industrial space in the cinema of the 20s. XX century»,»Colonial cinema», «Postcolonial cinema», «Cultural appropriation», «Orientalism», «Transnational culture in the postmodern era», «Cinematography of the metamodern». Based on the material of Russian and foreign films, the author notes that folk art culture is manifested in both documentary and fiction cinematography. The author concludes that folk art culture was reflected in the cinema at every stage of its historical development. The author notes that in modern cinema the topic of folk art culture has not simply lost its relevance, but has become one of the most relevant trends in connection with the processes of glocalization in the culture of the 21st century. Each stage considered by the author has its own specific features and reasons for the display of folk art culture. The article describes the main ways of representing folk art culture in cinema – folklore, traditional textiles, embroidery, folk songs.

All over the world prostitution is linked to poverty and the responsibility for aged parents and large families. Women who have little or no education and who lack job skills fall into prostitution because they see no other alternative. Social rehabilitation of sex workers should be the priority of government programs like the one described by Tabibul Islam in Contemporary Women's Issues (Rights-Bangladesh: New Attempt to Rehabilitate Sex Workers, from Global Information Network 1999). In various parts of the world there are NGOs (non-governmental organizations) involved in health developmental issues and the prevention of AIDS, and some are offering rehabilitation programs for sex workers. For example in Bamako, Thailand, India, Haiti, and Viet Nam, some NGOs are educating sex workers about the risks of Sexually Transmiitted Diseases (STDs) and HIV/AIDS and promoting job programs along with training classes in sewing, cooking and secretarial skills. Others are involved in the development of small businesses so that sex workers become economically independent from the sex industry (see Women, Poverty and AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Structural Violence. Edited by Farmer, Paul, Margaret Connors Margaret, and Jane Simmons. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. 1996). This paper examines a project implemented in 1993 and 1997 in Antananarivo (Madagascar) for the purpose of empowering a group of sex workers. The project sponsored by foreign donors had the goal of training about 50 sex-workers in sewing and embroidery skills for the making of clothing and household goods for the tourist market. The main purpose was to promote the social reinstatement of sex workers by giving them the opportunity to learn new skills that would enable them to support themselves with dignity.

This article, grounded in long-term ethnographic research among producers of contemporary luxurious embroideries and fashions in Lucknow, a North Indian city famous for its golden age as a powerful cultural center of opulence and excess, shows how anthropological knowledge can enrich current critical discussions of luxury and inequality. Since the 1990s, anthropology has seen a boom in consumption and material culture studies coterminous with the rise of identity politics and its celebration of diversity. In anthropological theory, as well, linking consumption to identity has stolen the limelight. In the process, questions of production, inequality, and reproduction of social structures have been overshadowed. Critical reappraisal of luxury in anthropological theory can paradoxically show us a way out of this identity trap, since luxury, unlike other consumer goods, demands that we think about inequality. Luxury also forces us to think beyond luxury brands, goods, and commodified experiences, pushing us toward more fundamental questions about what constitutes a good life, morality, and social order. The ethnographic case presented here, which reveals how structural violence can go hand-in-hand with paradoxical luxuries facilitated by fatalist attitudes, points to what such an anthropology of luxury might look like. In a village near Lucknow, women embroider luxury pieces for fashion ramps and celebrities, while being fed meritocratic dreams of individual progress and success by fashion designers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who try to convince them to work ever harder in the name of empowerment. But the women laugh at luxury goods, designers, and middle-class activists and, instead, insist on an antiwork ethic and a valorization of leisure—on wasting time over working; they prefer to “luxuriate” rather than indulge in luxury goods. However, this perception of luxury is connected to hierarchical inequality and a sense of social fatalism that has been reinvigorated through new experiences with competitive inequality, neoliberal pollution, and the false promises of meritocracy.

The field of art and business is very wide in India. Whose pride is keeping its existence going on from generation to generation. Craftsmen and artisans are identified not as individual but as artistic and artistic. There are various forms of arts and crafts in the country. Nowadays the main arts in art subjects are painting, sculpture, music, dance etc. In addition to the subject of shilp such as - woodwork, leatherwork, spinning-weaving, gardening, pottery-making, carpeting, mat-making, toy-making, sewing, weaving, embroidery, ironwork, tin Work etc. Today is the simplest use of art from a business point of view. In today's odd economic and social situation, man can earn a living through art work. Not only this, there is also a means of providing employment to the majority of the population in Kahala and Shilp villages. Today is the simplest use of art from a business point of view. In today's odd economic and social situation, man can earn a living through art work. Not only this, arts and crafts are also a means of providing employment to the majority of the population in the villages. भारत में कला एवं व्यवसाय का क्षेत्र अत्यंत व्यापक है। जिसका गौरव कभी दर पीढ़ी चलते हुए अपना अस्तित्व बरकरार रखे हुए है। शिल्पकारों एवं कारीगरों की पहचान व्यक्तिगत नहीं अपितु शिल्पगत तथा कलात्मक रूप में होती है। देश में कला एवं शिल्प के विविध स्वरूप हैं। आजकल कला विषयों में चित्रकला, मूर्तिकला, संगीत, नृत्य इत्यादि मुख्य कलायें प्रचलित हैं। इसके अतिरिक्त शिलप के विषय में जैसे - लकड़ी का काम, चमड़े का काम, कताई-बुनाई, बागवानी, मिट्टी के बर्तन बनाने का काम, कालीन बनाना, चटाई बनाना, खिलौने बनाना, सिलाई, बुनाई, कढ़ाई, लोहे का काम, टीन का काम इत्यादि। व्यवसाय की दृष्टि से आज कला का सबसे सरल उपयोग है। आज की विषम आर्थिक तथा सामाजिक परिस्थिति में भी मनुष्य कला कार्य के द्वारा जीविकोपार्जन कर सकता है। यही नहीं बल्कि कहला एवं शिलप गाँवों में अधिकांश जनसंख्या को रोजगार मुहैया कराने का भी जरिया है। व्यवसाय की दृष्टि से आज कला का सबसे सरल उपयोग है। आज की विषम आर्थिक तथा सामाजिक परिस्थिति में भी मनुष्य कला कार्य के द्वारा जीविकोपार्जन कर सकता है। यही नहीं बल्कि कला एवं शिल्प गाँवों में अधिकांश जनसंख्या को रोजगार मुहैया कराने का भी जरिया है।

Resumo: O personagem ameríndio povoa as narrativas brasileiras e é uma das figuras incontornáveis da literatura nacional. Yuxin, romance de Ana Miranda publicado em 2009, revisita a indianidade, desta vez conferindo a narração literária a Yarina, uma índia caxinauá que borda enquanto aguarda o retorno de seu marido Xumani, cujo paradeiro desconhece. Ambientada no Acre, em 1919, essa Odisseia às avessas torna-se, aqui, objeto de interesse pelo modo particular como reorganiza a matéria narrativa do poema épico sobre Ulisses. O presente artigo objetiva aproximar a narrativa homérica e Yuxin, identificando, num primeiro tempo, elementos de intertextualidade em ambos os textos, apoiando-se em Kristeva (1969). Num segundo tempo, colocaremos em evidência a posição de narradora da personagem Yarina e as reflexões de ordem narratológica que decorrem do deslocamento da figura feminina da posição de personagem secundária no texto grego para, em Yuxin, ocupar o epicentro do narrar. Servindo-nos do conceito de autodiegese, de Genette (1972), buscaremos relacionar a reconfiguração do esquema narrativo presente no romance, operada por meio da escolha de uma focalização narrativa distinta daquela observada no texto homérico, ao procedimento de destituição do heroísmo que estrutura o gênero épico. Tal deslocamento resultaria num apequenamento do masculino que decorre não apenas da focalização na personagem feminina que ignora o destino do elemento masculino, mas também retratando, por meio de Xumani, uma espécie de Ulisses pouco virtuoso. Desse modo, tentaremos compreender de que maneira esses dois textos, com semelhanças flagrantes na fábula que os estrutura, encontram caminhos particulares de colocar em cena questões ligadas aos gêneros masculino e feminino.Palavras-chave: Yuxin; Odisseia; intertextualidade; feminino; masculino.Abstract: The Amerindian character populates Brazilian narratives and is one of the unavoidable figures in national literature. Yuxin, a novel by Ana Miranda published in 2009, revisits Indianness, this time giving the literary narration to Yarina, a Caxinauá Indian who embroiders while waiting for the return of her husband Xumani, whose whereabouts she doesn’t know. Set in Acre, in 1919, this Odyssey in reverse becomes, here, an object of interest for the particular way in which it reorganizes the narrative material of the epic poem about Ulysses. This article aims to bring the Homeric narrative closer to Yuxin, identifying, at first, elements of intertextuality in both texts, based on Kristeva (1969). In a second step, we will highlight the position of narrator of the character Yarina and the reflections of a narratological nature that result from the displacement of the female figure from the position of secondary character in the Greek text to occupy the epicenter of narration in Yuxin. Using the concept of autodiegesis, by Genette (1972), we will seek to relate the reconfiguration of the narrative scheme present in the novel, operated through the choice of a narrative focus different from that observed in the Homeric text, to the procedure of dismissing the heroism that structures the epic genre. Such displacement would result in a belittling of the masculine that results not only from the focus on the female character who ignores the destiny of the masculine element, but also portraying, through Xumani, a kind of less virtuous Ulysses. In this way, we will try to understand how these two texts, with striking similarities in the fable that structures them, find particular ways of putting on stage issues related to male and female gender.Keywords: Yuxin; Odyssey; intertextuality; feminine; masculine.

Indian embroideries are popular all over the world and are highly liked [1]. Kasuti embroidery has its own regional identity and has crossed borders to be marketed in different parts of the world. Traditional Kasuti embroidery with ethnic designs and motifs with brilliant colours bear an individual hallmark of Indian textile design [2]. The success factor of Indian regional embroidery ‘Kasuti’ included: Customer specific designs and products, incorporating global styles” [3]. In the present study, traditional ‘Kasuti’ embroidery motifs were explored and collected for the creative& innovative designing. Top-ranked motifs were selected for innovative design development and designs were developed with the help of Corel DRAW X3 software. After then digitize the selected designs using Wilcom E2 embroidery software. Respondents evaluated the products on the basis of different parameters like techniques, aesthetic appeal, design placement, uniqueness of design and overall appearance. The study found that all the developed products by using digital embroidery softwares are highly preferred by consumers, they are ready to purchase the developed article. Its looks like traditional hand embroidery.

<div><p><em>The history of leather tanning in India dates back to 3000 BC. Tanning in the rural areas is done by indigenous techniques, making the use of this material easier. </em><em>The most popular Indian leather products include footwear and hand bags. The footwear comes in various designs of traditional embroidery, brocade of textile. Bright colors and unique designs are used. The all time favorite- Kolhapur chapels of Maharashtra are very soft and very comfortable to wear. A special type of thickest shoes, called mojadis is designed in Rajasthan. They are decorated with silk, beads and metal embroidery. Jaipur is famous for its fancy and sophisticated footwear. Hence, a study on financial analysis of Indian leather exports are very important in the present day scenario, and hence this study.</em></p></div>

Indian Textile Designs has a rich vocabulary and are well known all over the world for their rich variety, grace, beauty, elegance and skilled craftsmanship. These designs are used by the craftsmen’s in weaving, embroidery, wall paintings, printing, etc. Indian designs are the references of rich culture, traditions and heritage. Over the millennium beautiful designs has not only blossomed into an intricate art but has also been consumed in recent times by overwhelming phenomenon of modernization in the form of mass production and mechanization in textile world. The rich and intricate designs have rightly called ‘Exquisite poetry in colorful fabrics’. The natural forms are woven in a highly embellished and stylized manner. A unit of a pattern or the smallest unit of a design is a motif. Often inspired by nature, architecture, culture, or religion, etc. The motifs on traditional Indian textiles are all distinct and mostly very colorful, intricate, bold and symmetrical. After assimilating the essence of a pattern, a weaver, an embroiderer or an artist implements his own interpretation of it. Since ancient time many kings ruled our country, these designs are often representation of the different styles from an era gone. Thus a stem can evolve into a flower or an animal/bird form. Decorative motifs like a leaf, fruit, flower, branch, bud, creeper, animal, bird or a tree never break the symmetry of the pattern or designs. Indian craftsmen’s always gave serious consideration to the proper utilization of the space between the motifs in a pattern. To maintain correlation and harmony between the patterns, certain geometrical patterns, textures and effects were used. The most common being checks, strips, dots, etc.

Zardozi is a traditional embroidery since medieval period in India. It is considered to be famous embroidery of Lucknow as chikankari but zardozi is not getting as much as attention and promotion like chikankari. So this paper covers review of zardozi embroidery in historical perspective from ancient to modern period in India with special reference to Lucknow during Nawab’s times. It also focuses on to find out its contemporary status, factors related to continuity and changes in the embroidery. It lays stress on the socio-economic status and problems of workers (zardoz) specially wages and health issues. This paper is a effort to fetch attention of government and non- government organizations towards this Royal craft of Lucknow for better promotion and facilities.

Статья посвящена исследованию миниатюрной живописи в районе Гималаев живописи школы Пахари. В фокусе внимания автора становление и развитие этой художественной традиции в искусстве Индии, а также особенности техники, стилистические и тематические разновидности миниатюры на бумаге и вышивной живописи. The article is devoted to the study of miniature painting in the Himalayas the Pahari Miniature Painting school. The author focuses on the formation and development of this artistic tradition in the art of India, as well as the features of technics, stylistic and thematic varieties of miniatures on paper and embroidery painting.

India is a country with rich heritage of traditional textiles. It is a cluster of art and crafts of various communities and tribes. Tribal textiles are distinguished by their one-of-a-kindness, which reflects racial feelings and cultural identity. “Dongria Kondh” is a tribe from Odisha, lives on the hills of Niyamgiri, particularly on Rayagadha district. The importance of this community is that their arts and crafts reflect the importance of the mountains strain. The triangular design on the walls of the village and the colourful cloth embroidery they wear called "Kapda Gonda”. The design for adornment of kapda gonda reflects with the ethnic identity. The research process includes ethnographic investigation to profile social and cultural importance of Kapda Gonda in the form of interview of artisans for the process and embroidery involved in “Kapda Gonda”. The main purpose of the study is to provide training to the artisans to explore new ways of design intervention in the patterns of traditional motifs of Kapda Gonda to create awareness of their own craft flexibility within their community. With design intervention in Kapda Gonda motifs the artisans could make wide range of motifs for the modern society.

The use of footwear is as old as civilization. Numerous experimentations through the hands of Indian artisans of various regions, the form of desi jutti or traditional footwear emerged and circulated in numerous designs during ages. Today’s transforming approach of arts has been entered in every field of life to revive and modify our traditional handicrafts to justify our present needs and fashions. This paper is an effort to review the origin and glorious past of the handicraft of desi jutti as well new interventions in the handicraft industry, which affected, altered and fluctuated its original form using contemporary designs, materials and modern techniques. This paper is based on review of literature, interview and observation methods. Data is collected through thirty artisans in Ludhiana. Interviews and discussions also have been done with embroiders, boutique workers, sellers as well as experts. Keywords: Historical, change, contemporary, design, materials, machines, ornamentation.

Wife (1975) is a novel ostensibly about immigration, but it is also about gender, ethnicity, and power. Bharati Mukherjee's well-known essay, "An Invisible Woman" (1981), describes her experience in Canada as one that created "double vision" because her self-perception was put so utterly at odds with her social standing (39). She experienced intense and horrifying racism in Canada, particularly in Toronto, and claims that the setting of Wife, her third novel, is "in the mind of the heroine...always Toronto" (39). Mukherjee concludes the article by saying that she eventually left Toronto, and Canada, because she was unable to keep her "twin halves" together (40). In thinking about "mixing," Mukherjee’s work provides entry points into "mixed" or interlocking structures of domination; the diasporic female subject in Mukherjee’s Wife struggles to translate this powerful "mix" in her attempt to move across and within national borders, feminisms, and cultural difference. "An Invisible Woman", in many ways, illuminates the issues that are at stake in Mukherjee's Wife. The protagonist Dimple Dagsputa, like Mukherjee, experiences identity crisis through the cultural forces that powerfully shape her self-perception and deny her access to control of her own life. I want to argue that Wife is also about Dimple's ability to grasp at power through the connections that she establishes between her mind and body, despite the social forces that attempt to divide her. Through a discussion of Dimple's negotiations with Western feminisms and the methods by which she attempts to reclaim her commodified body, I will rethink Dimple's violent response as an act of agency and resistance. Diasporic Feminisms: Locating the Subject(s): Mukherjee locates Wife in two very different geographic settings: the dusty suburbs of Calcutta and the metropolis of New York City. Dimple’s experience as a diasporic subject, one who must relocate and find a new social/cultural space, is highly problematic. Mukherjee uses this diasporic position to bring Dimple’s ongoing identity formation into relief. As she crosses into the space of New York City, Dimple must negotiate the web created by gender, class, and race in her Bengali culture with an increasingly multiple grid of inseparable subject positions. Avtar Brah points out that diaspora is useful as a "conceptual grid" where "multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed" (208). Brah points to experience as the site of subject formation; a discursive space where different subject positions are inscribed, repeated, or contested. For Brah, and for Mukherjee, it is essential to ask what the "fields of signification and representation" are that contribute to the formation of differing subjects (116). Dimple’s commodification and her submission to naming in the Bengali context are challenged when she encounters Western feminisms. Yet Mukherjee suggests that these feminisms do little to "liberate" Dimple, and in fact serve as another aspect of her oppression. Wife is concerned with the processes which lead up to Dimple’s final act of murder; the interlocking subject positions which she negotiates with in an attempt to control her own life. Dimple believes that the freedom offered by immigration will give her a new identity: "She did not want to carry any relics from her old life; given another chance she could be a more exciting person, take evening classes perhaps, become a librarian" (42). She is extremely optimistic about the opportunities of her new life, but Mukherjee does not valourize the New World over the Old. In fact, she continually demonstrates the limited spaces that are offered on both sides of the globe. In New York, Dimple faces the unresolved dilemma between her desire to be a traditional Indian wife and the lure of Western feminism. Her inability to find a liveable place within the crossings of these positions contributes to her ultimate act of violence. At her first party in Manhattan, Dimple encounters the diaspora of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who provide varying examples of the ways in which being "Indian" is in conversation with being "American." She hears about Ina Mullick, the Bengali wife whose careless husband has allowed her to become "more American than the Americans" (68). Dimple quickly learns that Amit is sharply disapproving of women who go to college, wear pants, and smoke cigarettes: "with so many Indians around and a television and a child, a woman shouldn’t have time to get any crazy ideas" (69). The options of education and employment are removed from Dimple’s grasp as soon as she begins to consider them, leaving her wondering what her new role in this place will be. Mukherjee inserts Ina Mullick into Dimple’s life as a challenge to the restrictions of traditional wifehood: "Well Dimple...what do you do all day? You must be bored out of your skull" (76). Ina has adopted what Jyoti calls "women’s lib stuff" and Dimple is warned of her "dangerous" influence (76). Ina engagement with Western feminisms is a form of resistance to the confines of traditional Bengali wifehood. Mukherjee, however, uses Ina’s character to demonstrate the misfit between Western and Third World feminisms. Although the oppressions experienced in both geographies appear to be similar, Mukherjee points out that neither Ina nor Dimple can find expression through a feminism that forces them to abandon their Indianess. Western feminist discourse has been much maligned for its Eurocentric construction of a monolithic Third World subject that ignores cultural complexity. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s "Under Western Eyes" (1988) is the classic example of the interrogation of this construction. Mohanty argues that "ethnocentric universality" obliterates the differences within the varied category of female (197), and that "Western feminist writings on women in the third world subscribe to a variety of methodologies to demonstrate the universal cross-cultural operation of male dominance and female exploitation" (208-209). Mukherjee addresses these problems through Ina’s struggle; Western feminisms and their apparent "liberation" fail to provide Ina with a satisfying sense of self. Ina remains oppressed because these forms of feminism cannot adequately deal with the web of cultural and social crossings that constitute her position as simultaneously "Indian" and "American." The patriarchy that Ina and Dimple experience is not simply that of the industrialized first world; they must also grapple with the ways in which they have been named by their own specific cultural context. Mohanty argues that there is no homogenous group called "women," and Mukherjee seems to agree by demonstrating that women's subject positions are varied and multi-layered. Ina’s apparently comfortable assimilation is soon upset by desperate confessions of her unease and depression. She contrasts her "before" and "after" self in caricatures of a woman in a sari and a woman in a bikini. These drawings represent, "the great moral and physical change, and all that" (95). Mukherjee suggests, however, that the change has been less than satisfactory for Ina, "‘I think it is better to stay a Before, if you can’...’Our trouble here is that we imitate badly, and we preserve things even worse’" (95). Ina’s confession alludes to her belief that she is copying, rather than actually living, a life which might be empowering. She has been forced to give up the "before" because it clashes with the ideal that she has constructed of the liberated Western woman. In accepting the oppositions between East and West, Ina pre-empts the possibility of being both. Though Dimple is fascinated by the options that Ina represents, and begins to question her own happiness, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the absolutes that Ina insists upon. Ina’s feminist friends frighten Dimple because of their inability to understand her; they come to represent a part of the American landscape that Dimple has come to fear through her mediated experience of American culture through the television and lifestyle magazines. Leni Anspach’s naked gums, "horribly pink and shiny, like secret lips, only more lecherous and lethal, set themselves up as enemies of decent, parsimonious living" (152). Leni’s discourse threatens to obliterate any knowledge that Dimple has of herself and her only resistance to this is an ironic reversal of her subservient role: "After Leni removed her cup Dimple kept on pouring, over the rim of Leni’s cup, over the tray and the floating dentures till the pregnant-bellied tea pot was emptied" (152). Dimple’s response to the lack of accommodation that Western feminism presents is tied to her feeling that Ina and Leni live with unforgiving extremes: "that was the trouble with people like Leni and Ina who believed in frankness, happiness and freedom; they lacked tolerance, and they abhorred discussions about the weather" (161). Like Amit, Ina offers a space through her example where Dimple cannot easily learn to negotiate her options. The dynamic between these women is ultimately explosive. Ina cannot accept Dimple’s choices and Dimple is forced to simplify herself in a defence that protects her from predatory Western feminisms: I can’t keep up with you people. I haven’t read the same kinds of books or anything. You know what I mean Ina, don’t you? I just like to cook and watch TV and embroider’...’Bravo!’ cried Ina Mullick from the sofa where she was sitting cross legged. ‘And what else does our little housewife do? ‘You’re making fun of me,’ Dimple screamed. ‘Who do you think you are?’ (169-170. Dimple lacks the ability to articulate her oppression; Ina Mullick can articulate it but cannot move outside of it. Both women feel anger, depression, and helplessness, but they fail to connect and help one another. Mukherjee demonstrates that women from the Third World, specifically those who come into contact with the diaspora, are not homogenous subjects; her various representations of negotiation with processes of identity constitution show how different knowledges of self are internalized and acted out. Irene Gedalof’s recent work on bringing Indian and Western feminisms into conversation proceeds from the Foucauldian notion that these multiple discursive systems must prevail over the study of woman or women within a single (and limiting) symbolic order (26). The postcolonial condition of diaspora, Gedalof and other critics have pointed out, is an interesting position from which to begin talking about these complex processes of identity making since it breaks down the oppositions of South and North, East and West. In crossing the South/North and East/West divide, Dimple does not abandon her Indian subject position, but rather attempts to keep it intact as other social forces are presented. The opposition between Ina and Dimple, however, is dissolved by the flux that the symbol "woman" experiences. This process emphasizes differences within and between their experiences in a non-hierarchical way. Rethinking the Mind/Body Dichotomy: Dimple’s Response This section will attempt to show how Dimple’s response to her options is far more complex than the mind/body dichotomy that it appears to be upon superficial examination. Dimple’s body does not murder in an act of senseless violence that is divorced from her mental perception of the world. I want to rethink interpretations like the one offered by Emmanuel S. Nelson: "Wife describes a weak-minded Bengali woman [whose]...sensibilities become so confounded by her changing cultural roles, the insidious television factitiousness, and the tensions of feminism that, ironically, she goes mad and kill her husband" (54-55). Although her sense of reality and fantasy become blurred, Dimple acts in accordance with the few choices that remain open to her. In slowly guiding us toward Dimple’s horrifying act of violence, Mukherjee attempts to examine the social and cultural networks which condition her response. The absolutes of Western feminisms offer little space for resistance. Dimple, however, is not a victim of her circumstances. She reclaims her body as a site of inscription and commodification through methods of resistance which are inaccessible to Amit or her larger social contexts: abortion, vomiting, fantasies of mutilating her physical self, and, ultimately, through using her body as a tool, rather than an object, of violence. These actions are responses to her own lack of power over self representation; Dimple creates a private world in which she can resist the ways her body has been encoded and the ways in which she has been constructed as a divided object. In her work on the body in feminist discourse, Elizabeth Grosz argues that postructuralist feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Judith Butler conceptualize female bodies as: "crucial to understanding women’s psychical and social existence, but the body is no longer understood as an ahistorical, biologically given, acultural object. They are concerned with the lived body, the body insofar as it is represented and used in specific ways in particular cultures" (Grosz 18). In emphasizing difference within the sexes, these postructuralist thinkers reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and do much for Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s project of considering the ways in which "woman" is a heterogenously constructed and shifting category. Mukherjee presents Dimple’s body as a "social body": a "social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification and power" (Grosz 18-19). Dimple cannot control, for example, Amit’s desire to impregnate her, to impose a schema of patriarchal reproduction on her body. Yet, as I will demonstrate, Dimple resists in ways that she cannot articulate but she is strongly aware that controlling the mappings of her body gives her some kind of power. This novel demonstrates how the dualisms of patriarchal discourse operate, but I want to read Dimple’s response as a reclaiming of the uncontrollable body; her power is exercised through what Deleuze and Guattari would call the "rhizomatic" connections between her body and mind. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), provides a miscellany of theory which, "flattens out the relations between the social and the psychical," and privileges neither (Grosz 180). Deleuze and Guattari favour maps and rhizomes as conceptual models, so that all things are open, connectable, and subject to constant modification (12). I want to think of Dimple as an assemblage, a rhizomatic structure that increases in the dimensions of a multiplicity that changes as it expands its connections (8). She is able to resist precisely because her body and mind are inseparable and fluid entities. Her violence toward Amit is a bodily act but it cannot be read in isolation; Mukherjee insists that we also understand the mental processes that preface this act. Dimple’s vomit is one of the most powerful tropes in the novel. It is a rejection and a resistance; it is a means of control while paradoxically suggesting a lack of control. Julia Kristeva is concerned with bodily fluids (blood, vomit, saliva, tears, seminal fluid) as "abjections" which necessarily, "partake of both polarized terms [subject/object, inside/outside] but cannot be clearly identified with either" (Grosz 192). Vomiting, then, is the first act that Dimple uses as a means of connecting the mind and body that she has been taught to know only separately. Vomiting is an abjection that signifies Dimple's rhizomatic fluidity; it is the open and changeable path that denies the split between her mind and her body that her social experiences attempt to enforce. Mukherjee devotes large sections of the narrative to this act, bringing the reader into a private space where one is forced to see, smell, and taste Dimple’s defiance. She initially discovers her ability to control her vomit when she is pregnant. At first it is an involuntary act, but she soon takes charge of her body’s rejections: The vomit fascinated her. It was hers; she was locked in the bathroom expelling brownish liquid from her body...In her arrogance, she thrust her fingers deep inside her mouth, once jabbing a squishy organ she supposed was her tonsil, and drew her finger in and out in smooth hard strokes until she collapsed with vomiting (31) Dimple’s vomiting does contain an element of pathos which is somewhat problematic; one might read her only as a victim because her pathetic grasp at power is reduced to the pride she feels in her bodily expulsions. Mukherjee’s text, however, begs the reader to read Dimple carefully. Dimple acts through her body, often with horrible consequences, but she is resisting in the only way that she is able. In New York, as Dimple encounters an increasingly complicated sociocultural matrix, she fights to find a space between her role as a loyal Indian wife and the apparent temptations of the United States. Ina Mullick’s Western feminism asks her to abandon her Bengali self, and Amit asks her to retain it. In the face of these absolutes, Dimple continues to attempt her resistance through her body, but it is often weak and ineffectual: "But instead of the great gush Dimple had hoped for, only a thin trickle was expelled. It gravitated toward the drain, a small slimy pool full of bubbles. She was ashamed of it; it seemed more impersonal than a cooking stain" (150). Mukherjee asks us to read Dimple through her abjections--through both mind and body (not entirely distinct entities for Mukherjee)--in order to understand the murder. We must gauge Dimple's actions through the open and connectable relationships of body and mind. Her inability to vomit "pleasurably" signifies a growing inability to locate a space that is tolerable. Vomiting becomes a way for Dimple to tie her multiple subject positions together: "Vomiting could be pleasurable; thinking of all the bathrooms she had vomited in she felt nostalgic, almost middle-aged" (149). This moment at the kitchen sink occurs when Leni and Ina have fractured her sense of a stable Indian identity. In an interview, Mukherjee admits that Dimple’s movement to the United States means that she begins to ask questions about her oppression; she begins to ask herself questions about her own happiness (Hancock 44). These questions, coupled with Leni and Ina’s challenging presence, leads to Dimple to desire a reconnection and a sense of control. Undoubtedly, Dimple’s act of murder is misguided, but Mukherjee sensitively demonstrates that Dimple has very little choice left. Dimple does not simply break down into a body and mind that are unaware of their connections, rather she begins to operate on several levels of consciousness. Shen Mei Ma interprets Dimple’s condition as schizophrenic, and explores this as a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literatures. She uses R.D. Laing’s classic explanation of schizophrenia as a working definition: The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world, and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself...Moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on (Ma 43) Ma analyses this condition (which can be seen, like gender and race, as a socially constructed state of being), as a "defense mechanism" against an unbearable world; the separation in space and memory that the diasporic subject experiences results in a schizophrenic, or divisive, tendency. I agree with Ma's use of Laing's definition of schizophrenia in the sense that this understanding is certainly more useful than Emmanuel Nelson's insistence on Dimple's "madness." Reading Dimple's response with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual rhizomes, however, leads me to resist using a definition that is linked to mental illness. This may be a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literature, but it is also necessary, and perhaps more useful, to recognize that Dimple's act of violence and her debatable "madness" are ultimately less important than reading her negotiation as a means of survival and her response as an act of resistance. Many critics interpret the final act of murder as "an ironic twist of Sati, the traditional self-immolation of an Indian wife on the funeral pyre of her husband" (Ma 58). This suggestion draws up Dimple’s teenage desire to be like Sita, "the ideal wife of Hindu legends" who walks through fire for her husband (6). The violence perpetrated against women who naturalize Sita’s tradition is wrenched into an act in which Dimple is able to exercise some control over her fate. The act of murder is woven with the alternate text of industrial/commercial culture in a way that demonstrates Dimple’s desperate negotiation with the options available to her: The knife stabbed the magical circle once, twice, seven times, each time a little harder, until the milk in the bowl of cereal was a pretty pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any advertiser, and then she saw the head fall off - but of course it was her imagination because she was not sure anymore what she had seen on TV and what she had seen in the private screen of three A.M. (212-213) The tragedy of this conclusion surely lies in the events that are left unsaid: what is Dimple’s fate and how will society deal with her violent choice? Ma’s article on schizophrenia points to the most likely outcome--Dimple will be declared insane and "treated" for her illness. Yet my reading of this act has attempted to access a careful understanding of how Dimple is constructed and how this can contribute to rethinking her violent response. Dimple's mind is not an insane one; her body is not an uncontrollable, hysterical one. Murder is a choice for Dimple--albeit a choice that is exercised in a limited and oppressive space. "Mixing" is an urgent topic; as globalization and capitalist homogenization make the theorization of diaspora increasingly necessary, it is essential to consider how gendered and raced subject positions are constituted and how they are reproduced within and across geographies. This novel is important because it forces the reader to ask the difficult questions about "mixing" that precede Dimple’s act of spousal violence. I have attempted to address these questions in my discussion of Dimple’s negotiations and her resistance. Much has been written about this novel in terms of Dimple’s "split," but very few critics have tried to examine Dimple’s character in ways that penetrate our limited third person access to her. Mukherjee’s own writing in "An Invisible Woman" suggests the urgency of rethinking characters like Dimple and the particular complexities of immigration for non-English speaking housewives. Mukherjee’s relative position of privilege has given her access to far more choices than Dimple has, but notably, she avoids turning Dimple’s often suicidal violence inward. Instead, Mukherjee shows how the inward is inescapable from the outward: in murdering Amit, the violence Dimple perpetrates is, after all, a rearticulation of the violence from which her limited subject position cannot completely escape. Footnote: In thinking about Dimple's response, it is important to note that, of course, her actions and her words are always conditioned by the position that she has naturalized. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"(1988) argues that the subaltern subject cannot "speak" because no act of resistance occurs that can be separated from the dominant discourse that provides the language and the conceptual categories with which the subaltern voice speaks (Ashcroft et al 1998 217-218).The violence of Dimple's response must be seen as an ironic subversion of a television world that enforces patriarchal norms. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. Brah, Avtar.Cartographies of Diaspora - Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980. Gedalof, Irene. Against Purity - Rethinking Idenity With Indian and Western Feminisms. London: Routledge, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies - Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State U of NY P, 1998. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220. Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. Toronto: Penguin, 1975. -- "An Invisible Woman." Saturday Night 1981, 96: 36-40. Nelson, Emmanual S. Writers of the Indian Diaspora - A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

IntroductionOn a sunny afternoon in early spring 2014, five researchers were strolling through the streets of Old Aberdeen. They had known each other for only a few days since an event had brought them together. The event was Performance Reflexivity, Intentionality and Collaboration: A Sourcing Within Worksession, convened by anthropologist Caroline Gatt and performer Gey Pin Ang, as part of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Knowing from the Inside,” at the department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. This workshop aimed to explore aspects of creative decision-making in performance to assess their relevance to anthropological practice. For three days, participants had engaged in intensive physical and vocal training, seeking to act in ways that felt intuitive and not forced. Five of those participants—Brian Schultis, Peter Loovers, Ragnhild Freng Dale, Valeria Lembo, and myself—unintentionally continued those explorations after the workshop.Our wanderings around the old town took us to the St Machar’s Cathedral. As we were lingering by the graveyard, Valeria took out of her bag a yarn of golden thread. This, she said, was an object of “personal relevance” that she had brought along to the workshop as a prop to work with, following Gey Pin’s instructions. Now she was unravelling it, offering one point to each of us. As we untangled the yarn, we resumed walking. Held from different points, the yarn became a web. Its threads shifted, vibrations reaching our fingertips as we moved. As we entered Seaton Park, which is adjacent to the Cathedral, the threads registered our encounters with the bumpy path, trees, wind, and passers-by as visible, tactile, and kinetic qualities. Pulls, resistances, flows, and gaps triggered a sense of “enmeshment” (Ingold, Lines 11) in a living, breathing world, something greater than ourselves.Walking Threads (henceforth WT), as we retrospectively named the experience, has since developed into a publication (Ang et al.) and a series of invitations extended to larger groups, at conferences and symposia, to walk with the golden thread (walkingthreads.wordpress.com). In our basic WT practice, the yarn is passed around. The thread unravels and we begin to move. No instruction is given to participants, in order to avoid their over-conceptualising the walk. We begin in silence in order to encourage an attitude of “listening,” that is, of opening one’s perceptual awareness to what is happening in the moment. This has not prevented participants from spontaneously using their voice at later stages of the walk, through song, recitation or the exploring of vocal sound.While WT outings are sporadic, the golden thread has continued to be part of my life in subtle ways. Since the last walk in September 2015 at the Beyond Perception symposium in Aberdeen, the thread has repeatedly come to mind. I began to pay attention to these appearances of the thread not as a material object but as a so-called “mental image.” By focusing on the image of the thread, I intentionally recalled some of its properties as a thing that connects, tangles, ties, and is untied, properties that the WT had made salient. By allowing those properties to inform my relationship with my body, the thread turned into a somatic image, a process that I describe in this paper. Thus, this paper continues the WT project’s creative explorations of bodies with threads. This time, however, the thread is not conceived of as a material object but as an image.A few words on my understanding of images are in order. Since 2006 I have been dancing and researching butoh, a dance style that originated in Japan in the post-World War II years. Butoh is a formless dance: it resists codification into a conclusive system of movement, relying on intensified proprioception—the perception of one’s own body—to sustain movement work instead. The use of verbal imagery is widespread among butoh dancers: words act as devices to evoke sensory experiences and “scaffold” (Downey) perceptual attention in order to achieve nuanced qualities of movement. The practice of butoh has informed my understanding of mental images not as merely visual but also as kinaesthetic, that is, engaging the sense of movement. This connection is hardly new; Csordas, for instance, talks of “physical” or “sensory” imagery, rather than merely visual (146–47).While I never intentionally used butoh to relate to the thread, my training and sensitivities as a butoh dancer are likely to have played a role in my relations with this object, as filtered through the WT experiences. Based on my background as a butoh dancer and “thread-walker,” the approach of this paper may be understood as one of anthropology with art: one in which the modes of observation supporting artistic and anthropological inquiries coincide (Ingold, Making 8). An artist’s engagement with materials, tools and things—including the body—is speculative, experimental and open-ended, rather than descriptive or documentary. This type of engagement can question established ways of seeing. For instance, we generally think of objects and bodies as belonging to different domains—the inanimate and the animate, the lifeless and the living. This paper questions this assumption and hypothesises that, through a particular kind of perceptual engagement, which mobilises the somatic and the imaginary simultaneously, objects and bodies can merge. An object can be embodied and, vice versa, a body can become a thing.The paper draws on autoethnographic occurrences of relating to the image of the thread, in the form of short somatic narratives, or narratives “from the body” (Farnell). Each narrative aligns the image of the thread to a particular aspect of somatic awareness: thinking, breathing, and muscle-bones. Far from claiming universal validity, these personal accounts engage a “somatic mode of attention” (Csordas 139) to venture in the potentialities of image-based thinking (Sousanis; Jackson). The exploration finds that, as the materiality of the thread retreats into the background, its image unlocks aspects of self-perception that normally escape conscious awareness (Leder). The image of the thread becomes a perceptual device that, by facilitating access to somatic awareness, reshapes relations with the world and, internally, with the body. It is in this sense that I embody the thread. Beginning with a Loose End: Spinning Thought into Thread-FormAs I begin to write this paper, I witness my thinking taking the form of a thread. It first appears as a loose end. I see it in my mind’s eye, and from a short distance. The loose end of a golden thread floating in a dark space. I cannot see how far it extends. Instead, the gaze of my imagination glides towards its surface as though attempting to grab it. Even so close, I cannot touch it. Still I can contemplate few of its qualities. I meet its reassuring continuity. A glimmer catches my attention: it is a few silver filaments inside the thread, glittering. The thought-form of the thread is a sensation of thin electric current between the temples. I sense the space between my eyes and forehead, their muscles and bones, subtly engaging. The same space begins to narrow down into a corridor. It is narrower and narrower. My thought spins itself into thread-form.In the 1980s, movement therapist Thomas Hanna defined a perspective from inside as “somatic,” that is, pertaining to soma, the ancient Greek word for “living body” (20). The somatic involves the perception of the corporeal from the inside rather than the outside: “to yourself, you are a soma. To others, you are a body. Only you can perceive yourself as a soma—no one else can do so” (20). As a first-person perspective on the body, the somatic involves attention to perceptual processes (Csordas). Yet, in daily life, self-perception is the exception rather than the norm. Being in the world is active rather than reflective (Leder). Otherwise put, being alive requires a mode of engagement that goes “forwards” rather than “in reverse” (Ingold, Making 8).Were we constantly aware of our own presence and actions, this would obstruct their unfolding (Leder 19–20). In order not to inhibit its capacity for being, the body must remain to a great extent “absent” to itself (Leder 19). Some reflective possibilities nonetheless exist. In meditation, for instance, one can attend directly to bodily processes, with aesthetic and contemplative benefits (18–19). The opening somatic narrative presented my visualising of the golden thread as such a kind of reflexive engagement. There, the activity of visualising ceased to be an orientation towards an externally conceived “object” (the thread), becoming itself the end, or object, of perception.One may ask: What kind of sensory perception is mobilised in positing the “visualising” of the thread as “object” rather than as background process? I suggest it is proprioceptively-oriented kinaesthesia or, the perception of self-movement. In this mode of perception, the activity of visualising the thread yields kinetic and spatial impressions. Visualising, that is, is perceived as a movement of attention (Sheets-Johnstone 420–22).The image of the thread, meanwhile, has suggestively merged with the activity of visualisation, in two stages. First, it has guided my attention towards an otherwise-recessive bodily process. Secondly, it has lent its form to an otherwise-indeterminate bundle of sensations. I elaborate on this latter aspect in the following section, where the next somatic narrative posits thinking as a perceptual object, in the form of the image of a web of threads.Seeing through the Veil Walking home one day I noticed some thoughts unpleasantly affecting my mood. In recognising their negative impact, I decided that I should try and detach myself from them. I imagined that the thoughts were like threads woven together. This image of interwoven thoughts developed into another image: a coherent system of thoughts, or worldview, was like a “veil” spread between my eyes and the world. I could, quite literally, “remove” the veil through an act simultaneously of proprioceptive awareness and imagination, leaving my mind uncluttered. As new thoughts rushed in to form a new veil, I could also remove these and so on. As a reminder of this experience, I jotted down these words:If the veil is made of ideasThen thinking is weaving.Sometimes I can see the veilMade of the substance ofMy thoughts.When I see it,When I see the fabricOf thought that forms it,Then it disappears.When I see itWhen I can really see the veil,It’s by a certain way of seeingWhich is in my forehead.To see that way,Really look, with yourEyes as well asWith your mindFor the mind itselfCan attune,Can look, can see through the veil.Leder writes, “insofar as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the perceptual field it discloses. I do not smell my tissue, hear my ear, or taste my taste buds but perceive with and through such organs” (14). Similarly, in ordinary conditions, I cannot think about my own mind. To see through the veil of thoughts requires a reflexive effort. It is to attend to the act, not the content, of thinking.This form of awareness can be seen as gestural, as it calls into play the body—a certain way of seeing/which is in my forehead. It is both a stepping back from thoughts, which allows me to see them as objects (a veil), and a removing of them, as though they were tangible things.Weaving the Body into the Night: Breath and Physical Forces as KnotsThe definition of somatic in the previous section anchors it to the point of view of the perceiver. The next somatic narrative describes how, through the image of thread, the perceiving I dissipates into contiguity with the world. Following my experience of perceiving my own thoughts as a veil, I further practised “moving my thoughts” through that image. One night the image of the veil “moved me,” that is, my entire body, in turn.As I cycle back home in the light rain I sense my own presence weaving in the fabric of the night. The fresh air flowing into and out of my nostrils and lungs, my feet pressing against the pedals, pushing my body up from the saddle, my legs looping. Dynamic energy mingles with currents of air passing through my body, and shining asphalt flowing under the wheels. Rhythm, like sowing my presence onto the air. And though the road is steep, tonight cycling up the hill feels effortless. My mind is empty and alert, engaging with the fabric of reality I can see. Is this “reality” or just my imagination? It would not make much difference to me. This somatic narrative reintroduces the image of the veil on a different scale. Now I see the veil as though through a microscope: myriad intertwining threads, and I am part of it. Threads run out of my limbs and lungs: gathering and propelling, pushes and pulls, in- and out-breaths. They weave with the night’s very limbs and lungs: streets, trees, the hill, the breeze, the deep embrace of the sky.For Ingold “every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines” (Lines 3). Lines are the movements that living beings perform as they relate—“corresponding,” “clinging,” “tying,” and “untying” (3–7)—to other living beings and the world. Breathing also is a line: “as we breathe in and out, the air mingles with our bodily tissues, filling the lungs and oxygenating the blood” (70). Or rather, breathing is a knot: it ties the inside with the outside. “Breathing is the way in which beings can have unmediated access to one another, on the inside, while yet spilling out into the cosmos in which they are equally immersed” (67).Cycling up-hill, breathing in and out, pushing and propelling, is a weaving of my body, a bundle of lines, with the ebb and flow of the weather-world (Ingold, Lines). This image evokes an outer spatial dimension to the body, an opening. It recalls my being one of multiple people holding and walking with the thread in the WT project. As with WT, feelings of resistance, flux, and being part of something bigger emerge.The image of threads feeds into the somatic perception of body-in-action, and vice versa. Here, engaging in action and imagination are not in contradiction but imply one another. They “correspond” (Ingold, Making): it is because my actions unfold through the imaginary framework of the night as veil that they can flow as they do, sinking in perceptual tracks of extended being.Muscle-Bones as ThreadsFor anthropologist Michael Jackson, metaphors reveal the identity of domains of being that the intellect strives to keep separate, such as the cultural and the natural. “Metaphor reveals unities; it is not a figurative way of denying dualities. Metaphor reveals, not the ‘thisness of a that’ but rather that ‘this is that’” (142, emphasis in the original). Whenever a crisis occurs, which undermines the unity of being-in-the-world, metaphors can be called upon to resolve the impasse and to make people “whole” (149).The final somatic narrative is an example of how an image can restore the unity of the physical and the mental. By imbuing the visceral body with the tangible qualities of a thing, the image of the thread turns the absent body into a sentient, responsive body. This, in turn, helps to overcome the impasse created by physical pain.Lying on the floor, sinking into it. The pain has been with me for years now. When stressed or tired, it spreads through the left side of my body. I have begun imagining the pain’s epicenter as a knot inside the pelvis, between left hip and tailbone. Looking inwards, I try and see the muscular fibres enveloping my limbs, connecting top to bottom. I summon the image of the thread. I make its fibres overlap with my muscle fibres. I want the thread to be the muscles, and the muscles to be the thread. This way I can disentangle the knots and find relief. My body is a deep, dark well. Breath is the rope that takes me down. Breathing in and out creates ripples of movement. They gently undo the knot, ease the pain. In this somatic narrative, my body is, once again, a bundle of threads. This time, however, this image has an anatomical inflection. Instead of generic movements, it is my very muscles that are threads. Early modern Dutch anatomist Ruysch also described muscles as made “of many parallel threads of different lengths,” which fitted with his overall view of the human body as divine “embroidery” (van de Roemer 180–82).In the previous section, a knot was a device for binding and securing life relations to survive a world that is, by its very nature, adrift (Ingold, Lines 67). Breathing enacted one such kind of knot “tying” the inside with the outside. In contrast, now a knot is a place of stagnation, of tension, where movement does not flow as it should. Breathing triggers minute movements throughout the body, which allow me to gradually undo the knot, releasing tensions and bringing relief.ConclusionDrawing on personal experiences, this article has sought to show that corporeal relations with an object can transcend its materiality. By engaging imagination and somatic attention, the thread lived a second life within and through my body.Based on the object’s characteristics and properties, the image of the thread refashioned, albeit momentarily, my relation with my body and the world. It allowed me to fill a perceived gap between body and world, between imagining and being.Finally, in relating to “unthinkable” aspects of being—mental and physical pain—the image of the thread was beneficial and even healing. It yielded sustainable notions of the corporeal.ReferencesAng, Gey Pin, Paola Esposito, Valeria Lembo, Ragnhild Freng Dale, Caroline Gatt, Peter Loovers, and Brian Schultis. “Walking Threads.” Humans and the Environment/Walking Threads [Special Issue]. The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal 5.1–2 (forthcoming, 2016). Csordas, Thomas. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8.2 (1993): 135-56.Downey, Greg. “Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira Training: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art.” American Anthropologist 110 (2008): 204–13.Farnell, Brenda. “Moving Bodies, Acting Selves.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 341–73.Hanna, Thomas. Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1988.Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013.———. The Life of Lines. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.Jackson, Michael. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011.Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2015.Van de Roemer, Gijsbert M. “From Vanitas to Veneration: The Embellishments in the Anatomical Cabinet of Frederik Ruysch.” Journal of the History of Collections 22.2 (2010): 169–86.

In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. 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