Embodied Worlds - A Podcast by The Jugaad Project The Jugaad Project

What does it mean when a Tlingit weaver says her work is a "veil between worlds"?

To find out, listen to our interview with the inspiring Tlingit weaver, artist, teacher, and community facilitator, Lily Hope (Wooshkhindeinda.aat). Hope is a Chilkat and Ravenstail weaver based in Juneau, Alaska, of the Raven moiety, and belongs to her grandmother’s clan, the T’akdeintaan from the Snail House in Hoonah, Alaska. She learned weaving from her mother, master weaver Clarissa Rizal, and artist Kay Field Parker, and is from a matrilineage of weavers and healers. Hope’s weavings are in numerous museums and private collections.

Hope reflects on weaving knowledge as a practice of spiritual and cultural making, and how she puts this embodied knowledge into her works. Each creation, much like Hope's life, mediates between worlds of the spiritual and mundane, the community and wider world.

Image @sydneyakagiphoto

Is the anthropologist more like a dancer or grasshopper when in the field? Can the subjectivation or ‘making’ of an anthropologist be reconstructed through their network of encounters? What can those of us who are not social scientists learn about relationships from this inquiry? To discuss this, join our hosts Urmila Mohan and Emma Cieslik as they talk with Jean-Pierre Warnier, a French anthropologist who was invited in the 1970s by the then Fon of Mankon in Cameroon, Africa, to conduct his doctoral research. This was the start of a long relationship with the kingdom and its people.

A co-founder of the 'Matière à Penser' group (MaP), Warnier’s bodily-and-material approach to the study of practices, derived in part from his work in Mankon, enhances our understanding of how worlds-in-motion are created.

Image: J.-P. Warnier when the Fon of Mankon gave him a palace title. Cameroon, 1974. Courtesy of J.-P. Warnier.