Crafting Thought, Crafting Worlds: Weaving, Metacognition, and Indigenous Knowledge among Female Artisans in Guatemala

Abstract (English)

This paper investigates how traditional craft practices—specifically weaving—serve as sites of metacognitive engagement, creative expression, and cultural continuity among female Indigenous artisans in Guatemala. Weaving in these communities is not simply an economic task or cultural inheritance; it is a form of intellectual and artistic labor. Each textile—its patterns, motifs, and color palettes—encodes layers of memory, identity, and worldview. These practices are deeply intergenerational, grounded in oral transmission and hands-on apprenticeship, constituting a resilient craft-based epistemology that resists colonial and capitalist erasures.
Importantly, the paper examines how craft serves not only as a repository of cultural knowledge but also as a vehicle for empowerment. Amid systemic marginalization, weaving provides women with both material sustenance and a means of self-definition. Craft becomes a site of resistance, adaptation, and collective imagination—where everyday acts of making are also acts of meaning making and world building.
By foregrounding the cognitive, emotional, and political dimensions of craft, this study contributes to broader anthropological conversations on material culture, gendered labor, and Indigenous epistemologies, while advocating for a deeper appreciation of craft as both thought and theory in action.