Evaluating Saris : Social Tension and Aesthetic Complexity in the Textile of Modern India

Abstract

Through the study of the aesthetic impulse in everyday life, one discovers that all people develop skills and master techniques in varied endeavors. They produce forms that satisfy because of their perfection, the meanings conveyed and associations they engender, or their utility. Moreover, all people seek pleasant sensory experiences and avoid negative ones. By studying the aesthetic impulse we gain insight into ways that people interact, communicate, express deeply felt emotions, cope with problems, and strive to improve the quality of life. Jones 1989:262-263 Material culture, defined simply as made (Classic 1999:41), is the study of objects as physical representations of culture, recognizing the individual creators and consumers and their interpretations of art and tradition. We understand that in order to study a handmade object and its we must understand several important contexts: the historical time and place of the creation, the biographical context of the artist, and the form, technology, and aesthetics of the object, all of which communicate the standards of excellence held by the maker, the consumer, and the society at a particular geographical and historical location. While many excellent studies have considered the process of creation, studying the tools, the techniques, and the making of things,1 Michael Owen Jones's important contribution to this study has been to highlight the essential psychological context of the creator, and also to solicit comparative evaluations from consumers and makers. This evaluative investigation of the aesthetics and use of objects is a significant addition to the folkloristic study of material culture.2 (I believe evaluation to be so integral to the analysis of material culture that I feature it in the model for the study of bodily arts that I offer in the final chapter of my book, The Grace of Four Moons. ) Jones concludes The Craftsmen of the Cumberlands, his momentous study of the Kentucky chair maker Chester Cornett, with a model for the study of material culture, urging us to study the technology, producer, and consumer, as well as the interface between the product and the producer (Jones 1989:251). My aim over the last decade has been partly to apply Jones's evaluative approach to the study of dress and adornment in contemporary India. In studying saris, I utilize the folkloristic model for the study of material culture3 with its three key components.4 First, we must note production, an intervention in nature, the creation of an object that can be alienated from its maker. second, we look at exchange, a communication between the maker and the buyer, a transfer of the object from one person to another. And finally, we study consumption when the object once made and sold is now possessed, when this object is not only used, it is employed in a new wave of production, in a second cycle of creation. In consumption, the intervention is not in nature but in culture, when the object is placed within a created assemblage. The art of assemblage, an important creative act in contemporary life, results in arrangements in homes, on altars, and in museum exhibits. Ordered arrangements consist of canned good, items of yard art, and even of trash cans. Folklorists, including Jones, have undertaken worthy studies of the art of assemblage.5 Yet, the most common act of assemblage is that of getting dressed. This takes place daily, perhaps even more than once a day, by most people in the world. By choosing what to wear, and in choosing how to combine dress with ornaments, with shoes, with accessories, with hairstyles, people communicate their cultural identity, their historic period, and their personal aesthetics.6 While no one would question the fact that clothing displays individual and cultural identities, a deeper look at dress reveals the complexities in the production, marketing, and consumption of items of bodily adornment. …

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