Bill Wood: “Hearst Ginda Verde: Following a Textile Pattern, Unraveling a Global Mimetic Meshwork”

Online event; email c21@uwm.edu to register and receive the link.

Please join us for a special virtual talk with Bill Wood (Anthropology, UWM) on “Hearst Ginda Verde: Following a Textile Pattern, Unraveling a Global Mimetic Meshwork.”

This talk traces a textile pattern’s appearance in blankets currently being sold through Pendleton Wool Mills as “Hearst Ginda Verde.” Wood unravels the meandering story of this pattern from its origins in the late 1800s, to its reproduction by the business Santa Fe Interiors in the 1990s, and on to its more recent sale through Pendleton. The name of the pattern used in Pendleton marketing points to the well-known Navajo textile collection of William Randolph Hearst. Approaching the pattern ethnographically affords an exploration of the ways that indigenous weavers and others become entangled in global articulations and practices. Unraveling the story of the production, marketing, and sale of several textiles featuring this pattern points toward what Michael Taussig and Homi Bhabha have characterized as the disruptive capacities of mimetic practices and products and toward an emergent global mimetic “meshwork” of weavers, dealers, and consumers.

**This talk is cosponsored with the UWM Anthropology department.**

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About the Speaker

Bill Wood is an associate professor in Anthropology at UWM. He was a C21 Faculty Fellow for the 2019-20 academic year. His research is focused on the cultural politics of heritage in global context. He is the author of Made in Mexico: Zapotec Weavers and the Global Ethnic Art Market (Indiana U. Press, 2008), an ethnographic account that follows weavers, designs, wool, and finished textiles primarily between Oaxaca, Mexico and the American Southwest.