Weaving luntaya acheik (1): Modernising Traditional Craft Practice

The Saunders Weaving and Vocational Institute (SWVI) is situated in Yay-twin-nyi-naung ward, Lay-su quarter, Amarapura Township, Mandalay Region on the side of Mandalay-Sagaing road.

Till 1910, the local weavers used the hand throwing loom which could weave 24 inches only. When Mr. L. H. Saunders, Judicial Commissioner of Upper Burma, found that the technology of hand loom in Myanmar was old, he introduced in 1910, a fly shuttle loom used in England.

Connecting the Curriculum with the Community

After meeting the elders of the community at the village administrator's office, I and my students started looking at ways in which we could reach out to the children of the village.

Meeting with the Community Members about Trash

We had a discussion with village leaders about putting trash systematically in our field visit. We gave them some dustbins to implement this. Our discussion focused on whether the villagers knew how to put trash systematically, and if we could get their permission to share our knowledge with the children of their village.

Comparing street markets: Myanmar and Leiden

The Saturday Market opens every Saturday along the canals (Nieuwe Rijn, Vismarkt en Botermarkt) and a smaller one on Wednesdays. There are many makeshift stalls on Saturdays but fewer on Wednesdays. The stalls sell - flowers, bags, toys, foods/ drinks , accessories (bicycle, tailor, fashion etc), speciality food like Middle East cuisine/ ingredients, Dutch herring, chesses etc. The stalls are always busy.

Family and women: Leiden and Mali

The family is a social institution. It is beautiful to see a mother and her children together because it reflects the natural love and the affectability that exists between her and her offsprings. In Leiden, the parental concept is very visible in the streets because it is found that the parents and their children are at the edge of a bicycle (the parents and their children: case where all drive together; the case where the mother also pilot alone). Education is one of the priorities of the population of this city of the Netherlands.

Rice Varieties

One of the items on display at most of the local Autonomous Council sponsored/organized exhibitions at BTC areas of Assam is different varieties of rice seeds, including indigous and hybrid ones. The main target is to create awareness of hybrid varieties of rice but what it does is also make aundience realize the invisibility of indigenous varieties.

Indigo: The Center of ‘Locality’

Similar in many other places in the world, natural dyeing in Taiwan disappeared when the synthetic dye was widely distributed. Taiwan underwent fast modernization during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) that was also when Taiwanese indigo dye production and dyeing went down the lane. As a massive amount of Japanese machine-printed textiles entered the Taiwanese market, local dyeing workshops quickly shut down or turned into dealer shops of ready-made textiles. Since then, Taiwan indigo industry, once prevailing, now only existed in the memory of the elders.

Indigo as Pedagogy

Starting 2012, the TNUA Centre for Traditional Arts (CTA) initiated a series of field courses, including indigenous boat making, bark cloth making, banana fiber crafts, ritual parades etc.; the course of ‘Natural Dyeing’ was one of them. These courses aimed to bring students out of the classroom to learn from the soil and different people who give life to traditional arts, and to learn how traditional arts are related to the society and their generation. The 2013 course of ‘Natural Dyeing’, conducted with many partners, was divided into three main stages.

Reading through interpretation: New Leiden Clothes

For seven centuries, the identity of the city of Leiden was determined by woollen cloth fabric. The last cloth manufacturer closed in 1977, and with it the long tradition of woollen cloth ended.

Three terms that tell something about craft

While visiting the craft beer brewery, Benjamin, one of the co-founders of the brewery, was the tour guide for our visit. I find three terms were used frequently in his talk: 'to be honest,' 'but' and 'the beauty is.' The image been built from these word choices breaks some stereotypes on craft in my mind, but also proves some imaginations I had.

Humanities across Borders

A Humanist Model of Collaborative Higher Education

Photograph(s)