Guatemala is the beautiful traditional costumes the (mostly) women and
(occasionally) men wear. The colors are simply stunning, and every
village has a slightly different design, although more and more Mayan
people are switching to factory-produced costume which is still
beautiful, but doesn't have a strong regional or village tone.
Regardless, I will eventually try to put some pictures up to show some
examples, though I don't have many photos of Mayan costumes--women here
are famously averse to having their pictures taken.
Some people believe that the Mayan costume was originally imposed by the
Spanish, which wouldn't surprise me, since the clothing here has some
interesting similarities to the clothing worn by Quechua and Aymara
speakers in Bolivia and Peru. Regardless, however, the Mayan people
have taken ownership of the clothing, and they identify very strongly
with their traditional costume as one of the more important parts of
their costume.
It would be interesting to know more about the origin of the
costumes--that is, the origins of the differences between regional
costumes. I wonder if regional costumes play an economic role--similar
to the "branding" that marketers engage in for consumer products today.
If village A has a particular costume and a particular product, and you
see somebody with that pattern on, you can be pretty sure that they'll
be selling that product. And if it's a high-quality product, consumers
will come to associate the costume with the good and it's quality.
It's also likely that the costume plays a political function in terms of
local security--even if you don't know everybody in the region, if you
see somebody wearing a strange costume on, you know to keep an eye on
them, because they're not constrained by the local kinship bonds in the
area...
Just some thoughts--somebody (some Anthropologist, probably) knows all
the answers to these questions, but I was thinking about this last
summer, and the thought popped into my head again today for some reason.
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