Who sewed those buttons? Materials and Technologies in the Making of the Global Self. An Example from Guåham in Månislan Marianas

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In this paper, I build off of archaeological buttons uncovered at the San Dionisio cemetery (Guåhan, Månislan Marianas) by the Aberigua project. Aberigua investigates the different strategies that 17th-century Jesuit missions implemented in the colonization of the Indigenous CHamoru being. This colonization of being was not configured in a vacuum but within a global patriarchal turn that promoted gender asymmetry at a global scale. New materials and new quotidian technologies and activities were fundamental to it.

Buttons were not native to Guam. They were introduced by the mission in a process that textilized CHamoru bodies through dress. In this process, those technologies that implied more functional specialization were assigned to men, while less work specialization fell to women, in tune with the new gender understandings that Jesuits wanted to promote.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow