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Circulation and mobility of the Sewing Machine in Nitrate Territories and Lican Antay Communities (1870–1950)

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No. 52 (2025): Segundo Semestre
https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-1472.2025.82735
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Abstract

This article examines the circulation, appropriation, and re-signification of the sewing machine in northern Chile, focusing on nitrate territories and Lican Antay Indigenous communities between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. Through a qualitative methodology that integrates historical, ethnographic, and material sources, the study analyzes how this technical-industrial artifact was domesticated in productive, educational, and everyday contexts, giving rise to new forms of clothing, labor, and female agency. Far from representing a mere technological transfer, the sewing machine was embedded in local frameworks of meaning, intertwining visual regimes, ancestral textile knowledge, and moral economies of dress. In this process, hybrid aesthetics and specific modes of sewing emerged, revealing how communities reconfigured their relationship with modernity and industry according to their own cultural coordinates. The study offers a situated reading of the technical object as a sociotechnical and liminal artifact, capable of weaving together histories of gender, class, migration, and resistance in peripheral scenarios of global capitalism.

Keywords:

seamstress , natives , sewing machine , dressmaker , saltpetre mining
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How to Cite
Morales, H. ., Müller, E., Galaz-Mandakovic, D., & Andrea Wechsler Pizarro, A. (2026). Circulation and mobility of the Sewing Machine in Nitrate Territories and Lican Antay Communities (1870–1950). Revista Chilena De Antropología, (52), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-1472.2025.82735
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Revista Chilena de Antropología
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
Universidad de Chile
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