Paper
Unweaving and Weaving the Relationship Between Mothers and Daughters: An Analysis from the Perspective of Care and Violence in a Village in Southern Chile
presenters
Loreto Tenorio Pangui
Nationality: Chile
Residence: Santiago
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Presence:Face to Face/ On Site
This presentation analyzes the relationship between adult mothers and daughters in a small mountain village in southern Chile. The reflections presented are based on an ethnography conducted for my doctoral thesis, in which, since 2022, I have carried out participant observation in workshops on weaving with natural fibers and have conducted 25 in-depth interviews with different women in the locality. Among the main findings, I argue that the persistence of various structural violences and relationships of subordination that occur at the social level influences how mothers raise their daughters. When raising their daughters, mothers are attentive to reading the social context, needing their daughters to survive biologically and socially in the world where they live, not in other worlds. Therefore, the mothers and their daughters creatively weave and unweave their kinship relationship. In this weaving, the threads of the care that mothers offered their daughters in the past are intertwined with the threads of punishments, which are often perceived as violent by the daughters in the present. This translates into the pattern where adult daughters construct their current lives: as women, mothers, wives, partners, and daughters, based on the relationship they wove with their mothers in the past. I conclude that when daughters attempt to unweave the violence received from their mothers, this process seems paradoxical, as it also unweaves maternal care.
Keywords:
Motherhood, Care, Violence