[Lasa] Lynn Meisch ¡presente!

[Marc Becker]

Hello all,
Ann Rowe <aprowe en gwu.edu> sends the sad news of the passing of Lynn 
Meisch, an expert in Andean textiles.
-Dan

     I am sad to report the passing of Lynn Ann Meisch on December 4,
     2020 at 75, of complications from Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune
     disease to which she was genetically susceptible. She was known
     primarily for her documentation of indigenous textile traditions
     from Bolivia (particularly Tarabuco), Peru (Amantaní Island and the
     Huamachuco area), and highland Ecuador. In pursuit of good field
     records she studied and worked at both photography and penmanship,
     and her photographs were good enough to sell to travel magazines.
     She also collected textiles both for herself and for museums,
     including The Textile Museum in Washington and the Museo Nacional de
     Etnografia y Folklor in La Paz. Her textiles, notes, and photographs
     are now being accessioned at the Field Museum of Natural History in
     Chicago and will be available for study in the future.

                  Lynn was born February 17, 1945 and received her BA at
     Reed College in Oregon, and then an MA in Humanities, with emphasis
     on Latin America, minor in History, from San Francisco State
     University in 1973. Although raised in Minneapolis, she fled the
     snow and lived in San Francisco, where she worked in a law office to
     support herself. She traveled extensively in the Andes and wrote A
     Traveler’s Guide to El Dorado and the Inca Empire: Colombia,
     Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, published by Penguin in 1977 and reprinted
     three times, the last in 1987 with revisions. She also led well
     received tours. Her travels caused her to become interested in the
     weaving.

     Lynn began publishing articles on textiles in 1980, initially about
     Ecuador. She learned to spin and used it as an entrée but was more
     modest than necessary about her knowledge of weaving techniques. Her
     Bolivian field work was principally in 1982 but additionally in
     1974, 1981, 83, 85, and 86 for shorter periods, and Amantaní in 1983
     and 2001. By 1986 she returned to Ecuador, and her book Otavalo:
     Weaving, Costume and the Market was published in Quito in 1987. She
     collaborated with Laura M. Miller and Ann Pollard Rowe on a project
     to document textiles and costume in highland Ecuador as a whole,
     which was eventually published in four installments, all edited by
     Rowe: Costume and Identity in Highland Ecuador (University of
     Washington Press, 1998), several articles in The Textile Museum
     Journal vol. 42-43, 2003-04, published 2005, Weaving and Dyeing in
     Highland Ecuador (University of Texas Press 2007), and Costume and
     History in Highland Ecuador (University of Texas Press 2011). She
     was creative in finding financial support for her fieldwork, and
     received Fulbright, Inter-American Foundation, USAID, Bead Society
     of Los Angeles, and Earthwatch grants. In 1988 she curated an
     exhibition on Tarabuco textiles at the San Francisco Craft and Folk
     Art Museum, and in 1997 edited the catalog for the exhibition
     Traditional Textiles of the Andes at the Fine Arts Museums of San
     Francisco.  She also published some thirty articles and contributed
     to the volume on Latin America in The Encyclopedia of World Dress
     and Fashion (Oxford University Press, 2010).

     In 1997 Lynn also received her Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford,
     partly as an excuse to do more fieldwork. Her book derived from her
     dissertation was Andean Entrepreneurs: Otavalo Merchants and
     Musicians in the Global Arena, (University of Texas Press, 2002).
     Although Otavalo merchants have sold textiles since pre-Hispanic
     times, the book brings this practice up to date. She did spend more
     time in Otavalo than in any other Andean location. After her degree
     she taught a diverse array of courses, from classical antiquity to
     modern performance arts and museology, in the Department of
     Anthropology at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, while
     living in Walnut Creek. She loved teaching and won several awards
     for it. In 2011, she and her students curated an exhibition, Gift of
     the Gods: Exploring Maize, Culture, and Indigenous Art in the
     Americas, at the Hearst Art Gallery at the College, for which there
     was also a small catalogue. Her last Andean fieldwork was in San
     Ignacio de Loyola, in the Huamachuco area of Peru, during several
     trips in 2006-09, where she focused on the belts whose manufacture
     had survived since the Incas. She retired in 2015, as Professor
     Emerita, when her Sjogrens symptoms made it impossible for her to
     continue. After retirement, she worked on two ethnographic projects
     in her local area, which unfortunately remained unpublished,
     interviewing and reading about the children of people who were
     affected by WWII, and of women affected by the AIDS epidemic.

                  Lynn was intrepid and outgoing and had many compadres
     in Ecuador, in both Otavalo and Saraguro. She took godparenthood as
     a way of giving back to the people she was studying and was always
     ethical in her relations with them. Through a small foundation that
     she started, Fundación Jatari, she supported the education of many
     godchildren. She was generous with her time and knowledge and
     delighted in the quirks and foibles of human nature. She loved and
     wore Ecuadorian jewelry. She is survived by a brother and sister, as
     well as the many godchildren. She will be much missed.