By ROGER HAMILTON

Traditional weaving remains alive and well in Santo Domingo Xenacoj and many other villages in the highlands of Guatemala. This is true despite television and the global economy, centuries of war and poverty, and even opposition from the "modernizing" elements of society, such as one Guatemalan historian who has called the textiles evidence of "an archaic and backward mentality."

Today we celebrate these women (back-strap weaving is done exclusively by women), not just for the beauty of their creations but also as transmitters of cultural values.

But traditional does not mean static, in the Guatemalan highlands or anywhere else. Any genuine artistic expression is dynamic, and the world of Guatemalan textiles, how they are produced, and their role in society, is ever-changing.

This point was clearly brought home in a recent lecture at the IDB's Washington, D.C., headquarters by Ann Rowe, curator of Western Hemisphere textiles at the city's Textile Museum. Her talk on weaving and women's dress from Chimaltenango, Guatemala, was presented in conjunction with an exhibition of textiles and woodcarvings from that country on view at the Bank's Cultural Center Art Gallery.

Less spinning, more weaving. One major change has been in the area of materials. Although modern Guatemalan weavers use cotton, as did their pre-Columbian predecessors, the commercially produced thread that became available to them after World War II is now used almost exclusively. The women no longer must spend time laboriously spinning and dyeing thread with natural plant, animal and mineral substances. While non-Indian connoisseurs may mourn the loss of the warmth and subtle imperfections of the natural dyes, the weavers themselves do not. "The less spinning they have to do, the more time they can spend weaving," said Rowe. The result has been bigger, more elaborate designs, sometimes entirely covering the underlying fabric.

Like many traditional artisans, the Guatemalan women have few qualms about adopting new designs. Using a brocading technique, where the threads line up evenly in rows, the weavers can easily duplicate graph paper-drawn designs from European pattern books. Lest this seem a corruption of cultural traditions, it should be pointed out that some of the designs for the very expensive and highly celebrated rugs made by the Navajo tribe in the United States were copied from Middle Eastern carpets.

The women also have been influenced by European fashions in dress. In the old days, said Rowe, women preferred their huipiles cut straight down the sides, producing a stockier look that denoted prosperity and an abundance of food. Today, the preference is for narrower huipiles that may taper at the waist, and that are further drawn tight with a narrow belt, rather than the old-style wide sash.

The technology for producing textiles has also changed. The treadle loom, still operated by hand, but much faster than its backstrap counterpart, has long been used to make cloth for women's skirts on a commercial basis. Weaving on the treadle loom is an exclusively male occupation, a division of labor that Rowe said had a counterpart in medieval Europe, where women wove on a vertical hand loom at home until the treadle loom came on the scene, after which weaving became a male profession.

While fabric woven on a treadle loom can still be considered handmade, other manufacturing innovations hold less aesthetic promise. Designs are increasingly produced by machine embroidery, for example, and many mothers are buying huipiles for their daughters rather than making them at home, said Rowe. The reason is something any modern mother can relate to: they're cheap, and nowadays, with everyone always in a hurry, who has the time to weave?