Pierre Raymond

Who is Pierre Raymond?

Pierre Raymond is a social scientist who has been living in Colombia since 1979, and has been working on the country’s rural problems. He has undertaken in Colombia, his adopted country, several studies of rural economy, sociology and history. He also has been teaching at university subjects related to these topics to students in economics, rural development and forestry.

One of the research works he has completed in the Santander department, concerns a traditional cottage industry which was then about to fall in disuse. It relates the history of cotton growing and textile production. It gives an overview of the agronomic, economic and social aspects of this activity and describes the traditional techniques of spinning and weaving. It all started while undertaken field work on another investigation, he accidentally met three old ladies that were processing cotton fibre by ancient techniques.

The results of this research were published in three places. Later on, two other researchers studied other aspects of the local textile production and new information was thus published.