PROGRAM | Preservation Studies

By: Reyhane Mirabootalebi Chair: Patricia Sloane-White

ABSTRACT

Living Kurdish traditional textiles have roots in Middle Eastern ancient mate-rial cultures and are rare repositories of historical, social, cultural, and artistic knowledge. Yet, they have not been subject to detailed scholarly studies. The repre-sentations in the existing literature are often incomplete, placing the focus of inves-tigation primarily on the textile’s physical aspects, e.g., forms, techniques, materials, and designs, without adequate attention given to the social contexts of production, trade, and use, or to the many actors involved in making textiles, most importantly women weavers. My research adopted an interdisciplinary theoretical framework in the study of carpet production that recognizes textile production as social labor, too. It combined art-historical studies and a qualitative ethnographic research methodolo-gy to explore both the formal qualities of textiles and the social variables of produc-tion systems as vital factors for understanding the formation, development, and con-tinuation of any tradition.

My study focuses on flatwoven carpet traditions of two distinct Kurdish soci-eties with shared historical, cultural, and linguistic origins separated by Iran and Iraq’s national and political borders. It examines the state of preservation of these carpets by exploring how the massive socioeconomic and political changes that these societies have endured since the early twentieth century have affected their old artistic and cultural practices.

Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, this research estab-lished that the production of flatwoven carpets or barr, which were primarily made by women in rural and pastoralist Kurdish communities, stopped by the late 1980s due to decades of economic instability, regional insecurity, mass displacement, and devastation of human lives and the environment. In Iranian Kurdistan, this study cen-ters on senneh gelim, a significant urban flatweave that Kurdish women have pro-duced since the eighteenth century in Kurdistan Province. This research investigates senneh gelim’s historical origin and presents its developmental trajectory, tracing back to the late eighteenth century and going forward until the contemporary period. My research indicates that contemporary senneh gelim, although retaining many fea-tures from pre-industrial production systems, has taken a different developmental path from the renowned classic senneh gelims. The findings point to a shift in the geographical centrality of the production from urban to rural milieus over the last few decades, resulting in a considerable transformation in all aspects of construction, materials, designs, and meanings.

The analyses of social processes underpinning the contemporary senne pro-duction establish that senneh weaving in all production settings reflects Kurdish women artisans’ marginalization experiences resulting from their situation at the in-tersection of gender, ethnicity, and class. The results highlight the complex relation-ships between persisting patriarchy and economic materialism, which have long formed the Iranian carpet industry’s operational dynamics, including those in Kurdi-stan. My work concludes that a combination of many internal and external factors, such as the global economy, the region’s geopolitics, and inherent social and eco-nomic unsustainability within the production system, have undermined senneh gelim’s potential to provide contemporary women weavers with a sustainable liveli-hood, thus threatening the development and future preservation of this significant Kurdish and Iranian textile heritage.

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