| Subject | : | Mugul Andrews 1996 ICOC Presentation |
| Author | : | R. John Howe |
| Date | : | 02-13-2000 on 04:33 p.m. |
| Dear folks - At the 1996 ICOC, Mugul Andrews gave a presentation "Turkmen Wedding Carpets and Their Ethnic Context." This presentation has now been published in "Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies," Volume V, Part I, pp.69-75. Since several of us, no doubt, have this publication, it might be good to read it and to mine it carefully for indications relevant to Stephen's salon. (Perception is active. We are likely to read and to notice different things.) I will restrict myself here only to what Ms. Andrews reports about what is often described as the "wedding carpet." First, she says that while living in 1970 with the Yomut Turkmen in Iran, she saw a young woman weave such a carpet and talked to her about it and the role it would play in her wedding. This Yomut woman reported that she would sit on it in the house where the wedding will take place, that she and her husband will "sit on it together and drink the sherbert and break bread together," and that about three days after (the wedding)the bride will carry it to her mother-in-law's house and sit on it while the mother-in-law and some of her close female friends, take off the bride's "girl's" cap, rearrange her hair in braids and put on a new cap and a headscarf. The bride reports that when she leaves the mother-in-law's home she will not use the carpet again until she returns to it and then it will be used as a seat for guests. This story suggests that there were "wedding" carpets made by Yomut brides to be and that they were made under special conditions (the prospective bride would not talk to anyone while she was weaving it for fear that gossip, etc. "would spoil its cleanness")and that they had specific functions in the wedding ceremony. Second, Ms. Andrews reports that this carpet was 3'5" X 2'6," smaller than the "tent carpets" they saw which tended to be about 5'3" X 3'7." Ms. Andrews then give 8 examples collected from catalogs that apparently seem to her within the range of the wedding carpet she saw being made. Here are their measurements and attributions: (I think the first one is likely Plate 4 from Vanishing Jewels, O'Bannon's work on Marvin Amstey's collection. The image appears to have be flipped horizontally.) Teke 3'9" X 3'2" Ersari 3'2" X 2'11" Teke 3'2" X 3'1" Teke 3'1" X 2'10" Teke 4'6" X 3'8" Teke 4'1" X 3'4" Ersari 3'5" X 3'3" Note that although Ms. Andrews' saw a "wedding" carpet being woven among the Yomuds, all of the examples she provides, although of similar sizes, are either Teke or Ersari. She then reports that inquiries made at her request by a friend in post-Soviet Turkestan about special wedding carpets indicate that they are "at present unknown" there and that "no one remembers them being used." So size similarity may not be sufficient to support the inference that a given, non-Yomud rug was a special wedding rug. One last thing such little rugs will likely disappoint us: Ms. Anderews reports that the character of the pattern used by the Yomuds she was among for their wedding rugs was unimportant and that the one she saw be made was of a pattern that she personally found rather unattractive. Regards, R. John Howe |
| Subject | : | RE:Mugul Andrews 1996 ICOC Presentation |
| Author | : | Yon Bard |
| Date | : | 02-13-2000 on 05:27 p.m. |
| What exactly does it mean that "the character of the pattern was unimportant"? Regards, Yon |
| Subject | : | RE:Mugul Andrews 1996 ICOC Presentation |
| Author | : | R. John Howe |
| Date | : | 02-13-2000 on 08:19 p.m. |
| Hi Yon - I think it means that Ms. Andrews could not detect in her conversation with the young Yomud bride to be that the bride to be felt anything special about the pattern in the way that she clearly did feel about the rug itself. Another way to think about this is that the young Yomud weaver did not choose a pattern that most rug scholars and collectors would feel had aesthetic merit. Andrews provides an image of the design that this young woman was weaving and it is one we'd all say is a recent, conventionalized Turkmen design of little interest to us. I can post it if that's useful. I mentioned this point because it seems one of those instances in which the weavers' values about their own traditional tribal objects may diverge somewhat from what we might project on to them. Regards, R. John Howe |
| Subject | : | RE:Mugul Andrews 1996 ICOC Presentation |
| Author | : | Yon Bard |
| Date | : | 02-14-2000 on 09:25 a.m. |
| John, you talk about weavers' choices and values, but did they have any choice? If you were a Yomud bride from a certain family, you wove an ashik-grid asmalyk; from another, it would be a tree asmalyk. You may have had control over some details (what direction the syrga branches, e.g.) but I susppect these were esthetic decisions. I doubt these decisions represented any 'values' to them, any more than similar decisions do to, say, American quilters. Of course I am speculating, but so is everyone else, and I think Okham's razor is on my side. Regards, Yon |
| Subject | : | RE:Mugul Andrews 1996 ICOC Presentation |
| Author | : | R. John Howe |
| Date | : | 02-15-2000 on 09:19 p.m. |
| Hi Yon - I'm actually mostly reporting on what Ms. Andrews seems to be saying in her 1996 ICOC presentation rather than making an argument of my own, but from my reading of her, tradition did not seem to influence the pattern of this Yomud wedding rug much. Here's what Mugul Andrews says in the relevant passage: ...It was not the design that was special: it was only the "Avgan narjis," the Afghan design which was particularly popular at that time for the smaller carpets, and for which we developed a particular dislike---in fact, for that reason we did not photograph it and I can only offer a slide of a similar piece taken the same year (Fig. 2). Carpets of this very small format were to be seen on the local market, and they too, tended to be done in non-traditional patterns. A number of them have also appeared in West-European galleries in recent years, but there, too, there is no standard ornament. It seems, if these were really wedding carpets, that the pattern was irrelevant. I can illustrate this by showing a few slides from catalogues (Figs. 3-9) Ms. Andrews shows on the facing page the rugs whose sizes I listed in my initial post in this thread. There are five different designs used in these seven rugs. Three of the Tekkes have similar chuval guls but different elem patterns. This suggests to me, as I think it did Ms. Andrews, that the patterns used in the wedding rug she saw made (Afghan by a Yomud)was not influenced, as the girl weaver claimed the making and the use of the rug itself were, by tradition. The variation in pattern in the other similary sized rugs (if one wants to think of them a possible "wedding" rugs) points in the same direction. It also seems to me now on this reading that size is not a sufficient indicator of what might be a wedding rug even among Yomud rugs of the size this girl wove, since Ms. Andrews saw similar sized rugs in the market at that time. There were, on her testimony, Yomud wedding rugs but they will be difficult to identify. Regards, R. John Howe |