Afro-Dit
Weavings and Wood: Introduction to Tribal Arts from Southeast Asia to West Africa
Third hour: Textiles of Central Asia
The next place I'd like to take you is the steppes of Central Asia. This is just northeast of Iran, north of Afghanistan, east of the Caspian Sea.
{Slide: Map}
It's high, rugged desert country. The dominant tribal group in this part of the world is the Turkmen. This group consists of 6 or so major tribes (the exact number depends on what you count as a major tribe), each of which has subdivisions within it. The Turkmen come from a tradition of pastoral nomadism, although many of them had settled into cities and towns by the mid 19th century and almost all have done so now.
Pastoral nomadism, the sheep herding life, has some interesting consequences. One is that you have to migrate twice a year between pastures that are cool in the summer and those that are reasonably warm in the winter. That means that your house and all the furniture in it have to be portable. So, brick houses and heavy wooden furniture are out. What do you use instead? Well, since you raise sheep, you have plenty of wool. And what you use for a house and for almost all of its furnishings are textiles made of wool.
The Turkmen have been said to live in a textile dominated culture. Their houses, the furnishings, almost everything they use is woven from wool. And their art isn't pictures painted on canvas stretched on wooden frames, nor is it sculpture. It's textiles and, not too surprisingly in view of its portability, jewelry.
The gender division of labor among the Turkmen is that the men are the shepherds and make the dyes. Women turn the wool into yarn and do the weaving. So this art form is essentially art made by women. That ought to please the feminists. The Turkmen weavers are as skilled as any on the planet, and Turkmen textiles have been desirable to Europeans and Americans almost since the public became aware of them.
The way Turkmen made their living was by selling their wool and textiles, and by raiding villages and cities. They were the bandits that made travel on the silk road from China to Turkey and Iran so dangerous. Like nomadic people almost everywhere, they were constantly under attack by the central governments. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward. Since they have no permanent addresses, nomads don't pay taxes and it's hard to conscript them into the army. That's serious to most central governments, but would probably be tolerated if there were no other problems. But the big problem nomads cause is that they raid villages, stealing and kidnapping. Central governments can't tolerate that, since the main reason citizenries put up with central governments at all is to keep the bandits off their doorsteps. The government that fails in that responsibility is likely to be overthrown. Incidentally, being kidnapped or captured by Turkmen often led to slavery. The slave trade existed in central Asia well into the 20th century, and it was said that if you wanted a good slave at a fair price the best thing to do was to seek out a Turkmen trader. They had a reputation for representing their goods honestly. I should mention that among the very few positive achievements of the Soviet government was the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in this part of the world.
Turkmen textiles are mostly pile weaves. That means that the warp get set onto the loom, and the wefts interweave through it to make the fabric. In between rows of wefts, loops of yarn are wound around the warps and cut to form pile. These loops are referred to as knots, although they really aren't knotted.
{Slide: Pile Weave Diagram}
The designs are formed by varying the colors of the yarn used for the knots. Thus, the designs are created in rows, starting at the end of the item that's woven first, and the design elements are pairs of tufts of the knots projecting above the foundation. The finer the knotting, the more detailed the design can be.
The Turkmen wove things like rugs for the tent floor, rugs that were hung over the tent opening to serve as doors, storage bags of various sizes for different purposes, and a variety of trappings and decorations. Some were for everyday use, some were for special occasions and rituals. The very value of a woman was largely determined by her skill as a weaver. Turkmen wedding processions kept the bride hidden in a tent-like affair atop a camel. What was displayed was her woven dowry.
The next slide is a Turkmen bag, basically a dirty clothes hamper or a clean clothes drawer, and I'll use it to show you the essential elements of Turkmen weavings.
{Slide: Tekke Juval}
Bags do two things. One is obvious, they help to organize stuff. You can just hear a Turkmen woman yelling at her kid, "How many times must I tell you not to leave your clothes on the floor. Dirty clothes belong in a juval!" The other is equally important, and not so obvious to people like us. They conceal things.
In almost all of Asia and in the Mediterranean part of Europe it's believed that if you own something that incites envy by someone else, this will bring the malevolence of the evil eye down upon you. The Italian expression is that it invites malocchio. To avoid this, you conceal the things that might be envied. Thus, in Asia, no merchant will give you anything without wrapping it. To do so would be the equivalent of wishing bad luck on you. Likewise, if you admire something, the owner will often give it to you as a gift. This isn't just a good will gesture, it's partially self-defense. Bags and textiles in Asia serve the function of concealing things from the envy of others, and this is very important.
Getting back to this bag. It's about 3+ feet wide and 2+ feet deep, and once upon a time it had a back. The opening was the width of the top. This one was probably made in the first half of the 19th century, and was clearly not an everyday utilitarian item. The purplish areas are silk, an expensive commodity for these people, and one that didn't hold up very well to abrasion.
First, notice the palette. The background color of the field, border, and area surrounding the borders is red. This is true for the overwhelming majority of Turkmen weavings, although the shade of red can vary from the nice, clear red of this Tekke piece to orange, brown or violet. Second, the basic layout is typically Turkmen. The field is surrounded by one or more borders, three in this case, and there is an area outside the borders. The skirt at the end is also a typical feature, although in rugs it is usually at both ends instead of just at the bottom.
Let's look at the field. It consists of two major elements, called guls, arranged in alternating ranks and files. The major guls each consist of four quadrants, the diagonal pairs being identical. Notice how they sort of disappear under the border at the edges of the field. This gives the illusion that the field is actually infinite, or at least very large, and that the border is sort of a window through which you can see part of it. All of these features are pretty consistent throughout the Turkmen tribes, although details and palette vary, of course.
The word "gul" means flower in Farsi. But what are the guls? This is one of those things about which there is much fantasy and speculation. Some, like the major one on this piece, were associated with specific tribes and are sometimes thought to be a kind of a tribal emblem. But the evidence for that is pretty skimpy, if it exists at all. There are people who see all kinds of zoomorphic imagery, particularly in the negative space, and who would insist that the motifs on the skirt are bows and arrows. I tend to a much less romantic view. The things on the skirt are very clearly floral to my brain, and the notion that nomads living in high deserts thought flowers were wonderful seems logical enough. Perhaps they are poppies, which are native to the area, and are not only beautiful, but hallucinogenic. The major guls seem to be derived from ancient Turkic motifs, and are probably ultimately floral as well. The details in them are interesting and of morphology common to western and central Asia. The best guess about the source of the latchhooks and "birdheads" is that they are evolved from flatweaves, where the technique of slit kilim weaving dictates that there be no long vertical lines, so diagonals and horizontal lines predominate.
Let me offer you a very brief survey of the sorts of things the Turkmen wove.
{Slide: Yomud Torba}
This is another storage bag, about 2+ feet by 1+ feet. This size would seem appropriate for things like socks, gloves, and so forth. The guls are different than those in the bag we just saw, but the layout is similar. Borders surround a field of guls, with an area surrounding the borders, and the same background color throughout. Again, you can have a good time speculating about the iconography: bows and arrows, animals, you name it. The fact is, nobody knows. Notice the stub of a fringe. The fringe is common on bags this size, and was once probably about as long as the depth of the bag. It's very fragile, and usually is lost from older pieces.
{Slide: Yomud Ensi}
This is a tent door. It was attached to the top of the doorway, and could be rolled up or allowed to hang over the opening. The four panels in the layout is very typical of Turkmen door rugs, as is the skirt. These were once thought to be prayer rugs because many of them have an arch-like element near the top, but this is pretty much discredited now. The Turkmen weren't Moslem until fairly late in the 19th century, and such prayer rugs as they made seem to be pretty obviously intended for wealthy Persians. And the tent door rugs are much too big to make sense as prayer rugs.
{Slide: Asmalyk - Old}
I think the wedding trappings are among the most interesting Turkmen items, and this is one of them. It's called an asmalyk, and decorated the side of a camel during wedding processions. Once upon a time it had strings of pompoms hanging from it, which would sway to and fro as the animal walked. This is probably about as sensual as a camel gets. The animal's knees would be covered with small pentagonal trappings, typically in this design but with the scale reduced. The way the scale reduction was accomplished was by using only a single element of the lattice and only a single border, rather than by reducing the sizes of any of the elements. This one is quite old, probably made in the first half of the 19th century. The colors are glorious, especially in the border, and the general spaciousness is characteristic of old Turkmen weavings. Another indicator of age in Turkmen textiles is the fact that the guls are fairly tall. By the third quarter of the 19th century Turkmen pile rugs and bags were being influenced by the desires of Europeans, who used them for rugs, table covers and upholstery. The Europeans liked designs with more detail, so the Turkmen began packing the knots down more tightly in order to increase the knot density and detail. This flattens the motifs. You can easily see this in the next slide.
{Slide: Asmalyk, ca. 1875}
This one was probably made around 1875. You can see the flattening of the guls in the field, the greater regularity, the much busier borders, the centering of the design within the field. This, incidentally, is not a horrible example. It is, in fact, a very good one. But the first one is outstanding.
You might notice that the asmalyks have a white background, and differ in this respect from most Turkmen weavings. The white background is said to be related to weddings, and there are occasional Turkmen bags with white backgrounds, too. The next slide shows one.
{Slide: White Ground Kap}
This is a wonderful old bag, with what most would read as a tree of life central motif and flowers filling the minor borders. The major borders, with the white grounds, are probably floral as well, although the motifs are also suggestive of birds. What is their historical derivation? What did the weaver think she was representing? Are those two things the same? We have no way of knowing.
The last slide I want to show you in this group is a functional item, and you'd never guess what it is for if I didn't tell you.
{Slide: Ok-bash}
Let me get you started. This little item gets sewn along the side edges to form a cylinder, and the four points get joined at their edges so the completed product looks rather like an artillery shell. It's called an ok-bash, which means arrow cover in the language of the people who made it. And for a long time it was believed to be a quiver. But that all seems to be a misunderstanding. The Turkmen don't call this an ok-bash, they call it an uuk-bash. That word means tent strut cover. And what they used these things for was to cover the ends of the tent struts when they bundled them up and carried them on camels during migrations. The uuk-bash also had strings of pompoms sewn to them, which moved when the camel walked. The purpose of the whole thing, it is said, was for the camel behind to see the movement of the pompoms and avoid getting stuck in the eye by the struts on the camel in front of him.
{Lights on - "Mistake Torba"}
I want to finish up the Turkmen topic with this very
interesting bag. It's 19th century, a container for small stuff like socks and
gloves. Notice that the weaver miscalculated how much warp length she needed,
and realized this partway through. She was faced with a problem here, and I
think the way she resolved it tells us something about what was important to
her. Consider the solutions she could have taken. She might have continued
exactly the way she was going, and finished up without the guls disappearing
into the borders the way they do. She could have eliminated or simplified the
borders. What she did was to change the scale of the motifs to make them end up
in the right place. That is, what was most important to her was the complete
layout, even if it meant introducing the awkwardness of the scale change. I've
seen similar solutions to the same problem in other Turkmen bags. Also, notice
the change in color when she begins making the scale change. It's as though she
wants to call attention to it. This almost surely has some cultural
significance, although exactly what it is would be a matter of speculation.
This piece still has the original back on it, so you can see how the weaver
created the bag on the loom and how it gets sewn into the final form.