This dissertation is a social and material cultural history of the handicraft carpet industry in the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It examines how the carpet handicraft associated with the Islamic East entered the vocabulary of the Soviet state, despite its emphasis on heavy industrial development. Woven mostly by women and girls in village and pastoral nomadic contexts, the so-called Oriental carpets of the Russian Empire became sought-after items within the global carpet trade in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The research explores how the Soviet state replaced and replicated business networks that had sprung up during the carpet boom starting in the 1870s, consolidating them into state structures of trade, industry, and national heritage. Despite the rhetoric of socialist modernization of the Soviet Union, carpets continued to be knotted and woven by hand through the end of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the women’s bodies, skills, and the products of their labor were categorized and understood in different ways.
The dissertation uses handicraft carpets to reframe our understanding of how the Soviet Union incorporated peripheral regions such as the Caucasus into the cultural, social, and economic landscape of the Soviet Union. Moving beyond frameworks of the center and periphery that has characterized previous scholarship of the region, the dissertation foregrounds the Caucasus as a nexus of networks that connected the Soviet Union to Europe, Americas, and the Near East. It provides an alternative reading of Soviet national cultures as rooted not so much in top-down or bottom-up negotiations within the cultural or political spheres but in the cross-fertilizations through local, regional, and international networks.
The work looks past national narratives to emphasize the role that merchants, weavers, and artists played in shaping the trajectory of handicraft carpet weaving in the Soviet Caucasus. Drawing on a close study of objects, visual material, oral history, and institutional records, the dissertation shows how the construction of Soviet national cultural heritage in the Caucasus was born out attempts reshape the relationship between the practitioner and the craft.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/he6x-gh98 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Ryuk, Sohee |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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