Carpet Weaving and Women's Work

• In Event: Gender, Labor, and Identity in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus

Abstract

This paper explores gender in the context of carpetweaving in the Soviet peripheries as carpet weaving became more institutionalized from the 1920s. Although women were the main purveyors of the carpetweaving craft in nomadic pastoralist or in village settings, the development of workshops often brought supervising artists and technicians, who were often men, into the picture. Drawing on comparisons with Iran, this paper will examine the ways in which the concept of women’s work became salient in discussions of tradition and labor.

Author

• Sohee Ryuk, University College Dublin