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Accepted Paper:

Concepts of ownership and originality in Kazakh crafts  
Anna Portisch (SOAS)

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on two contrasting approaches to Kazakh crafts, in a domestic production setting and a museum environment. It explores how notions of creativity, standards, ownership and originality are tied up with belonging to a community of practice and being a recognised contributor to a cultural practice with a particular social relevance.

Paper long abstract:

In most Kazakh households in western Mongolia, young girls learn to contribute to textile production just as they learn to contribute to other household tasks. Felt carpets and embroidered wall hangings are made in daily life for the home and given as part of wedding-related gift-exchanges. Young girls work together with their elders and other co-learners, learning by watching others, practising, and gradually gaining responsibility. Most families in this remote, mountainous region are dependent on herds of animals for their livelihood and raw materials such as sheep's wool are used to make many domestic crafts. Learning to make crafts is thus part of a more widely relevant set of livelihood skills, and a means of contributing to the often collaborative activities of other family members. Crafts are not approached as an expression of an 'artistic vision' of a single craftswoman, but rather as functional soft furnishings, often the result of many people's work. In an environment of scarcity and poverty, women often innovate and improvise, using new materials, tools and designs. Similar craft are displayed in museum collections in Kazakhstan emphasising planes of meaning that are often absent in the practices of the craftswomen of western Mongolia. This paper looks at contrasting understandings of meaning, heritage, originality, ownership and appropriation, and how these are associated and negotiated in the everyday craft practices of Kazakh women.

Panel P02
Appropriation & ownership of artisanal knowledge: explorations at the interface between craft know-how and institutional codification
  Session 1