Burkett and Beyond

The Burkett and Beyond project offers a doctoral student the unique opportunity to work with the Horniman Museum on an exceptional collection of 87 felt textiles from the Middle East and Afghanistan, gathered by curator and art historian Mary Burkett from 1960-79. The aim is to contextualize this in the light of regional events in the subsequent 35-40 years. Burkett's collection brought felt, a characteristic domestic textile of both nomadic and settled communities in the region, to the attention of scholars at a time when it was beginning to fall out of use and considered too mundane to be of significance to museums of the day. Her research was curtailed by the Iran Revolution and Russian invasion of Afghanistan, both in 1979.
This exceptional textile resource of an ostensibly workaday fabric of society provides a valuable basis for examining textile practices and socio-cultural change during the time-rift between collection and today. The project will enable a doctoral student to bring Burkett's research up-to-date, focusing on Iran, especially during this important and unique period of improved relations in the region and resurgence of handicraft production. This will provide a valuable context for improved intellectual interpretation of the collection, enabling it to be used more effectively.
The project will have a clear ethno-historical focus. The student will compare organization of felt production between migrating pastoralist communities and settled workshops, and between past and contemporary generations. Factors such as technique, colour and imagery may help identify the historical trajectories and relationships between past and present communities in this region. Groups may include nomadic Bakhtiari, Lurs, Qashgai, and Kurds along with settled producers in Samiabad, Shiraz and Ardabil, regions which Burkett visited. Thus it may be possible to link material in the collection with specific workshops, journeymen and migrating groups, tracing some textiles and their production to their associated communities through both time and space, while revealing contemporary and changing practices among groups who still use and produce felt.
Key anthropological research themes informing the project include: continuity and change; the impact of war, trauma and migration on domestic craft practice; community valuation of regional heritage; creativity, skill and improvisation in cultural transmission; intergenerational relations; relations between nomadic and settled communities; social memory; museums as cultural brokers; collecting and curating practices; and sustainable heritage practices.
The student will be encouraged to adopt innovative methods in conjunction with their study. These will include apprenticeship to gain insights into skill and motif transmission. They will use film to document local practice. They will take photographs of the collection to show to communities of origin to elicit memories of past felt textile practices and explore felt's changing value for people today. The student will also develop a WordPress site during the project to gather data, document the project, and establish contacts with regional museums and craft associations as means of investigating past workshop practices, the guild system, and contemporary felt textile production.
This innovative artifact-focused approach to the dynamics of creativity and heritage in community textile practices in the Middle East will provide important new understandings of the processes of continuity and change, especially in periods of turmoil and war. It will also provide insights to intergenerational change and diverse felt textile practices between nomadic and settled groups. It will be benefit both museology and the anthropology of textiles, and will create potential for a dialogue between curators, craft-workers and scholars across these regions. Public events such as study days at the Museum will further widen public engagement.