Following the Felt: Object Trajectories and Gendered Social Networks in Contemporary Western Mongolia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have suggested that investment in flexible and spatially extensive social networks helped sustain mobile pastoralist communities and states in the past. This study explores the material dimensions of such social networks through an investigation of household textile exchange among contemporary herders in Western Mongolia. Today, Kazakh Mongolian women produce felt carpets (syrmaq) to give as gifts to each of their daughters’ husbands’ close relatives—an obligation that can require years of crafting and collecting. The formal exchange of felt carpets is often preceding by earlier exchanges of labor and raw material within womens’ informal social networks. The carpets displayed in the yurt (kiiz yi) thus reflect womens’ shifting positions in multigenerational households as well as their involvement in varied social relations—with their natal families, with their husband’s relatives, with neighbors and friends. By mapping the social and spatial trajectories of these objects through time, this study aims to identify patterns in material culture distribution of use in archaeological interpretation. It also highlights women’s skillful management of social relations as a key factor in the resilience of mobile pastoralist lifeways past and present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36496.0