Patterns and Collections: Carpets from Central Asia in the Imperial Russian Imagination

With the expansion of the Russian Empire southward in the nineteenth century, connoisseurs, art historians, and scholars in Russia began to pay attention to carpet traditions in the new territories of the Russian Empire in Turkestan. In journals and other specialty publications, they underscored a need to establish claims to authority over the knowledge of the traditional craft. They were highly attuned to parallel accounts of carpet weaving from regions that had a longer history of research and collecting of carpets. In contrast to the situation in Western Europe or the United States, commentators bemoaned the fact that the public and even professed experts in Russia did not properly appreciate carpets from the Caucasus and Central Asia. These scholars articulated a need to establish authority over the carpet weaving traditions of Russia's colonial possessions, resulting in a push toward a serious study of carpet weaving as a legitimate field of inquiry. This paper uses published sources on early carpet scholarship from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to examine how carpet weaving traditions in Central Asia entered an imperial discourse of knowledge. It argues that attempts to understand and categorize carpet weaving as an art form occurred along two fronts. Intellectuals and scholars attempted to wrest control over the locus of knowledge from experts in the West as well as from local weavers. In the process, they established a distinctly imperial vision of carpet weaving in contrast to competing imperial discourses and over traditional forms of knowledge.