Dorothy Armstrong

Left: John Lewis Pakistan Bokhara Handmade Rug, Red, £100 - £700
Handwoven woolen ‘Bokhara’ carpet, Pakistan, probably Lahore area c2017.

Right: Handwoven woolen carpet, Tekke tribe, Turkman Confederation, Central Asia, early 19th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

My thesis looks at the ‘oriental’ carpet, a term it regards as contested, as an example of transgeographical and transcultural hybridization of style, materials, production methods and meaning. It suggests that such hybridization is intimately connected with identity-formation, across individuals, communities, states and territories.

The thesis makes transparent a European and North American orthodoxy of such carpets, and challenges assumptions about better and worse, more and less beautiful or accomplished, viewing such ideas as an expression of culturally-conditioned beliefs about taste, rather than a set of incontestable truths about the quality of a carpet.  Instead it connects the orthodoxy of the ‘oriental’ carpet with social, political, economic and ethical ideologies of Europe and America during their period of hegemonic power from 1840.

It reclaims two populations of carpets which have been excluded from the canon by the Euro-American definition of what an ‘oriental’ carpet should be, machine-made patterned pile ‘oriental’ carpets, and copies and versions, hand-made or machine-made, in locations distinct from their areas of original production. By excluding these carpets from the canon, the Euro-American orthodoxy has also excluded some of the most common experiences of ‘oriental’ carpets, by makers and consumers.

The thesis seeks to create a new intellectual apparatus with which to analyse such carpets. It explores alternative systems for understanding and engaging with them, rather than accepting ideas created by the metropolitan centre, the market, the museum or the academy. It restores marginalized practices, products and regions of production to the discourse. It acknowledges the significance of replicas, versions and fakes in our experience of ‘oriental’ carpets.

It asserts the value of a cosmopolitan process of continuous hybridization, rather than an orientalist freeze-framing of the carpets of Islamic West, South and Central Asia as an example of a pre-industrial, pre-lapsarian, exotic Other.