Abstract
The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), hosted by the British Museum and financed by the Arcadia Fund, exemplifies initiatives that aim to preserve diverse material knowledges and practices variously threatened with disappearance. Based on insights from six EMKP projects, we critically interrogate such an emphasis on “endangerment,” highlighting how endangerment is closely entangled with resilience. Spanning six distinct material knowledges practices (wild silk textiles; hide and fiber crafts; artificial island-building; felt hats; dry stonemasonry; dyes) in six geographical locations (Burkina Faso, Mongolia, Solomon Islands, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Colombia), the featured EMKP projects highlight how endangerment and resilience are not mutually exclusive. Instead, enmeshed paradoxically through social embedding, endangerment and resilience are intimately intertwined, constituent parts of each other. We propose the notion of “demonstrably sustainable technics” as an analytical category to better account for the endangerment-resilience nexus, to better understand why and how some material practices and knowledges persist despite various threats to their continuity, that of their human and non-human participants and broader socioecological contexts. Simultaneously, “demonstrably sustainable technics” allow for a nuanced understanding of the imbrication of acts of cultural and social erasure paradoxically with the very same traditions of documentation attempting to be overturned or at least confronted by these projects.
Introduction
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was opened on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in 2008. Built 130 m into a sandstone mountain, the vault is heavily guarded. It contains samples of over one million crops, covering the past 13,000 years of agriculture. The goal is no less than to protect plant diversity for the survival of humanity, and all life on the planet. The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) presents itself as serving a similar purpose, at least in as far as both initiatives aim to preserve “diversity” with an overarching focus on sustainability, even though the EMKP has no explicit revitalization ambitions. 1 Hosted by the British Museum, and with financial support from the Arcadia Fund, the EMKP aims to document “material knowledge—the understanding of the resources, skills, technologies and social values necessary to create and maintain the material world around us”—that is, for various reasons, “under threat and in danger of disappearing”. Also unlike the seedbank, the data from EMKP projects is, after processing, published online and Open Access. To what extent OA is actually open, equitable and accessible, is up for debate (Dutta et al., 2021), but it is certainly more so than a vault on a remote island. The EMKP's agenda and commitment to documentation, dissemination and long-term data storage speak to an expectation that data on material knowledge has a role to play in the world right now, and in its future.
Behind the EMKP is the Arcadia Fund, whose driving idea is that “once memories, knowledge, skills, variety, and intricacy disappear—once the old complexities are lost—they are hard to replicate or replace” and consequently want to “build a vibrant, resilient, green future”. Started in 2001 by Lisbet Rausing, heir to the TetraPak fortune, and her partner Peter Baldwin, the fund has dispersed over $910 million in projects globally. For the EMPK, specifically, $13 million have been disbursed in grants designed to “cover a range of objects, from everyday crafts, tools and utensils to special items used for rituals. In a rapidly changing world, knowledge about these objects, and how they shape individuals’ and communities’ lives helps to retain the rich diversity of global culture for future generations”.
EMKP projects are framed through a focus on endangerment. However, when we look closely at the documented material knowledge and practices in question, we often find examples for emphatic resilience. We find material practices and knowledges that, despite various sources of endangerment, have “the ability to recover quickly from unexpected shocks and crises through, for example, adaptation, resistance or robustness” (Eitel, 2023: 2); they have done so often over incredibly long periods of time, involving various shifting sources of endangerment, from colonial violence to environmental threats.
In this paper, we present insights from six EMKP projects, spanning across four continents, to further an understanding of the connections between endangerment and resilience. We use these diverse insights to propose the concept of “demonstrably sustainable technics.” Demonstrably sustainable technics here refers to the notion that some technics—“associations and assemblages, of practices, objects, and institutions” (Coupaye, 2022a: 444)—have been uniquely sustainable in a dual sense—they have been resilient in the face of diverse destructive forces and they are sustainable in their relationship with the environment. Each one of these technics essentially indexes a way of being that exist in a much more sustainable relationship to their environment than often industrial-capitalist competitors that insist on a more rigid division between nature and culture exemplified in, for example, the perspectivist ontologies of Amerindians (cf. Viveiros de Castro, 1998). This sustainability is further demonstrable in the longitudinality of these technics, even in the face of ethnocide, colonialism and other forms of colonial erasure.
Accordingly this paper sets out to re-configure endangered material knowledge through the lens of “demonstrably sustainable technics” to open up new perspectives on endangerment and resilience in relation to diverse material knowledges. Central here is linkage to their socio-ecological embedding, wherein some longstanding objects “[make] people share a same set of ideas, social relations, and practices by bringing into play multisensorial references … to various domains in their life” through “[their] making, components materials, construction … but also [their] myth of origin, physical usage, and so on” (Lemonnier, 2014: 538).
From salvage anthropology to endangered material knowledge?
The establishment of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by systematic efforts to document, collect and classify what were perceived as endangered material cultures. Central to this was E.B. Tylor and his notion of “survivals,” which framed certain customs, objects and beliefs as remnants “carried on by force of habit” and persisting “as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture” (Tylor, 1871: 14–15 cited in Ratnapalan, 2008). Such practices, despite their “irrational” survival, were viewed as vestiges doomed to disappear with the presumed advancement of societies. Accordingly, a sense of urgency to “rescue” knowledge from extinction drove early fieldwork, from recording Papuan material knowledge in New Guinea before it would be irreversibly transformed by colonial and missionary influence (Weiner, 1988 cited in Bolton, 2024) to Franz Boas's extensive documentation of Native American languages, oral traditional and material culture (Gruber, 1970). As Malinowski remarked in his foreword to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, “the need for energetic work is urgent, and the time is short” (1922: xi), emphasizing precisely the endangerment condition of some cultures.
While producing vast ethnographic and material records, so-called “salvage anthropology” reinforced colonial hierarchies by positioning anthropologists as authorities entitled to appropriate artifacts without meaningful consent and collaboration (Clifford, 1988; Colwell, 2016). Michel Leiris’ diaries, for example, provide a clear account of how sacred items were stolen or taken through deceit during his 2-year expedition collecting materials from various African cultures (Leiris, 1934). Colonial logics have certainly shaped museum practices, and the acquisition of collections through unequal, extractive relationships need to be acknowledged. More so, cases like the retention of the Benin Bronzes by the British Museum have been calling for “acts of cultural restitution and reparation” (Hicks, 2020: 4)—the type of moral work already underway in countries like France as they return African heritage (Bolton, 2023).
Such decolonial debates have led to a “new museology” which prioritizes “education over research, engagement over doctrine, and multivocality over connoisseurship” (Boast, 2011: 64). Of course, multivocal approaches are not new. Take for example the Public Archeology efforts of the 1970s which tried to engage diverse publics in the production of academic knowledge. These efforts have had significant impact: as Chip Colwell (2016: 113) notes, “the increasingly active role of descendent communities has fundamentally shifted the way museums present culture and contributed to community development, tribal heritage management programs, social justice, and the advancement of the (cultural resource management industry).” Yet, as should be expected, collaboration is not without conflict.
James Clifford's influential notion of museums as “contact zones” (1997)—that is, as transitional spaces for collaborative engagement between cultures—has tried to rely on new models of partnership and consultation with source communities. While recognizing the relevance of such collaborations, some scholars claim that asymmetric logics of appropriation still persist as “the intellectual control has largely remained in the hands of the museum” (Boast, 2011: 58). As institutions with a deeply rooted colonial legacy, the new inclusiveness seems “overly optimistic” (Bennett, 1998) or even a “subterfuge” (Marshall, 1998). More fundamentally, critiques point out to the fact that neoliberal documentation and multiculturalism often fails to consider how incommensurable the assumptions, values and expectations at play are (Boast, 2011). That is not to say that dialogue is not welcomed, but that efforts for a more reciprocal, long-standing commitment should continuously engage with, rather than bypass, the frictions that emerge in these asymmetrical exchanges (Krmpotich and Peers, 2013; Tsing, 2005).
The EMKP, based at the British Museum, is squarely situated in midst of these challenges. In many ways, it could face the critique of potentially just being “another” essentially neoliberal project of universalist documentation and unable to escape its own colonial embedding, in particular also given the ongoing debates about open data and Indigenous Research Sovereignty (Anderson and Christen, 2019; Hudson et al., 2023). At the same time, in its commitment to collaboration, with various projects being led, or having been explicitly requested, by the communities that projects focus on, the EMKP may also offer an experiment in the kind of long-term, reciprocal collaboration that Krmpotich and Peers (2013) consider central for helping to more effectively decolonize legacies of museum practices. As Lissant Bolton, as former director of the EMKP writes,
The EMKP provides an opportunity to document objects in places where there are ongoing transformations in the ways that people now live, and where the pace of forgetting is often increasing. At the same time, the program draws attention to some of the complexities of knowing and owning objects in museums. If there are movements to use objects to make reparation for past colonial wrongs and to establish identities through ownership, EMKP potentially contributes to those by providing more information about what those objects are and have been. In addition, the project acknowledges and celebrates the richness and diversity of human knowledge and practice, keeping that richness in sight, where appropriate, by recording it. The best outcome, it seems to me, happens when the process of documenting objects reminds people about them and encourages the local transmission of knowledge and the strengthening of local knowledge and practice (2023, 336).
Endangered Material Knowledge Programme projects and their methodological and conceptual embedding
Each of the six EMKP projects included here is unique, but also shares a common vision—that of the EMKP—and comparable methodological approaches. The Principal Investigators of each project manage teams of local and international academic and technological specialists. Collaboration is key to EMKP projects. While principal investigators take responsibility for various administrative and documentarian roles, all projects require local collaborators, and several teams, including from our Zimbabwe case, are led by academics from the community where the research is being executed. The value of collaboration for this specific type of work cannot be understated. It holds particular significance for its potential to build enduring, mutually beneficial alliances while fostering community relations, with a distinct strength in reinforcing intergenerational ties and stimulating the transmission of knowledge (Krmpotich and Peers, 2013). For example, the digital documentation project on the endangerment of wild silk heritage coordinated by Laurence Douny was co-constructed in collaboration with three field assistants who are Salif Sawadogo, Lossani Dayo and Abdoulaye Séré, between February 2020 and August 2023. Special attention to ongoing commitment and equal reciprocity, as considered above, is crucial for that.
Some projects involve a series of short field trips, others are longer, doctoral and post-doctoral projects and some others are executed primarily by people on the site and deeply embedded material practices and knowledge systems. Kristen Pearson's project involved deep, long-term embedding in rural western Mongolia, where she got immersed in the lived reality of the yurt and all the life that is supports. Maria Luísa Lucas, in comparison, relied on multiple field trips to the Bora of Colombia, with each field trip and recording practice being framed by careful co-construction of documentation practices and ethics, with clear precedence given to Bora requirements. In the Lau Lagoon, Geoffrey Hobbis coordinates, with the help of Stephanie Ketterer and Elise Hornstra, a local team of documentarians including Derek Gwali Futaiasi, James Au, Judith Fangalasuu, Lysa Wini among many others who travel the length of the Lau Lagoon recording stories, as well as manufacturing and repair related to island building, on their own smartphones.
All PIs have extensive long-term networks with and ethnographic experiences in the respective research locations, often including relevant language skills, not only involving the lingua franca but also and in particular indigenous languages. In addition, all projects require “being there” and entail interviewing and participant observation. This involves embodying the technical process under investigation. Whether that be living on artificial islands, weaving spider silk or drinking tea on felt, it is the embodied praxis, the intersubjective relations worn and experienced through the techniques and materials, that make these insights so significant.
Conceptually, projects recognize “technology” as a “vernacular category” freed from the “conceptual weight of notions of modernity” (Coupaye, 2021: 5), and implicitly or explicitly operate within the broader conceptual framework of “cosmotechnics”—“the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making” (Hui, 2017: np). Cosmotechnics essentially seeks to take seriously ontological differences as they are expressed in particular technics, “to envisage the bifurcation of technological futures by conceiving different cosmotechnics” (Hui, 2017: np).
In recognition of this vernacular and cosmotecnical dimension EMKP projects relate to the French programme of Technologie Culturelle and its focus on techniques defined by anthropologist Pierre Lemonnier (based on Leroi-Gourhan's and Marcel Mauss’ definition) as “efficacious action on matter” (1992). 2 Techniques, as documented by EMKP projects, include the interrelated components of matter, energy, objects such as tools, gestures and specific knowledges (Lemonnier, 1992: 5–6) and the recognition that “each technique, arbitrarily defined, is the locus of multiple interactions and of constant adjustment among its elements: without the action animating it and without knowledge of its effects, the tool is nothing” (Lemonnier, 1986: 154). They are often “graphically [revealed]” through operational sequences or chaîne opératoire (ChOps) that “make visible their fundamental material, social, and cultural heterogeneity, relational intricacy, and the interweaving of causalities, choices, and contingencies, whilst also evaluating the concrete and precise weight of each actor, human and non-human, in the whole process” (Coupaye, 2022b: 38–39; emphasis in original). In the case of EMKP projects, these techniques and, at times, ChOp's are highlighted by means of visual, textual and audio-visual assets co-constructed with local communities, with assets aiming to create digital collections designed as a repository resource for the conservation, transfer and dissemination of Indigenous material knowledges and practices. 3
Based on these shared approaches we present and compare each case study, written by their respective EMKP grantees, to locate more generalizable characteristics of “demonstrably sustainable technics” in addition to the contextual specificity of each case. We use comparison to develop a better understanding of our “shared worlds” by “[taking] account of the evident and effective connections between peoples—even those who seem very different from one another” (Hirsch and Rollason, 2019: 10). It entails substantive risks but also promises particularly valuable gains. Comparison may result in a simple “catalogue of variations” (Sahlins, 2023: 14) without ability to abstract any further. Simultaneously, “generalization is inductive; it consists in perceiving possible general laws in circumstances of particular cases; it is guesswork, a gamble, you may be wrong or you may be right” (Leach, 1966: 5; cf. Sahlins, 2023). Besides, “all anthropology is comparative. There is no way to talk about other cultures and their institutions without, at least implicitly, comparing them with other cultures” and “if you happen to be right you have learnt something altogether new” (Leach, 1966: 5; cf. Sahlins, 2023). In our case, the lesson that we draw surrounds the notion of “demonstrably sustainable technics” as a new starting point for thinking through and about the endangerment-resilient nexus in cultural heritage.
We start with three case studies—Marka-Dafing wild silk textiles (Burkina Faso), Kazakh hide and fiber crafts (Mongolia) and Lau artificial island-building (Solomon Islands)—that demonstrate the socio-ecological embedding of “demonstrably sustainable technics” and its centrality for understanding both the resilience, but also endangerment, of these particular combinations of material practices and knowledge (see also Hobbis and Ketterer, 2025). Subsequently we narrow in on the case of Yazidi felt hats (Iraq) highlighting how some technics are defined by a continued, not necessarily exceptional, tension between resilience and endangerment and how it is this long-term tension that fuels not only long-term material practices but also adaptable knowledge systems. The next two case studies—Great Zimbabwe dry stonemasonry, and Bora dyes (Colombia)—focus on the centrality of resilient knowledge systems for explaining the continued survival, and adaptations, of “demonstrably sustainable technics” within their particular socio-ecological niches. Finally, we conclude with a comparative synthesis and propose “demonstrably sustainable technics” as a framework that allows for shifting away from simplified distinctions between “disappearing” or “endangered” and “new” or “innovative” material practices and knowledges.
Case 1: Marka-Dafing wild silk (Burkina Faso) 4
The Marka-Dafing of Burkina Faso, who are akin to the Marka-Soninké of Mali, found their origin in the Ghana Empire, the existence of which spanned between the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. With the fall of the Empire, the Marka migrated to Burkina Faso, where in the nineteenth century, a group converted to Islam. They were subsequently given the name “Dafing,” referring to the black ink of their Qur'anic scholars as well as their indigo dye work of their women, who also famously displayed black labial tattoos. The Marka-Dafing comprises over 200,000 people who belong to the linguistic and cultural group known as Mande that extends across West Africa. In the area known as Dafina (or the land of Marka-Dafing), variations of Marka-Dafing language are spoken as well as Dioula and French as a national language, which was imposed during France's colonisation between 1896 and 1960, at a time when Burkina Faso was known as “Haute Volta.” Marka-Dafing patrilineal and patriarchal communities are mainly composed of agriculturalists, traders and artisans who co-exist with autochthonous populations of Bobo, Bwa, Dioula and the semi-nomadic Fulani cattle herders (or Peul). The Marka observe Catholicism, or traditional beliefs, while the Dafing, who are a majority Muslim, practice a form of Islam somehow embedded in traditional values and the practice of magic.
Alongside their expertise in indigo dyeing, Marka-Dafing women, who are traditionally responsible for the production of cloth and therefore the processing of raw materials, excelled in the art of silk. The indigenous type of silk, Marka-Dafing artisans work with, referred to as “wild” silk in Western entomology, has often been overshadowed by the long history of Bombyx mori domestication (for about 6000 years) and the worldwide extensive production of this fine silk (Douny, 2024). Comparatively, West African wild silks generally have a rough aspect and, at first sight, may appear to lack sheen. In Burkina Faso, wild silk is spun by the caterpillars of undomesticated moths of at least the genera known as Anaphe and Epanaphe, which spin large collective nests, and the genus Epiphora that spins its own cocoon. Indigenous wild silks have been used in the Marka-Dafing's textile production for at least four centuries while also being traded across West Africa, according to their oral tradition. Making these textiles known as Mêka pon or tuntun involves a series of actions performed collectively or individually by women, including shredding and boiling the nests, drying and beating the dusty fibre, brushing and spinning it into yarn, weaving the threads on a horizontal double-heddle loom which is done by men and optionally dyeing the wrapper in a light bath of indigo.
Over more than twenty years, due to climate change and the impact of humans on the insect species and their environments, these precious materials have become increasingly scarce as reported by traders and artisans. In Nigeria, where wild silk is used in weaving and embroidery work, its progressive decline started in colonial times when the massive extraction of wild silk nests for European textile manufactures, contributed to the depletion of the genetic base of certain species (Ashiru, 1989).
Because the nests have become rare in and outside of Burkina Faso, collectors, over more than twenty years or so, have had to travel deeper into the forests of Ivory Coast and Guinea-Conakry in areas that are increasingly cleared for wood extraction. It is important to note that an extensive culling of trees by the French colonial administration in the 1920s across the Afrique Occidental Française, in which contemporary Burkina Faso was a part of, dramatically impacted the ecosystems. While realising the scale of the damage also exacerbated by demographic pressure, the French colonies issued repressive campaigns of reforestation (Bernard, 1993). Yet another factor causing the endangerment of wild silk-producing species is the fact that in the forest areas of Ivory Coast, as observed by Marka-Dafing traders, the species also fail to regenerate because the larvae, which are treated as a protein-rich delicacy, are sold on markets where they constitute a daily economy for women. For these traders, the business of wild silks has become unworkable due to the high cost of reaching these remote areas and of acquiring the rare materials. While many of them found themselves in deficit, in the rare cases when a small profit is made, it rarely helps them to cover their travelling expenses. Armed banditry is another cause for the degradation of the ecosystems in various parts of Burkina Faso and West Africa (Sanou and Zoungrana, 2024). It is therefore contributing to the disappearance of the species while also impacting human lives (Houehounha et al., 2024).
In the Mouhoun region of western Burkina Faso, tuntun, which is the Marka-Dafing term for the silk-producing caterpillars, their nests, the fibre, and the cloth, is an endangered material, so are the techniques and knowledge attached to it. Learning this craft has become too costly because of the cost of the material and its production. In addition, wild silk textiles have competed with cheaper and easier-to-obtain industrial cloth, while also being highly fashionable in and outside of the Marka-Dafing community. In this context, wild silk techniques and knowledge are also endangered due to the lack of intergenerational transmission whenever a practitioner dies.
Nonetheless, wild silk textiles persist in their social significance. In the Marka-Dafing communities, wild silk techniques embody the cultural identity and heritage (laada or tigné) of the people who have been producing it for centuries. Tuntun as a sought-after attire dedicated in the past to women of royal families and today to wealthy women, finds its cultural significance in the amount of indigenous silk that is woven in bands made of alternated stripes of silk, cotton dyed in indigo and plain white cotton yarns. The presence of silk in the wrapper enables the validation of an aphorism, moral statement, critique, or insult destined to an enemy, and that is woven in linear motifs displaying shades of blue and white and light brown, which is the natural colour of wild silk. For instance, “ta to ara” is a woven message that targets pedantic men and women who always point out others’ faults and do not see their own. In this case, the wrapper is meant to confront these individuals with the truth. “Den kelen ba” often signifies that having an only child who is bright and successful in life is better than giving birth to rascals. This message stands as a reply to a mockery that having a single child is useless and a sign of bad luck. The efficacy of this non-verbal form of communication lies in the visual and cultural property of the sheen of wild silk known as daoula, which also translates as an aura of charisma.
Because of the lack of raw materials, women have relied on other kinds of locally produced materials, such as vegetal silks and dyed cotton-based yarns, occasionally made of imported synthetic fibres. All constitute available and affordable alternatives to wild silk that are said to mimic the properties of indigenous silks, such as their colour and sheen. However, highlighting a continued preference for wild silk textiles, the wrappers woven from these yarns are often described as “consolation wrappers” or as intended for women who cannot find or afford wrappers made of real silk. As these alternatives to wild silk wrappers contribute to perpetuating the design of the wrapper, making these alternatives can certainly help local artisans to keep tuntun production going, yet without the silk. Inevitably, the techniques and knowledge about wild silks are threatened to disappear with the species. One can only hope for the insects’ survival capabilities despite their apparent vulnerability, and that they will thrive by adapting to new environmental conditions constantly challenged by human activity.
Accordingly, the case of wild silk textiles in Marka-Dafing, Western Burkina Faso showcases ecological endangerment while highlighting social embedding as a defining characteristic of “demonstrably sustainable technics.” Marka-Dafing wild silk textiles are threatened at a fundamental material level: the caterpillars spinning the type of silk used in Marka-Dafing textile production are in rapid decline. Still, Marka-Dafing communities continue to value wild silk textiles and techniques as “irreplaceable key elements of practices and sets of shared representations that have nothing to do with the production of objects or their apparent main physical function” (Lemonnier, 2012: 17). Specifically, wild silk textiles, as cloth of prestige, are central for establishing individual women's status due to the historical and cultural significance of the material (Figure 1), which stands as a Marka-Dafing material identity and is a part of a broader local cultural heritage expressed as laada or tigné. These two terms that refer to the community's usages, customs and practices as the legacy of the ancestors highlight here the cultural aspect of techniques and knowledge about wild silk production that the Marka-Dafing artisans specialized in the craft, have inherited over generations.
Communal of nests spun by hundreds of caterpillars are then hand spun by Marka-Dafing women into a discontinuous yarn, which is then woven in their tuntun wrappers. (Photo: Salif Sawadogo and Laurence Douny)
Case 2: Kazakh hide and fiber crafts (Mongolia) 5
The second case study focuses on documenting traditional hide and fiber crafts made by mobile pastoralists in Western Mongolia, particularly those associated with the yurt (Kazakh: kiiz yi; Mongolian: ger). The whole suite of technologies associated with the yurt embodies the paradox of “demonstrably sustainable technics”—it is simultaneously resilient, with evidence for similar dwellings on the steppe going back 2000 years (Vainstein, 1976; Miller, 2012; Gardner and Burentogtokh, 2018), and precarious, as mobile pastoralism and the use of the yurt as a dwelling has all but vanished in Inner Asia with the important exception of Mongolia (Pianciola, 2019). The crucial relationship between mobile pastoralism and the retention of traditional craft knowledge is evident among the Kazakh minority of Western Mongolia, where the abandonment of mobile pastoralism is tied to widespread emigration to Kazakhstan (Barcus and Werner, 2010; Diener, 2007; Finke, 2013). Traditional household textiles, still made by mobile pastoralist Kazakhs in Mongolia, are seen as so incompatible with life across the border that families leave them behind when they emigrate and sedentarize.
Acknowledging all this, the resilience of traditional crafts among Kazakhs in Mongolia cannot solely be explained by their continued adherence to mobile pastoralism. What “resilience” looks like varies across object classes within mobile pastoralist households, not because some crafts are more strongly connected to herding or mobility, but because some crafts are more strongly connected to the management of hierarchical kin relations.
Our EMKP team documented wall hangings (tus kiiz) and felt carpets (syrmaq) in more than two hundred households, and most had at least one machine-made wall hanging on display. Produced at a single factory in Xinjiang and sold by multiple vendors at the open-air market in Ölgii, the provincial capital, the machine-made wall hangings come in exactly two patterns and two colorways. Some vendors sell finished wall hangings, while others sell the embroidered black fabric by the meter, allowing buyers to customize the length according to their means and needs. While the average handmade tus kiiz is about a meter and a half long, tus kiiz assembled from pre-embroidered rolls are often more than double that length.
Viewed as a snapshot, the replacement of handmade tus kiiz with machine-made counterparts appears as significant rupture in material practices. But viewed with temporal depth and spatial breadth—an approach informed by the PI's archaeological background—contemporary embroidery practices are much in keeping with those of the last half century. While syrmaq exhibit strong continuity across the whole region and over time, tus kiiz fashions have been much more fluid.
During the Soviet period, tus kiiz and other household embroideries readily admitted new designs observed on Russian kerchiefs and tablecloths. Particular instantiations of these new designs—mostly floral, but also including motifs like roosters and baskets—can be traced back to particular small clusters of craftswomen because of how faithfully the original interpretation was copied. Elderly women talk about which designs were popular “in those days,” making it clear that their old, hand-stitched tus kiiz, made from thread painstakingly re-spun from unraveled Russian cotton, are no more conservative than the exuberantly colored figurative wall hangings embroidered from Chinese acrylic thread by their daughters-in-law.
Tus kiiz and other embroidered household furnishing also readily admit alternative techniques alongside new motifs. While most are sewn in chain stitch using an awl, there are numerous examples of cross-stitch and satin-stitch going back to the 1950s. In the early 2000s, using a syringe to produce a pile surface on embroideries became popular, a trend also observed by Portisch (2013). We documented more than one Mickey and Minnie Mouse embroidery using this novel technique. In a community where hand making skills are still widespread, purchasing is not the only way to inscribe new forms of consumption—in this case, the consumption of Western media after the fall of the Soviet Union—into one's material world.
What is at stake in the shift toward machine-made tus kiiz is not the loss of tradition, since Kazakh women in Mongolia have long used household embroideries to participate in trends and highlight their consumption practices. Rather, it is a narrowing of the range of what these household textiles can represent and to whom. The embroideries purchased at the market speak loudly about a woman's access to the city, to cash and to international networks. However, these machine-made pieces no longer speak about the maker's mastery of technical embroidery skills, historically a source of moral authority for Kazakh women (Portisch, 2013). Some negotiate this tension by purchasing patterns that exhibit many of the same qualities as machine-made tus kiiz—large size, even, regular shapes that repeat across the whole object. The pattern, drawn on transparent plastic, is transferred to fabric and taken home to embroider by hand. These pieces incorporate the new aesthetic, allowing her to participate in the newest fashions while inscribing her skill and ownership in the object.
Syrmaq stand in sharp contrast to embroideries, both in their conservatism over time and their resistance to commodification now. Handmade felt carpets cover the floors even in households that have replaced every handmade tus kiiz with a wall hanging from China, and women spend months each year quilting new syrmaq. Why? Unlike tus kiiz, syrmaq are given as kiit gifts to new in-laws as part of the tösek oryn.
Mongolian Kazakh engagements and weddings involve multiple occasions for visiting and gift giving, but the tösek oryn (literally “bed gift”) is arguably the most substantial in terms of labor, cost and perceived social stakes. Given by the bride's family to the groom's family months or years after the wedding, the tösek oryn marks the closure of a prolonged series of exchanges between in-laws and represents the fulfillment of the bride's family's final obligations to their daughter. Like nearly all aspects of the tösek oryn, the timing is fraught: deliver it too early and you might be perceived as inadequately attached to your daughter; deliver it too late and you might be perceived as negligent toward her in-laws.
Syrmaq constitute the most important part of the tösek oryn by far. They are given as gifts (kiit) from the bride's parents not only to the new couple and the groom's parents, but also to the groom's “important” relatives. At minimum, this means the groom's father's older brothers and the groom's older brothers, but the list often expands to encompass more distant relations. For the bride's family to fall short of the requested number would be an unthinkable breach of etiquette—they would sooner delay delivery by months or years than fail to meet their daughter's parents-in-law's demands.
Women do not necessarily produce carpets with particular recipients in mind, since preparations begin years before a daughter is betrothed. However, every kiit carpet is labeled with its intended recipient's name before delivery. These decisions are too important to leave to one individual; the whole family gathers the week before to decide how to divide the gifts. Women tend to insist both that the carpets they produce are all of the same (high) quality and that the best carpets should go to the most important in-laws.
Families assembling the tösek oryn face a delicate task: no carpet should be obviously inferior to any other, yet the carpets as a group should possess subtle variations in quality that allow them to express hierarchical differences. This is why syrmaq are not easily replaced by factory-made carpets, despite their availability in local markets. Factory-made carpets are understood to vary in quality only according to size, with carpets offered in only two or three standardized sizes. Factory-made carpets cannot express the subtle, contradictory maxim of the tösek oryn—that all carpets must be equal, but some must be better.
When syrmaq are brought home to individual households, their presence, their newness, their keeping-out-of-circulation becomes an index of that family's involvement in a dynamic kinship system (see Figure 2). Unlike tus kiiz, which communicate the identity and taste of their makers, syrmaq communicate the position of a household within a larger patrilineage.
Tösek oryn carpets received by one household over the last several years. The family has chosen to keep them rolled and unused, ready for regifting. (Photo: Kristen Pearson 2023)
As families increasingly migrate to Kazakhstan, both syrmaq and household embroideries are left behind when they emigrate and sedentarize. These abandoned objects, which we encountered repeatedly during our field research, tell a story of transborder migration as transformation—there is no room for felt carpets and embroidered wall hangings in the apartment buildings of Aktau and Pavlodar across the Kazakh border. People explain that these textiles aren't suitable for Kazakhstan—“the climate is different, wetter,” “the wool will smell”; “it will be eaten by moths.” Underlying such statements is perhaps an anxiety about what else might be incompatible with apartment living that restricts air flow and sunlight.
Much of the push to move centers on opportunities for children, whose future marriages—as Mongolian Kazakhs are absorbed into the much larger Kazakhstani Kazakh population—will likely involve Kazakhstani partners. Increasingly, representatives of Mongolian Kazakh families are invited to participate in weddings of this new generation raised and married in Kazakhstan. When they return, gossip and speculation spreads—Kazakhstani Kazakh weddings are different. Importantly, they omit the cycle of gifts and counter-gifts that gives syrmaq their social significance. By recognizing the social dimension of the syrmaq's resilience in the Mongolian context, the potential consequences of its loss become more apparent. The syrmaq is a social technology that renegotiates the relationship between women and their natal kin, materializes unequal but mutualistic relationships among kin and helps newly established households identify themselves within a network of obligations. As demonstrably sustainable technics, its loss may hold unexpected consequences.
Case 3: Lau artificial island-building (Solomon Islands) 6
The Lau speakers at the core of this EMKP project belong to one of over 60 language groups that are spread across Solomon Islands, a small islands or large ocean state consisting of six main islands and over 900 smaller ones. Located in the northern half of Malaita, one of the six main islands, the Lau Lagoon is home to about 15.000 Lau speakers, who have, at least for the last seven centuries, primarily lived on artificial islands that they have built and maintained. The Lau commonly refer to sea as “land-covered-by-sea” while artificial islands are, in essence, land made out of and in the sea. Making land also means making diverse landscapes, creating the broader worlds that shape Lau lives and that respond to the various challenges and opportunities that Lau lifeworlds entail. The Lau have made large artificial islands, where one island is home to hundreds of people, hosting a whole village community, schools and churches. But the Lau have also made smaller islands, home to just a handful or even one family, similar to smaller hamlets in the inland. An island may not even need to be a living place, but could be a starting or resting point for a fisher man. Such islands may include a hut not much different from the small shelters that can also be found in inland gardens and that allow, usually women, to catch a breath.
Artificial island making is, in various ways, about Lau engagements with the maritime environment that surrounds them. Why the Lau started building islands initially is not fully clear, but current explanations and those collected by Walter Ivens in the 1920s highlight various advantages to this sea-based living (Ivens, 1930). By building islands inside the Lau Lagoon, the Lau have been able to take advantage of the close proximity to fish and other seafood that are the cornerstone of their livelihoods. Much time and effort are saved by living in the sea, rather than having to leave land to get there. At the same time, living on artificial islands has protected the Lau against threats. Mosquitoes cannot traverse the lagoon to get to the islands; and even if one or so makes it, because the islands have no immediate fresh water sources mosquitoes cannot replicate, grow and spread there. Artificial islands protect the Lau against malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. Islands even help with the pragmatics of human waste management. Toilets are easily built over water while waste disposal is much more logistically complicated for mainland settlements. The health benefits are obvious. And then, there is another, central, historical advantage: islands are easier to “fortify”—they protect against raids, e.g. from the bush areas. It is easier to control who comes to the island and to protect it during moments of warfare. While the latter is no longer much of a concern, the other benefits to island living persist.
Accordingly, artificial island living continues to be a feature of daily life in the Lau Lagoon. However, it is also increasingly endangered and with it is the knowledge about how to build and maintain this land made out of the sea. Lau lifeworlds more broadly are experiencing major changes, and have done so over the last century and a half. As saltwater people, the Lau were among the first Malaitans to substantively engage with European traders and then colonizers (Corris, 1973). Geographical accessibility, and a willingness among some local leaders to facilitate passage, enabled European ships to “recruit” indentured labourers for plantations in Queensland and elsewhere in the Pacific, especially throughout the 1870s and 1880s (Corris, 1970). Beyond the physical dangers—“24% of indenture contracts and closer to 30 per cent of individuals” (Moore, 2015: 172) did not survive—labour plantations also became conduits for Christian conversions, with many labourers eventually returning to the Lau Lagoon as Christians and even missionaries themselves (Burt, 1994). Christianization of the lagoon unraveled Lau lifeworlds, cosmologically and, subsequently, in all other realms of life (Maranda, 2001). Because life on artificial islands was organized around ancestral religious prescriptions (Ivens, 1930; Köngäs Maranda, 1974), many converts moved to, and created, new villages on the Malaitan mainland (Akin, 2013). These villages often depended on external, missionary and British colonial, support to ensure their survival, which in turn facilitated a broader loss of autonomy (Burt, 1994). Conflict between ancestral and Christian settlements became common, while attempts at missionization intensified and often involved attempts to permanently transform or destroy through “acts of ‘blessing,’ ‘anointing’ and baptizing’” (White, 1991: 108) ancestral spaces and places, especially on artificial islands. As a result, the ritual significance of the spatial construction of these islands has nearly disappeared (Satomi, 2012).
Alongside Christianization, a broader dependency on external sources, in particular cash income, is decreasing the significance of, but also possibilities for, fishing activities. For example, logging as a widespread activity throughout Malaita has been attributed to declines in reef and mangrove resources (Minter et al., 2018). In addition, a perceived ease of life in non-island settlements such as easier fresh water access is pushing more and more islanders to abandon their artificial islands.
On an ecological level artificial island living is threatened by rapid environmental changes. The Lau Lagoon has experienced rapid coral bleaching over the last decades. The sea water temperatures are rising and fish stock is dwindling. Fishermen catch less and less and have to travel further and further from their island or mainland homes. And tidal changes have become more erratic and intense. Figure 3 showcases this struggle. It shows the same tiny, artificial island, once during low tide and once during high tide, a normal high tide that is. There is little room for maneuver. If there is a storm or a king tide, the house might quite likely flood. Recent climate modeling indicating that also most Lau mainland villages will be below sea level by 2050, which will likely increase already existing climate-change related displacements and relocation, especially to urban Honiara (Otoiasi, 2024).
A tiny artificial island in the Lau Lagoon during low tide (left) and high tide (right). (Photo: James Au)
In other words, the Lau are increasingly shifting from living with and on the water, to living with and on land. One of our project participants emphasized that he cannot really imagine returning to living on an artificial island. He had invested too much time and resources in his gardens and fruit trees. He did not think that fishing would be sustainable in the long-term. However, he was also not ready to completely abandon artificial islands, musing about potentially constructing a guest house for tourists on such an island. Artificial islands, according to him, may appeal to foreigners. They are no longer a viable living place for his and his family—or any of his descendants in any foreseeable future—but at least they might contribute to the viability of living in the Lau Lagoon, rather than requiring urban or international migration.
In addition, project respondents described artificial islands as potential responses to environmental challenges. Island-building techniques are used to strengthen land that has not been artificially built. It may be used to create a sort of sea-wall. Combined with mangrove trees, it can prevent soil erosion and stabilize land that is perpetually exposed to tidal changes and regular storms. It can also serve as a way to extend a mainland village, to avoid having to build further inland, taking away garden land that is, ideally, further removed from the sea to avoid saline intrusion and its negative effects on garden crops.
Lau artificial island practices are fascinating because they are part of the ecology that is the Lau Lagoon. They are part of the seascape, while also protecting the Lau against water, flooding etc. Simultaneously, they may be adapted to fend off even rising sea levels. They are very different from “seawall” or other “artificial island” projects as they are increasingly and globally advocated for as a climate change adaptation measure. In neighbouring Fiji, for example, “modern” seawalls have had negative outcomes for livelihoods, trapping water and acting more like a dam, because of the construction techniques involved (Piggott-McKellar et al., 2020). Lau artificial islands do not have this problem. Protecting, documenting and engaging with Lau island building may, therefore, also open up unique opportunities to explore Lau responses to climate change and broader environmental threats and transformations.
The case of Lau islands building, thus, locates resilient technics in their socio-ecological embedding, in this case, literally involving the creation and maintenance of the land on which people live, and, thus, how they experience and navigate their socio-ecological environments. Further reminiscent of the case of Kazakh hide and fiber crafts, socio-ecological change—here sea-level rise combined with migratory patterns—are endangering island-building as a material practice aimed at social reproduction. However, expanding our understanding of demonstrably sustainable technics as paradoxically resilient, this EMKP project also demonstrates how these technics may adapt to even the most fundamental material challenges: among the Lau, some practitioners are intensifying island-building to fend of the very socio-ecological challenges that threaten the practice. Demonstrably sustainable technics are here shown to be so resilient because of their flexible adaptability based on longstanding techniques and longstanding successes as material practices for social reproduction.
Case 4: felt hats among the Yazidi community (Kurdistan of Iraq) 7
Black and white photographs by British photographer Wilfred Patrick Thesiger show Yazidi men wearing Kûmê Kûlav, felt hats, in Sinjar, Iraq, in the mid-1950s. 8 These conical-shaped felt hats were worn by men and boys as young as 5 years old with gosik, braided hair coming down on each side. The photographed subjects were from the Yazidi Jwana tribe as this style of wearing felt hats with braided hair is distinctive to the men of the aforementioned tribe. The Jwana tribe is one of the three main Yazidi tribes residing in Sinjar (Fuccaro, 1994). The Yezidis are one of the most endangered religious communities living in the disputed Northwest region of Iraq, mainly in their heartland, Sinjar. Throughout centuries, the Yazidis have faced discrimination, marginalization and genocidal campaigns often for misinterpretation of their beliefs. During the Ottoman Empire, the Yazidis suffered from repression, persecution and pressure to convert to Islam (Allison, 2017). Likewise, under Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Yazidis were subjected to the regime's Arabisation programme (Savelsberg et al., 2010). In 2014, the so-called “Islamic State (IS),” stormed Syria and northern Iraq, systematically targeting the Yazidis in Sinjar forcing them to convert to Islam or face death (Allison, 2017). IS's attack on Sinjar resulted in massacring thousands of men, enslaving women and children, and displacing the majority of the Yazidis estimated at 400,000 people who fled Sinjar (Nadia's Initiative, n.d.).
Khalaf Darwesh from the Jwana tribe was among those who fled his hometown, escaped the 2014 Yazidi genocide, and was displaced in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. After Sinjar was liberated, with his family, they returned to their hometown in 2017, and that was when he made his first felt hat with Nofa, his wife. Felt hats are part of men's traditional outfit of the Yazidi community; particularly, of the Yazidi Jwana tribe who used to wear felt hats over their braided hair. The craft of felt-making practiced by the various communities in the region having a history going back at least 5000 years (Steinkeller, 1980). There are usually a total of six braids, with three braids descending from each side. Wearing braided hair by the Jwana tribe is associated with one of the main Yazidi religious and historical figures, Sheikh Sharfaddin, 9 whose temple is located in Sinjar and visited by Yazidi pilgrims. The Jwana tribe has a close association with Sheikh Sharfaddin as some of the heads of their clans were among those who accompanied him to Sinjar in the thirteenth century. 10 It is believed that Sheikh Sharfaddin wore his hair braided, and in honouring Sheikh Sharfaddin and reaffirming their disciple, the men of the Jwana tribe adopted wearing their hair braided and topped it with a felt hat for aesthetic reasons. Generations of the Jwana tribe have persisted wearing braided hair and felt hats in which they have found a strong sense of religious and cultural identity.
Witnessing the danger that his community was facing and being a survivor of a genocidal campaign, Khalaf felt the urgency to preserve his and the Yazidi community's heritage. For Khalaf, dressing in traditional clothes is a significant cultural element of one's identity; reinforcing that element marks the persistence of the Yazidis, particularly when the Yazidi identity has been under immediate and periodical threats of elimination throughout history. Before 2017, Khalaf never made felt hats, but he was 13 years old when he first witnessed his uncle, a master craftsman, making felt hats for the people of their village in Kania Avdi. Picking up from his childhood memories, Khalaf embarked on the craft of making felt hats, utilising techniques and materials employed by his uncle, echoing the past to the present in the face of genocide.
Khalaf makes the felt hats from Live lambswool at their family home. He often obtains the wool from shearing the few lambs and sheep he has or from his neighbours who are sheepherders. Each felt hat needs a kilo and a half of wool. The preparation of the wool is often done by Khalaf's wife, Nofa. The wool is first washed and hand picked. Then it is carded with a hand-made tool called Dari Mushknin that Khalaf made from pieces of wood and nails. The carded wool is then layered in a basin where soapy water is added to it. The wool is then gently rubbed by hand in circular motions to add pressure so that the wool fibres tangle to each other until the felt fabric is formed. To create the conical shape of the hat, the felted wool is then placed on a conical-shaped tool that Khalaf made from a traffic cone, and he continues working on the shape with his hands (see Figure 4). After the conical-shape of the hat is formed, Nofa sews the edge of the hat with a thread and needle; the thread is pulled-in to tighten the bottom edge of the hat. This process usually takes an hour and a half for Khalaf and Nofa to complete a felt hat.
Khalaf Darwesh at his home talking about a felt hat he just crafted. Making felt hats is a home and family work where every member participates. Khalaf is taking the lead in the crafting process, directing his children to assist him. (Photo: Renas Babakir)
For craftsman Khalaf, who is one of the handful of people who continue to make felt hats in Sinjar, making felt hats reminds him of the men of the Jwana tribe when almost all of them wore traditional clothes with felt hats and braided hair. Some of the elderly men used to wrap a piece of cloth around the conical-shaped felt hats as a turban to complete the headwear. Khalaf in awe and admiration to the dressing style of his deceased uncle and cousin who wore traditional Yazidi clothes with felt hats says that when “I make the felt hats, I have them both, my uncle and cousin in front of my eyes, they come towards me, and they look like gifts sent from heaven.” 11 Despite his main profession as a blacksmith, Khalaf is determined to continue making felt hats and teaches his children how to make them. His local customers are limited to two groups: the few elderly Yazidis who continue to wear felt hats, alongside younger and older generations from the Jwana and other Yazidi tribes who wear felt hats during religious and cultural ceremonies as markers of their Yazidi identities. Khalaf reiterates that he makes these felt hats so that they do not vanish as the elimination of the Yazidis have been systematically pursued. He emphasises that when the cultural elements unique to a particular group disappear, the group loses their origins and identity. Though the practice's survival is uncertain, felt-making by Khalaf Darwesh's family re-emerged at a time of profound threat and revived not only for survival but as a powerful tool of endurance and cultural resilience.
The fourth case study accordingly shows how material techniques are, similar to Lau island-building, resilient because they are considered a means by which endangerment can be counteracted. Simultaneously, this EMKP project shows how this resilience goes beyond the discussed ecological and residential sources of endangerment. Instead, the case showcases the demonstrable sustainability of particular technics in the face of intense political, religious pressures, even genocidal campaigns. Simultaneously, this EMKP project shows how this resilience goes beyond the discussed ecological and residential sources of endangerment.
Case 5: Great Zimbabwe dry stonemasonry 12
Dry stonemasonry is an expansive term encompassing a wide range of techniques, including quarrying, construction and repair of stone structures built without mortar or any binding materials (see Figure 5). The stonemasons usually acquire the knowledge and skills after spending a considerable time as apprentices, mastering the hands-on skills and techniques of the work that McGibbon (2013: 10) described as “not possible to teach from a book.” Dry stonemasonry as a practice and artisanal skill is as old as the stone itself, and it is practised throughout the world (McGibbon, 2013; UNESCO, 2018; Walker et al., 2000). It is one of the widely spread ancient craftsmanship with traces in Europe, Australia, North America and Africa. In southern Africa, ancient dry stonemasonry is attested by over 600 structures of varying types and sizes predominately found in Zimbabwe and a few others in Mozambique, South Africa and Botswana. The art of building in dry stonemasonry epitomise the rise and development of complex state societies in southern Africa between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries (Pikirayi, 2001; Pwiti et al., 2013). Of these ancient structures, Great Zimbabwe located in southern Zimbabwe is the largest and most spectacular, making it a unique expression of a built tradition in Africa and a challenging heritage to manage and conserve.
Two stonemason restoring a collapsed wall at Great Zimbabwe. (Photo: Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, 2021)
Zimbabwe derives its name from (Great) Zimbabwe, making it one of the few countries to be named after an archaeological site. The Great is a prefix that was added by the early European writers to distinguish this site from many other similar ones which they had observed in the region. In the local Shona language, Zimbabwe means “a house of stones.” In the country, Great Zimbabwe and Khami are two dry stone-built archaeological sites enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986. Recently, in 2018, another similar heritage typology named Naletale and the Dzimbahwe Cluster have been included on the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list. Such status attests to the significance of dry stone-built archaeological sites which transcend the local and national boundaries to become “heritage of humankind.”
Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, PI of this EMKP project, grew up among the Nemanwa, one of the local clans ancestrally connected to Great Zimbabwe. Growing up in the shadows of this ancient settlement, he was inspired to study archaeology, cultural heritage and museum studies at university. Upon completion of his degree programme, he was employed by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, NMMZ (the statutory institution in charge of the administration of cultural heritage) as a curator of archaeology based at Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site. It was during this curatorial tenure which stretched from 2010 to 2021 that he developed a keen interest in studying the indigenous knowledge, skills and practices of local stonemasons in the restoration and conservation not only of Great Zimbabwe, but other similar sites dotted around the country.
At Great Zimbabwe, stonemasons from the local communities have been instrumental in the repair, reconstruction and conservation of the dry stone walls since the early 1900s when curators of European origins embarked on major restoration projects during the colonial era (1890–1980) (Sassoon, 1982; Schofield, 1928). In the post-colonial Zimbabwe, the stonemasons have continued to play a significant role in the restoration and conservation of Great Zimbabwe. However, in the ever-expanding academic conservation literature of the site (see Chikwanda, 2006; Matenga, 1996; Ndoro, 1995, 2001), there is a glaring gap and silence of the voices of local stonemasons. More so, in Zimbabwe there are no formal institutions that train dry stonemasons. It is largely believed that the dry stonemasonry knowledge and skills have been inherited from the ancestral builders of the ancient dry stone-built settlements (Sagiya, 2020). Thus, dry stonemasonry is a resilient skill and practice embedded in the local knowledge epistemologies.
What is glaring is the fact that there is no documented succession planning to pass the dry stonemasonry knowledge and skills from generation to generation. There is no framework for sharing experience and professional development. Furthermore, Zimbabwe does not have a policy on the preservation of ancient craftsmanship, such as dry-stone masonry. Against this background, the knowledge and practice of dry stonemasonry is under threat not only at Great Zimbabwe, but also in the rest of the country.
In Zimbabwe, dry-stone masonry craftsmanship is confronted by a myriad of challenges. As a physically demanding practice with limited employment opportunities outside the heritage sector, dry stonemasonry as a profession has failed to attract the interest of the youths (Sagiya, 2020, 2022). The practice has also remained male-dominated. Besides the NMMZ, and the occasional whims of wealthy individuals, there is no demand for the skill in the building industry. In Zimbabwe and other African countries, colonialism and modernity ushered in new construction materials such as cement made bricks or concrete and other western techniques that have transformed building traditions.
Despite these challenges, dry stonemasonry has been resilient. There is potential for harnessing dry-stone masonry in the modern building industries. Great Zimbabwe has inspired a few members from the local communities who have created self-employment through the construction of lodges, perimeter walls and other structures mimicking the site's architecture. The current population of the people living around Great Zimbabwe is between 15,000 and 30,000 (Great Zimbabwe National Monument World Heritage Site, 2024: 11). Such commercial stonemasonry has diverted from dry stone masonry key principle of not using binding materials, but some of the techniques, such as quarrying, remain the same.
Recently, two state universities in Zimbabwe, the Bindura University of Science Education and Great Zimbabwe University have introduced a dry stone architecture module in their archaeology and heritage management degree programmes. These courses provide students with just theoretical historical contexts, different sites and conservation challenges facing dry stone-built heritage in southern Africa. While this is a welcome development; universities can do more to unlock the economic value of the dry stonemasonry profession and heritage. For example, through the Innovation Hubs introduced at every state university in the country, departments can innovate around dry stonemasonry to make it a brand of architecture that can travel beyond the restoration needs of monumental ancient buildings of the Zimbabwe culture. The business potential for dry stonemasonry is evident in some modern buildings and resorts with architectural designs and styles inspired by Great Zimbabwe. Thus, the future of dry stonemasonry craftsmanship can only be guaranteed through collective safeguarding efforts by stonemasons, heritage institutions, construction industries, academic institutions and other stakeholders, reflecting how the resilience of particular technics is also fundamentally entwined with local knowledge networks and adapt between informal and formal knowledge transmission systems.
Case 6: Bora dyes (Colombia) 13
The Bora are an Indigenous Amazonian people whose most ancient villages are located between the lower reaches of the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers. There are around eight hundred Bora people in Colombia today. However, only about two hundred inhabit communities close to the territory they occupied before the beginning of the twentieth century, when the region went through a severe crisis (Taussig, 1984). During this period, rubber exploiters tortured, enslaved and murdered tens of thousands of people, causing a demographic drop of at least 90% among the Bora (Lucas, 2020). Later, throughout the twentieth century, they were further Christianized by Spanish Catholic priests and inserted into extensive networks of illegal trade of animal skins and cocaine. Although the constitutional guarantee of rights in the 1980s (Pereira, 2005: 211–233) has enabled a more peaceful life in recent decades, much cultural knowledge has been endangered or only partially recovered throughout these processes.
This EMKP project, launched in 2022, aimed to fulfill a long-standing demand from these communities, especially among women. Namely, the documentation of knowledge associated with graphic repertoires and natural dyes that fall into disuse year after year. Nowadays, not only is it challenging to find people who have a good grasp of the names and forms of the designs that adorn bodies and objects or the location of the raw materials used in the manufacture of certain dyes, but it is also increasingly rare for people to have a comprehensive mastery of the mythical narratives, shamanic spells, ritual songs and medicinal and cosmetic uses associated with the designs and pigments. So far, EMKP documentation activities have been successful in recording this knowledge in different support and media (see Figure 6). However, they have also provided us with interesting clues for reflecting on ideas like “resilience” and “endangerment” from an Indigenous perspective. At present, at least two axes of debate deserve our attention.
Research assistant Omer Teteye makes bark cloth for dyeing. (Photo: Maria Luisa Lucas, 2022)
Firstly, contrary to what we might expect, the Bora have not put obstacles in registering knowledge related to the identification, collection and processing of plant and mineral species used in the preparation of natural dyes. Contrary to Euro-North American contemporary concerns about biopiracy and the usurpation of intellectual property, the people involved in the project have judged that anyone, Indigenous or not, who wants to prepare a pigment can do so without major restrictions. However, in the case of dyes with aesthetic or healing properties, it is common that these are associated with other forms of knowledge that endow them with healing, prophylactic or cosmetic properties. Namely, mythical narratives, ritual songs and, above all, shamanic spells. Thus, the most problematic would be the dissemination of records containing this knowledge that, from the specialists’ point of view, is what ultimately makes the pigments effective. Therefore, despite being mastered by very few people today, most judge that some of this knowledge should not be recorded on audio or video or, still, that some of these files should not circulate freely on online databases. According to them, this would be justified by the irreversible transformation of the transmission networks caused by recording (since much of this content must be learned from older people through payment in goods or labour 14 ) and, also, by the risk of illness for those who record and those who are recorded. This danger of illness has a reason: most Bora designs are associated with “animal-spirits”—that is, beings from mythical times with human capacities who, being the Bora's primordial enemies, find in today's animal species only one of their possible transformations. Other of their transformations or indexical forms are, precisely, the designs (Lucas, in press). Thus, the documentation of graphic repertoires on paper, photographs and digital archives permanently materialises enemies that had, until then, inhabited only the ephemeral world of ritual performance. These two harmful consequences of documentation become clearer when we turn to the second axis of reflection offered by the Bora case.
Despite being a clear demand from the communities involved, the documentation of the designs soon became the subject of controversial debate during their documentation on supports such as paper, gourds and wood. Besides the aforementioned concern about the possibility that the designs would circulate freely on the EMKP database, it also became clear that these contents were highly open to improvisation. 15 So, how could we explain the Bora's reluctance to allow the circulation of something that, after all, is the object of so much experimentation and variation? There are at least two possible answers to this question.
Firstly, by observing people's remarkable interest in reconstructing orally the transmission networks of each design, it was evident that what comes to the fore in women's and men's concerns is less the form of the graphic repertoires than the interpersonal relationships that go with them. To some extent, knowing exactly the transmission chain of a design is what guarantees its authenticity. On the other hand, as we just saw, the entanglement or indexicality of designs and animals-spirits makes people involved in the documentation especially vulnerable to attacks from these beings and potentially ill.
Both in the case of the knowledge that could be recorded on audio and in the circulation of graphic repertoires, people are more worried about the inappropriate use that other Bora people living outside the villages could make of this content than about possible misappropriation by non-Indigenous people. In this context, although the need to recover, record and strengthen knowledge about designs and natural dyes is unanimous, the process is far from being harmless. In other words, documentation among the Bora is both a clear demand from the communities to recover specific contents and, especially when considering the open access models in vogue, a threat to the continuity of this same knowledge.
This kind of conclusion suggests that endangerment, for the Bora, seems to have less to do with the vanishing of the content or technology involved in each material knowledge and more to do with the “detachment” or possible shattering of the proper ways of transmitting knowledge and building relations over time and generations. Drawing on the Strathernian fiction of the opposition between gift and commodity worlds (Strathern, 1988), the Bora regime of knowledge seems to operate less as a contract between autonomous parties and more as a virtually endless system of prestations—or, in other words, as a system in which people and their knowledge (in this case, graphic repertoires) cannot simply be “extracted” or “detached” from one another. In addition, the active production of what we conventionally call “cultural resilience” seems, in this case, to be very similar to those put into practice by them throughout recent colonial history. Here, as in the case of the movements of recovery by improvisation concerning rituals and clans in the last century (Lucas, 2020), the point was not the invariable replication of graphic repertoires or the technological operations involved in preparing dyes but, instead, the insistence on keeping alive specific modes of relations between humans (and also non-human beings) whose importance goes far beyond drawings and natural pigments.
The sixth and final case study focused on Bora graphic repertoires and natural dyes in Colombia, affirming the centrality of localized knowledge management systems for the resilience of demonstrably sustainable technics, here in the context of longstanding exploitation and violence. Bora dye makers, as practitioners and custodians of this technology, are actively engaging in managing knowledge transmission, also in the context of the EMKP documentation project, to fit, above all, locally specific needs, interests and values (rather than the more abstract, global ones of the EMKP, or the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for that matter). In other words, also when it comes to knowledge transmission, demonstrably sustainable technics are fundamentally defined by their careful social embedding and their abilities to strengthen, or weaken, longstanding social ties.
Demonstrably sustainable technics
The six EMKP projects featured here are notably diverse. They are not only diverse in their particular cultural and geographic settings and embedding but also in their “finalized” objects. These objects range from dyes to land itself and are variously located on the continuum that entangles the mundane and the exceptional (cf. Derbyshire et al., 2020; Lemonnier, 2012), including the foundations of everyday life (Lau islands) as much as ritually embedded textiles. For example, the ChOps that create these objects, though not discussed in detail here, equally reveal intense sociotechnical heterogeneity (as ChOps reliably do (Coupaye, 2022b)). Exemplified in the debates surrounding knowledge documentation of Bora dyes, so do surrounding knowledge systems. Each EMKP project further highlights a unique combination of threats to a particular material practice and knowledge, such as biodiversity loss (Marka-Dafing wild silk textiles), shifting residential practices (Kazakh hide and fiber crafts) and uncodified knowledge transfer (Great Zimbabwe drystone masonry); each case finds different dynamics at play that help explain the resilience, the persistence of, a particular material practice and knowledge system—from resistance to genocidal erasure (Yazidi felt hats) to the preservation and strengthening of kin relations (Kazakh hide and fiber crafts).
Despite these substantive differences, what the six projects share is that they fit a category of technics that has a particular analytical value for better understanding why, how and, most simply, that some material practices and knowledges persist despite various and, at times, continuous threats to their survival, that of their human and non-human participants and broader socioecological contexts. It is this particular category that we call “demonstrably sustainable technics.” As demonstrably sustainable technics, the vernacular technologies at the core of different EMKP projects challenge a too simplified focus on “endangerment” as a key defining feature of particular material practices and knowledges; thus, they contribute to broader efforts aimed at challenging the “terminal narratives” (Connolly et al., 2022: 2) and exclusionary discussions of continuity-change processes surrounding (post)colonial (material) cultures (cf. Bradtmöller et al., 2017; Derbyshire et al., 2020).
Demonstrably sustainable technics highlight a historically embedded, at times nearly continuous, endangerment-resilience nexus. For example, Yazidi felt hats are embedded in a deep history of endangerment—and resilience. While it is not the “finalized” object that is most explicitly threatened, it is its human makers who have, across the centuries, been targets of violent, at times genocidal, persecution. In this context, the resilience of the Yazidi felt hat technical system is part and parcel of Yazidi survival itself.
Central to this endangerment-resilience nexus is that endangerment variously facilitates resilience, even revival of a particular material practice and associated knowledge systems. Yazidi felt hats are, again, an excellent example for this dynamic as their practice has been revived in direct response to renewed threats to Yazidi physical and cultural survival. Lau artificial island building, in turn, demonstrates how a particular material practice and knowledge may also survive because it can provide a pragmatic answer to endangerment. While “modern” seawalls may fail to protect ecosystems against rising sea-levels, Lau islands—and seawall—may offer a sustainable response to at least some aspects of anthropogenic climate change. In other words, “demonstrably sustainable technics” showcase how at the very horizon of endangerment, resilience may emerge, at least as it pertains to some material practices and knowledges.
Demonstrably sustainable technics are also valuable as an analytical category because they shed light on those technics that are resilient and the characteristics of their resilience. Particularly insightful here is the EMKP project on Kazakh hide and fiber crafts and the resilience of the syrmaq (felt carpet) vis-à-vis the tus kiiz (embroidered wall hangings). Even though the syrmaq should, in terms of convenience, be more likely to be replaced (go extinct), this EMKP project revealed it to be more resilient than the tus kiiz. The reason is key: the syrmaq is more centrally embedded in processes of social reproduction, it is a type of object that because of its “physical properties, and [its] material implementation [is a] … wordless expression of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking; … [rendering] visible the pillars of social order that are otherwise blurred, if not hidden” (Lemonnier, 2012: 13).
Hence, while demonstrably sustainable technics have functional values, 16 as in the case of drystone masonry in Zimbabwe, social embedding is crucial for understanding the location of such technics at the endangerment-resilience nexus. Social embedding, above all else, pushes a particular material practice and knowledge towards resilience. Examples can be found throughout the six EMKP projects such as the significance of wild-silk textiles for non-verbally communicating status (among others) among Marka-Dafing communities or the centrality of interpersonal relationships for explaining Bora graphic repertoires.
Social embedding is such a central characteristic of these demonstrably sustainable technics that it may even contribute to their endangerment. For instance, Bora communities have questioned the preservation of material knowledge—at least if it is made available open access as envisioned by the EMKP—because of the social consequences it may have. As Lucas argues in more detail elsewhere, Bora communities have expressed concerns that recordings of endangered material knowledge may endanger those accessing this knowledge, and their families, if/when they have insufficient sociocultural understanding of the animals and spirits that the recordings evoked, possibly as “human predators” (Lucas, in press). In other words, social embedding is also central for understanding the fundamentally paradoxical characteristics of this particular category of technology and its location at the endangerment-resilience nexus.
In the case of demonstrably sustainable technics, endangerment and resilience are, thus, neither mutually exclusive, nor do they contradict each other. Instead, enmeshed paradoxically through the social embedding of particular material practices and knowledge systems, endangerment and resilience are intimately intertwined, constituent parts of each other. This also means that, despite at times extensive histories of resilience, the threat of endangerment is real for these technologies. For example, Marka-Dafing communities may not be able to protect wild silk textiles, as they may be unable to protect the species of caterpillars used to spin the type of silk used for socially significant textiles.
The focus of the EMKP on endangerment is, thus, adequate, but also insufficient to fully comprehend the dynamics at play as these demonstrably sustainable technics and their practitioners negotiate their past, presents and futures in highly complex, often enough violent, rapidly shifting environments. As an analytical category demonstrably sustainable technics reveal this complexity, while simultaneously creating opportunities for uncovering vernacular particularities in context-specific technical actions and associated values and lifeworlds.
Conclusion
The EMKP is only in its sixth year. With its commitment to embedding digital documentation and heritage management in archaeology and anthropology in the grounded, empirical world of fieldwork, a new generation of scholars is getting a chance to “be there” where the action of cultural diversity is playing out in day-to-day life. The work being done is truly wonderous. We use this in Michael Scott's sense of wonder being an index and mode of challenge of ontological premises. The basic idea is that different ontological starting points give rise to different experiences of wonder (Scott, 2016). Scott borrow his definition of wonder from Rubenstein “broadly construed to include awe, marvel, astonishment, shock, dread, amazement, and horror” (Rubenstein, 2008: 9). The continuation of such practices, these demonstrably resilient, long-standing techniques, are exactly the sort of sites where different ontological premises and wonders collide in experiences of each-other, in this case on the internet through the EMKP website. It offers possibilities for “a destabilization, whether fleeting or prolonged, of specific assumptions about the nature of being or becoming” (Scott, 2016: 476) as it relates to endangered—and resilient—material knowledge and practices around the world, over tremendous periods of time.
Consider the EMKP project “Last of the Bemba Bark Cloth Makers, Northern Zambia.” In the September 2023 issue of Nature, project partners announced finding what may be the worlds oldest wooden structure, dating to 476,000 years ago and thought to be made by Homo heidelbergensis (Barham et al., 2023). Imagine that! And this not meant in a facile, silly way. Rather, we entreat you to seriously imagine these radically different ways of being in the world and what we all risk loosing if their resilience diminishes to the point of extinction,
In The Dawn of Everything (2021), Graeber and Wengrow note: We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the generous comments from the anonymous reviewers, the kind support of the editorial team at the Journal of Material Culture, the support of the EMKP team including Lissant Bolton and Paula Granados Garcia and we especially thank the partner communities involved in the projects: Marka-Dafing of Burkina Faso, the Kazakh community of Mongolia, the Lau people of Solomon Islands, the Yazidi community in Kurdistan of Iraq, the longstanding community of dry stonemasons at Great Zimbabwe and the Bora people of Columbia. Finally, we would like to thank the teams of international and local researchers who helped make all of this possible.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Endangered Material Knowledge Programme: Hobbis, EMKP2021LG03. Babakir, EMKP2022SG01. Sagiya, EMKP2020SG08. Douny, EMKP2019LG04. Pearson, EMKP2021SG06. Lucas, EMKP2021SG04.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.