Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures @ SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE University of Queensland

Craft Landscapes & Production Networks in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Kashan

Collaborators: Nader Sayadi & Manu P. Sobti

Positioned within the context of the medieval Islamic realm, this project examines the combination of tangible and intangible factors within urban environments to specifically uncover the process of craft production. Given that craft production was an especially labor intensive process before the era of extensive mechanization, we examine intertwined networks of locale-specific conceptualization, production, distribution and marketing systems. Kashan’s sharbafi or silk textile waving craft tradition has remained one of the most important livelihoods of Kashani inhabitants, remaining unbroken from its heyday in the early seventeenth century under Safavids to the inception of modernized wool and cotton textile industries at the time of Reza Shah Pahlavi in the early twentieth century. The legendary Kashani sharbafi craft applies to looms as well as machines, and has dependent upon the skills of multiple actors and a host of associated crafts before the finished product is created. These complex networks include weavers, managers, merchants, consumers, buildings, minerals, plants, qanats, looms, and pigments. The sharbafi tradition also has parallels in the silk textile tradition at Herat in Khurasan (now Afghanistan), at Margilan in Fargana (now Uzbekistan), at Yazd in Jibal (now Iran), and Bursa in Rum or Bilad al-Rum (now Turkey).

In addition to studying the Kashani sharbafi craft, this research also re-conceptualizes the term ‘craft landscape’, as especially pertaining to the urban context. It proposes that a ‘craft landscape’, such as one in Kashan, was an environment that simultaneously shaped and was in turn shaped by the craft that resided at its center. Kashan’s urbanscape allows us to move smoothly between the multiple scales of material culture, urban inhabitants, buildings, neighborhoods, city, hinterland, region and beyond. An inter-dependency is observed between the city and its spaces serving as sites for craft, and in turn made by the networks of craft and craftmakers. This broad approach is illustrated both in the works of contemporary cultural geographers such as Schein, Sauer, Groth, and Upton, alongside medieval interlocutors including Ibn-Khaldun, Mir Fendereski, al-Biruni, and Ibn-Sina. How did these ‘craft landscapes’ then prevail within the economies of old Islamic centers in Iraq, Sham (Levant), Khurasan, Fars, and Mawarannahr (Transoxiana)? Why were such craft centers characterized by their limited access to water, creating situations wherein the normative practice of agriculture was now replaced by this crucial livelihood. In addition to on-site fieldwork, archival research and artisans’ interviews, in order to interpret the bilateral relationships between craft and these environments, we also rely on a range of socio-economic history approaches, extending from Bruke and Ghazanfar to Ibn-Khaldun.