Arab World - Bedouin Silver | Jewellery Blog & Courses

What’s in a name?

jewellery and identity

What’s in a name?

Updated Jan 24, 2024

One of the most complex issues when working with jewellery is how to put the origin of a piece into words. Looking at a hallmark is only the beginning. The hallmark systems, which operate on a national level, can inadvertently be counterproductive in attributing jewellery: when a piece is hallmarked in one particular country, this does not mean that the type is exclusive to that country.

There is much more to the identity of a jewellery piece: who made it, who wore it, where, and when. Here are some thoughts on how we identify jewellery and from which point of view we do that.

A Ouled Nail Bedouin woman and silver bracelets.

A foulet khamsa from Morocco, with a bright green glass cabochon.

Which name to use: the issues with countries

In most jewellery books, you will find pieces of jewellery assigned to a particular country. That seems rather straightforward, but is in reality quite complicated. Most of the borders delineating countries we know today have come into existence after World War II and the various wars for independence. These borders are disputed in several cases, too.

So especially when a jewellery piece is a little older, the country as we know it today may have had a different geographical range, may not have existed at all when the piece was made or may have been colonized after the piece was made.

Modern state boundaries also cut through age-old systems of exchange and cultural space: they have been conceived on the drawing board during colonial times. That is reflected in their straight and angular lines, disregarding natural boundaries such as rivers or mountain ranges that defined cultural spheres of contact.

Identities: cities, towns and tribes

Arbitrary though they may be, modern borders have a compartmentalizing effect: national identity does not always take transnational identities into account. Sometimes, this even leads to disputes about whether a piece of jewellery is, for example, Moroccan or Algerian, Algerian or Tunisian.. But that distinction is not always relevant, because a piece of jewellery can be both: the particular Amazigh tribe that makes use of it, may very well live in more than one country.

So, when referring to countries, it is always important to remain aware that these are countries as they are now – and that countries are not equal to cultures.

That is different for cities and towns. These may be older than the country they are currently located in. Cities and towns also cater to a larger clientele.

An example are the bracelets shown above: these were made in Cairo, and worn in Sinai, southern Palestine and southern Jordan. The Bedouin that purchased these bracelets inhabited this large area, which now consists of three different countries.

So do we call it an Egyptian bracelet, because it was made there?

A Palestinian bracelet, because it was worn there?

Do we call it Israeli or Jordanian, even though the bracelet was made before these countries themselves existed?

Or is it a Bedouin bracelet, because these are the people of whose culture this was part?

Identities: religion and movement

Another aspect of identification is often religion. This is where it gets even more complicated, especially in the sphere of creation. Many master craftsmen of jewellery were Jewish, but does that make a piece they created Jewish, too? Craftsmen catered to clientele from all religions, throughout history.

An example are the two Coptic silversmiths living in Bahariyya Oasis, Egypt, who created jewellery for an almost exclusively Muslim clientele. Are their pieces Christian?

And what to think of itinerant craftsmen, who traveled through a, sometimes vast, region to create jewellery for a variety of patrons? Is their nationality, tribal affiliation or religion even relevant to the identity of the pieces they made, just because they made them?

It is – when the jewellery they make serves to explicitly identify its wearers as belonging to a certain group. And that brings me to the topic of identity.

Jewellery and cultural identity

I believe the key is to understand how jewellery is very closely linked to identity. Now ‘identity’ is of course a notoriously fluid concept, interpreted differently depending on context.

But the picture that emerges is that the backbone of identity often is the locality or tribe a person belongs to, with religion coming in second and expressed in significant, but relatively small differences in dress and adornment, and modern nations following only after that.

Jewellery worn by Jewish, Christian and Muslim women can be completely identical, because they both live in a region with a certain notion of what ‘their’ jewellery looked like. The foulet khamsa shown above for example was worn by women of all three religions in a certain region of Morocco – read more about this ornament here.

So, when determining where a piece is from, I feel that all these factors should be taken into account instead of just pinpointing an origin in a country as we know it today.

There is the question of where it was created and by whom, who would have been wearing it and in which geographical range, and where it eventually was sold.

A piece can be simultaneously Yemeni and Saudi when it’s part of a community living on either side of a modern border. It can be Jewish and Islamic when created by a Jewish craftsman for a Muslim patron.

All of these aspects form part of the identity of the piece, and together they paint a much more vivid picture of the people who wore these multi-dimensional pieces. Trying to classify a piece as exclusively this-or-that ultimately says more about us, than about the wearers themselves.

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. Her main field of expertise is jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, as well as archaeological and archaeological revival jewellery. She has authored several books on jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Turquoise Mountain Jordan, and many others. She provides consultancy and research on jewellery collections for both museums and private collections, teaches courses and curates exhibitions. She is not involved in the business of buying and selling jewellery, and focuses on research, knowledge production, and education only.

Imaginarium

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | Reviews

dreaming our futures out of our past

Making the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium

That personal adornment is heritage, will come as no surprise if you have been following this blog for a while. But what does that heritage mean to the communities that it belongs to, that produced it, that lived with it? The publication Making the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium. Dreaming our futures out of our past is a brilliant volume that questions, reverses, challenges and above all, deeply loves. It accompanied the exhibition held in London in the autumn of 2022, curated by Salma Ahmad Caller, which showed a variety of artists’ responses to the way in which their communities have been represented in the West.

Making the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium

Essay and work by Crit Team

Essay and work by Afsoon

Essay and work by Alia Derouiche Cherif

First off, what is an Imaginarium? The explanation on the back cover reads: ‘A place devoted to the imagination. An imaginarium is richly coloured by those who are doing the imagining.’ So, is all of this imagined? Yes and no. The heart of this project is formed by the many colonial postcards that have been produced of women in North Africa and Southwest Asia. These are images of women as Western photographers imagined them to be, part of an imaginary ‘Orient’ that mainly existed as counterpart to the West. But these women, however much they have been made to pose and dress (or undress) in a certain way, were real. They were someone’s mother, sister or daughter. Who were they? What did they want, believe, hope? The project centers around these women from three angles: throwing light, casting doubt, telling tales.

The Imaginarium-book is edited by Salma Ahmad Caller, who is also the curator of the exhibition and the creator of the project. She has worked with artists, researchers, writers, scholars and consultants, who each have their own relation to the postcard women, the past and the cultures that they come from. How we look at these images is shaped by our own lives, histories and cultural context, and so this book contains a caleidoscopic ensemble of personal interpretations and views. I will share a few of these next.

The essay and art by Hala Ghellali, Colonial Postcards from Libya. Reclaiming the songs of our heritage, is a very personal account of how research into postcards turned into a way of honouring and reclaiming heritage, and personal adornment in particular. She reconnects the silver jewellery items to their world of poetry, songs, experiences among women and shares with us how she feels about these postcards and how her art interacts with both these images, her personal experiences and her heritage. Hala has a book coming out on Libyan silver jewellery soon, and having read this powerful essay, I can only be grateful she will be sharing more of her research with us.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay contributes an essay in the form of a letter to one of the postcard women: a personal, intimate account of her own life and experiences blend in with imagined aspects of the life of the addressee, Mme Cohen. Enaya Hammad Othman writes about the representation of Palestinian women both by colonizers and nationalists: her observation that after a century of representation, women themselves are increasingly expanding their control over the meanings of cultural clothing (p. 100) reminded me of the work of Wafa Ghnaim of Tatreez and Tea. Alia Derouiche Cherif places the well-known photographs of Tunisian women by Lehnert & Landrock in a new context by juxtaposing it with the experiences of a descendant of the Ouled Nail in today’s Tunisia (p. 92). Afsoon, in her essay Somewhere between here and home, reflects on how these women have never consented to their image being shared so widely as they are now. In her art, she ‘nests’ them in things they might find familiar, such as jewellery, henna, beads, patterns and colours, in order to bring a little of ‘home’ to them. (p.33)

Reading this book has introduced me to many realities that exist besides the images that we are so used to seeing because they are shared over and over again. It caused me to question the realities that I am familiar with, and urged me to keep trying and imagine these in another light. The book addresses the effects and the pain of colonialism, racism and oppression, but what you will notice in every page, every artwork, every word, is love. This book and this project have created a space where the postcard women finally can feel safe and protected, where they are surrounded by gazes not looking for what might be gained from them, but what can be done for them: cover them, shield them, enhance them, adorn them.

If you want to start grasping how personal appearance matters personally, culturally, socially, historically, artistically, and how it is most definitely relevant for our world today, I highly recommend you to peruse this book: not just to read, but to take in the many layers of meaning in the artworks presented as well. A beautifully designed book that will get you thinking, questioning, and hoping.

Making the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium. Dreaming our Futures out of our Past. Curated and edited by Salma Ahmad Caller, 2022.

Full colour, 118 pages, in English. Published by Peculiarity Press

The book was a much loved gift from Salma Ahmad Caller.

More books on the importance of jewellery as carrier of identity and as a historic source? See my picks for you here! To get regular updates when a new book is presented, why not join the Jewellery List and have them sent to you…?

Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Hair: untold stories

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | Museums & Exhibitions

the many meanings of hair

Hair: untold stories

Hair has been our most personal, natural form of adornment for millennia. We either hide it or show it, and it is so personal that it is regarded as an extension of the person itself. But hair is much more than that. The excellent exhibition Hair: untold stories in the Horniman Museum and Gardens is entirely devoted to the many meanings of hair.

Hair explores our relationship to human hair by looking at it from various perspectives. Researchers, artists, film makers, hair dressers, poets and photographers all weigh in to paint a vivid and sometimes unexpected picture of this material. The exhibition starts out with a section on hair as material: maybe not the first use to come to mind, but to me a refreshing way of looking at hair as something other than a part of our body or our appearance. Hair is a marvelous fibre: lightweight yet incredibly strong, flexible and absorbing. Hair was used to attach shark’s teeth to palm rib swords on the Kiribati islands in Oceania, but of course also in products related to hairstyling like wigs and fillers.

A large map illustrating the hair trade is very illuminating. I was aware that in many cultures, hair is shaven off for religious reasons, but never thought much about what that hair was used for: apparently, there is a thriving market for it, and not all of it goes to wig making. ‘Waste’ hair, collected when brushing, is sorted and sold as well. I learned that many early Afro wigs were made of yak hair coming from Central Asia and China, that nowadays synthetic wigs can also be made of fibres derived from banana skins, and much more.

What looks like a hair shop, is an art installation by Korantema Anyimadu, exploring the experiences of black and non-binary people with hair in the UK. Listening to their favourite songs, reading memories and looking around in the hair shop I learned a great deal about memories associated with the smell, feel, timing and handling of hair and the challenges of feeling ‘at home’ in a country where your basic hair care cannot be achieved so easily.

Exhibition Hair

Hair combs: more than tools

Installation by Korantema Anyimadu

Swedish jewellery made of hair

The section on Entanglements presents and discusses the balance between the personal aspects of hair and the social norms expected of the wearer: the eternal balance between individuality and the common. Bridal hair is associated with fertility and beauty, Victorian women were expected to wear their hair up when married, and keeping the first hairlocks of a child as memento is a worldwide phenomenon. Hair and death are shown in European mourning jewellery created with hair of the passed persons, and a topic I could personally relate to is how to deal with the loss of hair due to illness or chemotherapy.

A series of combs ends the exhibition: these are not just presented as hair maintenance tools, but as meaningful, powerful objects that can convey many messages. I really enjoyed this exhibition, as it managed to address many unexpected angles on hair in a comprehensible, enjoyable and thought provoking way.

Accompanying the main exhibition are several smaller photographic exhibitions: Cult Hair (on the lower gallery) and Intimate Archives (on the gallery above the World Gallery). The latter combines hair care rituals with spells and traditions, showing how acts of social care connect scattered and displaced people. A powerful expression of the meaning of body aesthetic, both as performative act and as carrier of identity!

Hair: untold stories in Horniman Museum and Gardens: find out more on the museum website

More on personal adornment in exhibitions and museums? Read about other collections here! Want to be kept in the know on new and forthcoming exhibitions and museum installations? Join the Jewellery List and have news delivered to your inbox!

Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Alexine Tinne

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | Reviews

photography

Alexine Tinne. Photographer. Her Worldview

Early photography in North Africa and Southwest Asia offers a wealth of information – about the photographed, but also about the photographers. Photographers create images, they capture the world as they see it. They include what they would like observers of their work to see, and exclude what does not fit the perfect image. In doing so, many early photographers constructed an image of ‘the Orient’ that reflects not the region itself, but the view Westerners had of it, as well as the dominance they exerted over its people. Among these early photographers, very few were women. The book Alexine Tinne – Photographer. Her Worldview and the accompanying exhibition present the photographical work of one headstrong Dutch lady who traveled extensively throughout North Africa.

Alexine Tinne is perhaps most famous for her death, after a less than ordinary life: she was killed in an attack on her campsite in Algeria. Born in 1835 in a wealthy Dutch family, she never married, but instead set out to explore the world. Her curiosity had been present at a young age, when she could be found exploring geographical works and maps, learning English, French, Spanish and Arabic – possibly even Tuareg, as she started out to copy a French – Tuareg dictionary by hand. Traveling with her mother to Egypt and Palestine turned into a trip of nearly two years: a trip in which we see her love for exploring and photography piqued.

Photography reveals a great deal about the photographer: personal predilections, and cultural assumptions or worldview. These personal preferences shine through in Alexine Tinne’s work as well. Looking at her photographs in a way is looking through her eyes, framing the world as she wanted it to see. She clearly thought in images and composition, and was very aware of the technical aspects of photography. She learned to correct image distortion and played with framing: I could not help but relate to how she tried out various cutouts of a photo she took in her backyard to create a composition she was satisfied with. Another example is the collage she made of the view from her window in The Hague. To us, used to digital cameras and smartphones with panoramic settings, that may not seem particularly groundbreaking, but in the 19^th century it was. In images like these, Alexine shows us she is not confined by conventional frames or considers herself limited by technical (im)possibilities. This is someone who literally thinks out of the box.

So, what happens when someone like that sets sail for North Africa? There are not all that much photographs left of her journeys, but those that do survive, are telling. Here, we see her world view change. Photography in North Africa and Southwest Asia in this timeframe was practiced by cultural outsiders with a colonial interest. As a result, the image they created of ‘the Orient’ reflected a worldview of dominance by Europeans and subservience by the colonized. Alexine’s first images fit right in that view, but after a while, they change. This change is discussed in detail in the last chapter of the book. Looking at some of her photographs, I got the impression she did not take photographs to send back home to serve an audience: she seems to have made them as mementos for herself. This is particularly visible in the photos she had made of damage after a devastating storm in Algeria: these are not constructing an idealized view, but showing a heartbreaking reality. The series of carte de visite portraits that she had made of her travel companions provides another view of how she perceived her world. Over the years, she had assembled a widely varied group of people around her, from North Africa and Europe alike. Now these portraits in the late 19^th century were usually made by wealthy families (photography was expensive!) and included only family members, not people considered to be of a lower social status. Alexine had them made of everyone. In group photos as well, she included all her travel companions as equals: it may be my imagination, but on some of these everyone looks equally bored to be standing outside in the heat for yet another time-consuming posing session. Many of her travel companions are known by name, and you will come to recognize them on the photos as you read on. I appreciated how the book does not portray Alexine Tinne as an enlightened white saviour. Instead, the authors carefully place her work in its cultural context and then proceed to point us to tiny differences that reveal her worldview was considerably more inclusive than that of many of her peers. To be clear: that is not inclusivity as we would expect it today, but it is definitely different from the majority of 19^th century photographers.

The book itself is in a large, square format. In 8 chapters, the authors place Alexine’s photographs in their cultural and technical context by including many photographs by other photographers for comparison. We see how her first journey to Egypt influenced her photography skills, and how she further honed these in The Hague before setting sail for Africa. At the beginning and end of the book an art photography project by Dagmar van Weeghel is presented, who photographs individuals in the style of Tinne. All photographs are shown against a black background, as if flipping through a photo album. I loved the generous size of the photos, which allows the reader to really look and compare. A peculiar aspect of the book is that it has no page numbers. I’m not sure whether that is a consequence of its lay-out as a photo album, but it does make quoting or referring to pages challenging. Also, not all captions can be related to corresponding photographs, as the captions are numbered but the photographs themselves aren’t. The one real drawback though are the small slip-ups throughout the book. Some captions are incorrect or contain misspellings (photograph 135 for example is labeled as Thebes, but depicting a cataract near Aswan; photograph 155 is a date seller, not a dade seller), some book titles are misspelled, the mention of Alexine and her mother traveling from Luxor to the Black Sea and back in a fortnight likely refers to the Red Sea instead, and so on.

I really enjoyed this book for its thoughtful approach of the photographical work by a remarkable woman in a timeframe where women generally did not travel or photograph. Old photos are shown once again to reveal much more than just an image: the authors show us how both a person and a worldview emerge if we know where and how to look. A valuable addition to your bookshelf!

Alexine Tinne, Photographer. Her worldview. by Maartje van den Heuvel (ed). WBOOKS, 2021

Full-colour, bilingual in Dutch/English. Available with the publisher, the Haags Historisch Museum and online.

The book was received as review copy from the publisher.

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Le Khôl

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | Reviews

Kohl containers in france

Le Khôl

Another lovely book on kohl containers! The Musée International de la Perfumerie in Grasse, in southern France, hosts an exhibition on kohl containers in the winter of 2021-2022: Le Khôl. Le secret d’un regard envoûtant venu d’Orient. The exhibition is accompanied by a concise publication in magazine format, in which various authors provide background information on this elaborate private collection.

The museum was donated a private collection of 268 kohl containers, collected over four decades by Mme. Leblanc in various parts of the world. She describes in the chapter on the history of her collection how she first became enamored with kohl containers in 1967, whilst living in Africa, and how after those first pieces her collection expanded gradually until it encompassed hundreds of pieces from several continents.

A chapter on the history of kohl containers by the head of the department North Africa-Middle East of the Quai Branly-Musée Jacques Chirac, Hana Chidiac, explores how eye make-up was used from Antiquity through the Middle Ages into our own timeframe, as well as how the meaning of kohl was perceived throughout time. Hélène Kessous, anthropologist specialized in India, contributed a chapter on the uses of kohl in India, including the differences between kohl, surma and kajal as well as their respective containers. I enjoyed that this chapter also included a recipe for kajal, as well as short discussions on the magical aspects of kohl and its presence in movies.

The second part of the book is a catalogue of kohl containers from various parts of the world, which I enjoyed reading in tandem with Paint It, Black, the existing and elaborate publication on kohl containers. Le Khôl complements Paint It, Black geographically with kohl containers from further afield such as China, Central and Southwest Asia, adding to your overview of these wonderful items.

Throughout the book, the kohl containers are shown in large, full colour photographs, which make this book a publication you’ll enjoy browsing through. Not all containers in the collection have been included: a selection has been presented, but the pieces shown are varied both geographically and in their shapes and materials, so there is plenty to see and enjoy. The terminology is sometimes a bit Orientalist, using words like secrets, beguiling, seductive, and mysterious – the book does not need these, as the individual chapters and catalogue are interesting enough by themselves. Le Khôl is a short, sweet presentation of a private collection of kohl containers in a luxurious magazine format, that you will want to add to your bookshelf!

Le Khôl. Le secret d’un regard envoûtant venu d’Orient, by Ludmilla Renardet & Julie Gérard (eds), Editions Faton, 2021

63 pp, full-colour, in French. Available with the publisher, the Musée International de la Parfumerie and online.

The book was purchased through the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Browse other books on personal adornment here!

More on the use of kohl is in the e-course Scents of the Middle East – bringing you the invisible world of fragrance, make-up, henna, hairstyles and much more.

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.