Head Adornment

Head Adornment

by | European jewellery, Reviews

traditional costume and identity

Head Adornment

One of the aspects of personal appearance that always stands out is what we wear on our head. Headdresses have a practical as well as a communicative and spiritual side. They protect our hair and face from the elements, but also serve to elongate our person, impress onlookers and communicate status. They are agents of transformation, and they are important all over the globe. The National Museum in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, devoted an exhibition to headdresses, curated by Irene Steiner, who also put together the accompanying catalogue Head adornment, traditional costume, and identity.

The focus of this volume is on headdress from Europe: over three quarters of the 200-page publication explores a variety of regional European head adornment. Two chapters (9 and 13), form the main matter of the book. Chapter 9 presents brief explorations highlighting the many angles of costume and dress study. From lived experiences to repurposing and revaluating traditional dress, gravestones as historic source and traditional dress on Halloween, this chapter is a collection of thoughts and observations that may further the study of dress. Chapter 13 presents a selection of regional headdress variations, each with a brief description. Surrounding these main chapters are short essays on particular headdresses like the stunning Radhaube and Reginahaube, hats, bonnets, head scarves and much more. The photographs of these headdresses worn are just stunning, as they are combined with the dress they would go with: an absolutely splendid and colourful view!

An interesting intermezzo is the photographic essay by Frank Rossbach. Here, headdress elements are worn and styled without regard for their historical ‘correctness’, and more as fashion statement. The accompanying text raises important topics like exotification and romanticizing traditional dress, along with problematic issues such as nationalization and commodification of dress and adornment. These topics are not explored, only mentioned, but their inclusion in a publication about traditional dress hopefully raises awareness that dress study is about so much more than just fabric and models.

The final two chapters provide a reflection on headdress from non-Western countries. Hair adornment from four continents is presented, followed by a selection of head ornaments (worn often over, on or in the headdress proper) from Africa and Asia. Where the previous chapters are accompanied by in-depth texts, these two chapters are for the most part visual and have an introductory paragraph that can only remain general in nature due to space constraints. The importance of hair jewellery for example, associated with the cultural significance of hair and hair styles, is not touched upon – but as the author wrote in the introduction, there is no single book that can encompass any and all head and hair jewellery.

Given the often personal and/or religious importance of head ornaments, there are a few instances in the book where I did wonder whether depicting them worn out of context is the best approach. Of course, the aim of the book is to educate and honour the cultures these head adornments come from. But in the case of for example the Oromo headdress (p. 172), the ornament carries a much a deeper significance. It is considered to be a living object, a sacral emblem. [1] In a case like this, however illustrative wearing it may be, presenting it as stand-alone object might be the more sensitive choice.

This publication offers a huge number of images, making it a valuable visual reference. The texts with each chapter vary in length and depth of discussion, but raise important points in the study of dress and adornment. Notably the need for research in private collections is addressed time and again throughout the book, a need I can only confirm from my own work with private collections. Each and every chapter in this book could easily be the central topic of book on its own, given time and resources, and I sincerely hope the opportunity to create them will arise in the near future. In the meantime, I’m sure you will enjoy this visual reference feast!

Head adornment, Traditional Costume and Identity. Europe, Asia, Africa, by Irene Steiner, 2022

201 pages, full-colour, bilingual German/English. Available with the author.

The book was gifted by the author.

More books on traditional dress and jewellery? Explore the selection here, or join the Jewellery List to receive new book alerts in your inbox!

References

[1] Megerssa, G. & A. Kassam 2019. Sacred Knowledge Traditions of the Oromo of the Horn of Africa, Fifth World Publications, Durham/Finfinnee, p. 243-244

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.

Losing sight

Losing sight

by | Opinion

the decline in knowledge

Losing sight

Traditional jewellery is disappearing at a fast rate. It is no longer made in the quantities past generations would need, and it is being sold both in the countries of origin as well as in the regions of the world where collectors live. These days, that is not just ‘the West’, but also for example China: amber and coral are bought in bulk by Chinese collectors. But besides the jewellery itself, another valuable asset is disappearing at an even more alarming speed. That is knowledge about what this jewellery actually is – and what it represents.

That loss of insight is for example visible in the flawed identification of pieces of adornment. Sometimes these can be way off the mark, such as the Bedouin face veil shown in the gallery below. It was offered up for auction as a body ornament/necklace from Turkmenistan (1). The dorsal ornament from Turkmenistan, pictured below as well, was offered as a Saudi jewel. We might have a good laugh about such a mismatch (and I usually do), but the rate in which these appear is indicative of a much more serious matter.

Now you might think ‘Of course these are misidentified, they are being handled by cultural outsiders’ and that would certainly hold true in a number of cases. But incorrect attributions also, and increasingly, occur within the countries of origin themselves. The photograph in the gallery below shows several splendid Yemeni necklaces – I photographed these in the exhibition Splendour and Shine in the Flow of Time. When I posted this photograph on my Instagram-account, I received dozens of messages from Algerian followers insisting this was Algerian. The Turkmen jewellery, which I photographed on the Amsterdam Tribal Jewelry and Textiles Fair, received a lot of attention as well, with many people writing me these pieces were from Kabylia. These are just a few examples: I receive messages every single day of people who genuinely believe a piece of adornment stems from their culture, even if it hails from another continent, another culture, another language family entirely.

The loss of accurate knowledge also manifests in constructed images presenting as reality. Lebanese singer Myriam Fares launched a new music video early in 2022, in which she claimed to dress and perform in Amazigh tradition: the jewels and dress she used in an online dress-up challenge however were random and had very little to do with actual Amazigh adornment. (2)  The comments on this particular post range from appreciation to anger: misrepresenting Amazigh culture on a global stage by an Arab performer is adding insult to injury in an already strained dynamic. Being respectful about adornment has much wider implications than just ‘looking the part’: it includes understanding what jewellery actually means. The photograph of the young woman included in the image gallery (click ‘next’ on the right side of the gallery) is another example of a non-existent, exotic-looking ensemble. Constructed reality in older photographs is a well-known phenomenon, as I addressed in another blog post. It is however still very much alive today, where photos are made specifically to share one narrative or to convey one particular message. There is no such thing as neutral photographs, yet we often accept them as reliable sources of information. When we no longer recognize that a dress is worn the wrong way, or mismatched with ornaments that would not belong with it, the power of misinformation that is shaping our world view will only grow stronger.

Bedouin face veil

Turkmen dorsal ornament

Yemeni necklaces

Turkmen jewellery

Modern mashup

You might also think ‘So what? A wrongly attributed piece, what’s the big deal?’. Incorrectly identifying pieces of adornment is not my point here. That happens all the time, and many of those glitches can be avoided with a little more research. My point is that ascribing pieces of heritage to another culture has consequences. In the continuous struggle for identity and acknowledgement that many cultures face, it is imperative to be aware that spreading misinformation is not helping, to say the least. It can even be outright damaging, if the misattribution occurs willfully and intentionally – rebranding heritage to fit a new narrative is one of the most vicious ways of erasing the past.

Piece by piece, accurate insights in dress and adornment are diluted further with chunks of misinformation that are repeated over and over again – the Internet is as fast as it is patient. Images are easily copied and shared, with the accompanying background information disappearing and being replaced by brief, and often wrong, captions. With the watering down of conducting proper research to simply ‘Googling’, these nuggets of misinformation continue to be repeated and shared. The meticulous work of Wafa Ghnaim of Tatreez and Tea is just one example of the time and effort it takes to bring back the detailed meaning of Palestinian tatreez from the brink of oblivion, and there are many more researchers that work tirelessly to ensure not only material culture survives, but its cultural, social, economic and historic meaning as well. One of the most important factors in this ongoing effort is that the results are shared widely, so they are accessible to people worldwide: the databases of both the Textile Research Centre and the Zay Initiative are just two examples of accessible information.

And we need those efforts more than ever. Because we have now arrived at that point where the transfer of knowledge to the next generation is crucial. If we lose sight of both the details of and the wider world behind adornment, if we let the stories of both wearers and collectors slip through the cracks of time, the remaining jewellery pieces will have lost their voice as a historic source forever.

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Do you own a collection? Please do try and document it as much as possible. Every little note helps! A free guide on how to get started with that is here.

Are you wondering what to do with your collection? Please consider the work of the Qilada Foundation – my non-profit initiative aimed at repatriating collections and everything they represent to their countries of origin.

References

1) Catawiki lot 59513855, auctioned on June 17th 2022

2) The choreography did, however: this was copied straight from a choreography by Kif-Kif Bledi, a group of performers who are known for their deep study of dance and identity. The contemporary twists they add to traditional dance made the choreography easily identifiable as a creation of Kif-Kif Bledi as shown in this video– the intellectual property dispute is still ongoing.

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.

Early Photography Portraits

Early Photography Portraits

by | Opinion

an unreliable source

Early photography portraits of the Middle East

Updated Jan 11, 2024

Don’t you just love those old photos of women wearing jewellery? Many collectors search for these and use them to get an idea of how jewellery was worn. But there are some serious considerations to take into account with these photos: you can’t take them at face value.

Staged studio photographs

The thing with old portraits is that in almost all cases they have been staged. Early photographic equipment was heavy and cumbersome: you couldn’t snap a candid picture like we are used to nowadays, the subject had to stay really still.

Buildings and landscapes are better at that than people, so these form a large part of early photos.⁠ For people, photographers would have their own studio and their own props, and they could create photographs of people dressed in just about anything that they believed would sell.

And that is an important aspect of early photography: the point of view from which these photos were taken.

Early photography: creating the ‘Orient’

Early photography very often served to create an image of ‘the Orient’ to send back home. Of course, this new art was also used in documentation like for example of archaeological sites and monuments, but documenting more often than not switched to creating when contemporary life was photographed.

What was photographed had to fit into a specific framework: idyllic scenes in the countryside ‘like it had been in Biblical times’, and studio photography of men and women at their most ‘Oriental’. This included strangely misplaced clothing and sometimes complete nudity, as well as unnatural poses.⁠ Life as it actually happened was rarely photographed.⁠

Old photographs therefore are not neutral sources of information: we always need to be aware of the intent with and purpose for which they were taken. The photograph shown above was taken by Jean Besancenot in Morocco, and is more reliable than for example images from photo studios operating in the main cities.

Constructing the Orient: modern media

But is that misrepresentation a thing of the past? Sadly, no. In this digital age, photographs circulate faster and wider than ever before.

Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are picture-based entirely and a quick search will get you dozens of image results. The context that goes with these however often does not come along, and as a consequence misinformation and misrepresentations are repeated again and again. It’s why I started this blog, as I wrote about here.

With the availability of photography for virtually everyone, paired with the slow disappearance of traditional dress and adornment, we enter a new era of constructed images.

Again, mashups of dress and adornment are created, photographed and circulated widely with just one click of a mouse. The photo shown above is an example for such a mashup: the headdress and face veil are not worn together like this, as they belong to two different social groups.

How to observe early portrait photos from the Middle East

Here are three points to consider when looking at old photographs of women wearing jewellery.

First of all, don’t take them at face value immediately but have a close look at what you actually see. Is it a studio photograph? Is the photographed person (semi-) nude? Is the photo part of a series, recognizable by captions like ‘scènes & types’? These are all indicators for posed and constructed photography. Postcards in particular are notoriously posed and in some cases a far cry from reality.

A second point is to look for other work by the same photographer: there is a difference between the well-known photo studios in large towns, and photographers associated with for example archaeological or military expeditions.Who was the photographer? What else did he (it was almost always a he, see for a remarkable exception this blog) photograph?

Thirdly, see what information, if any, you can dig up about the photograph itself. Especially with photographs found online, see what information comes with it: not every ‘Bedouin bride’ or ‘Woman in traditional clothing’ is identified accurately. As mislabeled info is often copied many times over (see more about that here), this may take some searching, but using the search feature for comparable images it may in some cases be possible to find a source with more information.

Taking the time to form an opinion about the trustworthiness of a photograph as visual source will help you gain a better understanding of the jewellery and dress you’re researching.

Early portrait photos and jewellery: what we can learn

Is there anything we can learn with certainty from early portrait photographs, regarding jewellery? Well, yes: we can observe which jewellery items were in existence at the time of photographing.

Even if they are props and used randomly (you’d be surprised to see how many necklaces ended up as headdresses, just because it looks so exotic), logic dictates they were available when the picture was taken.

This provides us with a timeframe: ‘this type of jewel existed as early as…’, and to some extent an idea of clothing. These pieces of information can then be used again to contribute to the actual story of the photographed people as they really were, instead of how the photographer invented them to be.⁠

And that’s the story jewellery research aims to bring back to life!

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References

I have written this blog post from a perspective of photography as resource for jewellery studies and not as a discussion of early photography itself. This field is widely explored by scholars from a variety of angles. Here are a few starting points:

The essays in the Postcard Women’s Imaginarium are a very important contribution by contemporary artists and scholars to the interpretation of Orientalist postcards.

Tied in to the inventing and constructing of photographs is the power balance between the (foreign) photographer and the photographed. The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay explores these ethical aspects in depth. The video A Snapshot of Empire: the racist legacy of colonial postcards shows how these pre-staged photographs continue to influence our view today: watching these 8 minutes is highly recommended!

Local photography is discussed in Ritter and Scheiwiller (eds), The Indigenous Lens? Early Photography in the Near and Middle East (Berlin 2018), of which the introductory chapter can be read here.

A selection of sources for historical photographs of the Middle East can be found here and here.

Would you like to quote this article? Please do! Here’s how:

S. van Roode, [write the title as you see it above this post], published on the Bedouin Silver website [paste the exact link to this article], accessed on [the date you are reading this article and decided it was useful for you].

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.