The ornamental cane-screens (çîẍ) of Iraqi Kurdish nomadic breeders : An object of enchantment among Mantik families? - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

The ornamental cane-screens (çîẍ) of Iraqi Kurdish nomadic breeders : An object of enchantment among Mantik families?

Résumé

From Central Asia to the Middle East, cane-screens made of woven strips of reed, wicker or other stems are traditionally used in nomadic shelters. Those of the Iraqi Kurds, called çîẍ, are used as the outer walls of the tents and inside, they separate the diwanxané, an area dedicated to hospitality, from domestic places, creating de facto male and female spaces. The interior çîẍ of the Mantik tribal identity breeders of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Governorate (KRG) has the particularity of being decorated entirely with ornamental diamond-shaped motifs. This type of decoration on the interior cane-screen is new in the group, of the order of two generations. In this way, we will see that this nomad object encompasses both a physical and symbolic capacity, but also participates in opening. They participate in the maintenance of the boundaries of the Mantik breeders in a violent regional, social and geopolitical context. The particularity of the group is that the two vertical poles of pastoral attraction (wintering and summering), as well as their routes, are located in areas of political and armed tension. The Iranian and Turkish armies regularly bomb the summering zone because of the presence of Kurdish armed identity groups. In the wintering zone, the Mantik villages are located around the ceasefire line since the end of the civil war between the two rival major Kurdish parties: the KDP and the PUK. On the way to the summering mountain pastures, tensions are fraught among all the protagonists. In their techniques, visual compositions and use, cane-screens, with or without patterns, show surprising permanency for a typical object with a constant figurative corpus from nomadic culture, in a Kurdish society wounded by years of erasing anthropological locations. The terms gul and nresh gul and the repetition of the diamonds echo the composition of a garden, an allegory of paradise awaiting the believer and of carnal pleasures that contribute to a type of eroticization of the household’s daily life. The ornamental çîẍ also carries the values of hospitality, protects the family’s intimate space from the gaze of strangers, and turns the envious eye away in the evocation of Paradise. Finally, due to the operational chain, but also to the gift and reciprocal exchange of work in which they participate, the çîẍ incorporates solidarity injunctions inside the group: first between female members, and female and male members of the same binamâl; then between the various lineages. The Mantik’s ornamental cane-screens, as diplomatic objects, belong to what the philosopher Alfred Gell calls the techniques of enchantment, a conception of art according to which it is propaganda for maintaining the status quo, a technical and aesthetic means of accepting common rules in a society. In the context of the KRG and the Mantik herders: a ritual of protection, solidarity and territorialization where the tent is set up..
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Dates et versions

hal-03684354 , version 1 (01-06-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03684354 , version 1

Citer

Michael Thevenin. The ornamental cane-screens (çîẍ) of Iraqi Kurdish nomadic breeders : An object of enchantment among Mantik families?. Nomad lives : From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day, 2021, ISBN : 9782856539675. ⟨hal-03684354⟩
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