“Endangered Crafts: Documenting Shu Making in Chitral, Northern Pakistan“

Abstract

• This paper is concerned with issues related to the documentation of endangered crafts. It takes as an example an ethnography which aims to understand and record over two years the weaving of shu, a type of woollen cloth characteristic of the region of Chitral in northern Pakistan, for which the authors received funding from the Arcadia Foundation’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP). Climate change and an ageing population in the shu-making villages in Chitral have put the knowledge and skills of this craft at risk of extinction. EMKP’s aim is “to support the documentation of material knowledge systems” and to preserve them by providing free access to a digital repository to store knowledge system-related information that was recorded by researchers in interviews with the agents of these knowledge systems together with photographs and film footage of their practices. The collaboration between PI Iqbal, who is carrying out the field research, and Principal Curator Voigt, bringing a complementary perspective of museums as repositories of material culture, allows us to consider and mitigate better the theoretical and practical implications of EMKP’s objectives. In this paper we will discuss our project in the context of the historical collecting of manufacturing processes in industrial museums; reflect on our methods in the light of the shu makers’ implicit and explicit knowledge; reflect on the experience from the first season in the field, and deliberate the usefulness of preserving craft knowledge more widely. We will highlight the nature of the relationships between researcher, the local community organisation, and the makers themselves, particularly with respect to the making visible of their tacit knowledge.