Dumplings in Daghestan

Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov and Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov
TAATTOOED MOUNTAIN WOMEN AND SPOON BOXES OF DAGHESTAN
Magic medicine symbols in silk, stone, wood and flesh
96pp. Bennett and Bloom. Paperback, £19.99.
978 1 8989 48 81 0

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan may become a cult classic by virtue of its title alone. The author Robert Chenciner is a textile historian, but is here writing also about skin and wood. The book looks like a well-illustrated museum exhibition catalogue, and in that tradition the captions and side-notes reveal as much information, if not more, than the text itself. Chenciner is a free scholar. There are not many of these left; but if you have ever stumbled upon Simon Digby identifying the supporting characters within a Mughal miniature, Bruce Wannell glowing with enthusiasm for Pathan poets of the North-West Frontier or Sheila Paine teasing out the imagery of Central Asian weavers you will have felt the idiosyncratic glow of this scholarly species of “questing beast”.

Daghestan is one of the least-known of the many fractured nation states of the Caucasus. It is virtually invisible to all but a regional specialist, though a literate reader should be able to identify all of its neighbours: oil-rich Azerbaijan, wine-growing Georgia, war-scarred Chechnya, and the Caspian Sea. Daghestan is like Scotland in the size and drama of its land mass. It has a population of between 2 and 3 million divided among thirty-one separate ethnic groups – who are united by a shared belief in Islam, pride in their resistance to Russian conquest and a common material culture. The mountain villages of Daghestan have a long tradition of communal self-government, with an economy balanced between carefully worked terraces of privately owned agrarian land and shared highland grazings. Their artistic vision is most famously expressed in Soumakh carpets and Kaitag embroideries, which suggest Matisse and Aboriginal art in their graphic strength and the glowing intensity of their colour combinations.

It was an attempt to research the remembered “meanings” of these much-prized Kaitag embroideries that first set Chenciner to question the mountain women of Daghestan, in the company of his co-authors Gabib Ismailov and Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov. They soon realized that although the women were necessarily silent about what their great-grandmothers had thought when they created these exquisite embroideries, they themselves were still making use of many of these symbols, in wood carving and in skin tattoos.

Any study of tattoo art is inevitably dominated by the incredible vibrancy and richness of design that came out of Polynesia in the mid-eighteenth century. There is, however, a much more modest tradition of tattoos in the Old World, and it is this link which concerns Chenciner and his researches in Daghestan. He looks south, downstream from the mountains of the Caucasus towards the valleys of the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates, where excavations have found ancient mummies with dots and dashes of coloured skin. It is supposed that these women might have been linked with sacred prostitution at the great sanctuaries of the goddesses of love. Perhaps this linkage would explain the drop in status of tattoos in later centuries, for, in the Hellenistic and Roman period, tattoos were used as instruments of state power: labels for slaves, prisoners of war, criminals and soldiers. It is clear, however, from the Pazyryk mummies of Siberia and among the noble women of Thrace “who bloodied their arms with letters” that, elsewhere in the Old World, tattooing had lost none of its status. Chenciner’s study of 109 mountain women in Daghestan reveals a vast assemblage of signs, many shared with Turkic people, with Ossetians, with Hungarians and Sarmatians. Crosses, Stars of David and seven-branched trees (transposed into menorah) are seen not as the identity marks of either Judaism or Christianity but as part of an ancient Mesopotamian-derived cornucopia of protective symbolism.

In Daghestan, the tattoos were made by elder women on girls, usually at the time of their coming of age. They were applied using three needles tightly bound together that were dipped into a dark ink – created from an inedible berry, “cat’s pears”, a Caucasian honeysuckle – that can also be used for conventional writing ink. The act of tattooing could create tattoo sisters, who had shared ink and blood, and may also have been used as badges for a matriarchal clan (but not for any discernible geographical or tribal identity). The most common cause cited for their use was for protection “against evil”, with the most admired portion of a woman (her breasts, face, hands, or thighs) tattooed to protect it from the evil eye. The old shamanistic beliefs of the Caucasus also required protection from the perils of the transmigration of souls. Human spirits, once freed from a body by death, may choose to reside in objects such as rocks, hills and trees. The tattoos may have prevented a spirit from leaving a body before its time (a cure for unwanted shamanistic soul-wondering) and also helped prevent spirit possession. There is an intriguing suggestion of the similarity between embroidery and tattoo; in both, needle-driven silk or ink is used to embellish either cloth or skin with protective magical symbols. Certainly, the three ritual uses for the Kaitag embroideries, to protect a newborn child from the evil eye, to wrap up the dowry of a bride on her way to the new marital home, and to cover the faces of the dead before their burial, explicitly reveal the power of these needle-created symbols.

The spoon boxes of Daghestan, hung from a wall beside the hearth, are also part of the domestic mythology of the region. Traditional Daghestan homes comprise three spiritual features: the threshold, the central column and the hearth. For just as the Tree of Life-like wooden column keeps the elements of floor and ceiling (earth and sky) apart, the feminine hearth, with its warmth, fire, light and the wafting vapours from its cauldron, binds everything together. Both the cauldron and the hearth-chain are held in the greatest respect, and an outsider is customarily welcomed into the sphere of domestic protection by being offered food – a near sacramental gift of broth and dumplings served in an ornate spoon. This did not just keep a traveller warm and fed, but it symbolically placed the guest under the protection of his host, within Daghestan’s martial and blood-feud-riven society.

Robert Chenciner offers up intriguing glimpses into further areas of research, such as the thirty-one different dumplings championed severally by the ethnic communities within Daghestan, as well the boiling of a sacrificed bull in man-high cauldrons, at the seasonal festival of St George. In the meantime, we can only be grateful for an author who does not tuck his debt to his vital local sources within a sentence or two, in “acknowledgements”, but names all 109 mountain women under their nineteen different villages. This work is a serious inquiry into the motivation that empowers traditional artistic expression. It will be treasured as a source book for all who share in this search.
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Barnaby Rogerson's most recent book is The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad: And the roots of the Sunni-Shia schism, published last year.