Two widths of handwoven cotton cloth cover the couch in our living room. They were once sewn together and formed a blanket. My mother gifted this white blanket to me when I moved into my current home. During the last nine years, I have often found myself caressing this blanket. Sometimes I also think of my beloved maternal grandmother and the village in southern Romania where I spent my childhood summers. One day, in response to an invitation to select an object from my home that holds a mirror of me and write a piece of ‘objectography’, I decided to engage this blanket differently. Through autoethnographic exploration, I learned about its materiality and sociality. The home-prepared cotton fibers have a certain coarseness. I came to understand that I likened this roughness to the bark of trees and the lumps of soil, that is, things that have and sustain roots. In caressing the blanket, I confirmed to myself that I too had grown roots. I had a stable home, a precious feeling after years of being uprooted and living in more than thirty places in five countries. I also learned that about a hundred years ago my great-great-aunt handwove the blanket and gifted it to my grandmother in commemoration of her departed young daughter. My grandmother deemed the blanket worthy of inclusion in a wedding trousseau, but her university-educated daughters did not find it appropriate for their modern urban flats. Later my grandmother thought that I would like it and asked my mother to keep it for me after she passed away. I came to regard the blanket as the material manifestation of a lineage of women to which I belong. In light of these details, my repeated sensuous and affective engagements with the blanket are somewhat akin to the rhythmical movements of the weaver. I myself ‘weave’ the blanket as an object that anchors me in space, time and kin.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Paul Basu and Elizabeth Hallam.
