Syrmaq Felt Presentation by 2025-2026 Hajji Baba Club Fellow Kristen Pearson

We are delighted to invite you to an upcoming talk by Kristen Pearson, our 2025–2026 Hajji Baba Club Research Fellow. Kristen is an advanced PhD candidate in Anthropology and Inner Asian Studies at Harvard University, whose research explores Kazakh felt carpets, known as syrmaq, as living treasuries of tradition, identity, and evolving social relationships in Western Mongolia.

Felt carpets and embroidered hangings have been part of nomadic life across Inner Asia for thousands of years, and in western Mongolia they are still made, given, and inherited within the Kazakh kiiz ui, or felt house.

Between 2022 and 2024, Kristen directed the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme project, “Nomadic Material Heritage,” documenting these textiles and other hide-craft objects in Kazakh households in Bayan-Ölgii Province. The result is an open-access collection hosted by the British Museum, with photographs, films, and interviews from the communities whose work it records. Her Hajji Baba Club Fellowship subsequently allowed her to extend this research to Kazakhstan, following the textiles and the families who carry them across the border.

In this talk, Kristen will introduce the collection and reflect on what these field visits taught her about how textiles move through relationships of making, exchange, and inheritance. She will also consider the productive friction between the methods of heritage documentation and the ways Kazakh women themselves attend to these objects in their own homes.

This is a wonderful opportunity for members to hear directly from our current fellow and to learn more about the kind of original scholarship the Hajji Baba Club Research Fellowship was established to support.