Traditional Women’s Clothing of the Baloch, Hazara and Jamshidi of Turkmenistan in the Collections of the MAE RAS

This article is a follow-up to a previous one focusing on the traditional attire of three lesser-known Iranian ethnic groups in Turkmenistan: Baloch, Hazara and Jamshidi of the 1920s, based on the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. The Museum houses several collections of artifacts and photographs related to cultural practices and lifestyle of the so-called Iranian-speaking nomads of Turkmenistan. Those artifacts were gathered during the first Soviet ethnographic expedition to Central Asia — the Central Asian Ethnological Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, conducted from 1926 to 1929 under the guidance of I. I. Zarubin, one of the most prominent Iranologist in Russia. Regrettably, these MAE collections are currently not widely known even among experts in this area. From March to November 1928, D. D. Bukinich and E. G. Gafferberg studied the main characteristics of women’s folk clothes of Hazara and Jamshidi in Kushkinsky District of the Turkmen SSR. Similarly, in 1929, G. K. Schultz and A. P. Bulgakov conducted research on the Baloch people, including women’s clothing, in Baýramaly, Merv, Ýolöten, and Merakh districts of the Turkmen SSR. In the 1920s women’s folk costumes of the Iranian-speaking nomads of Turkmenistan varied greatly and could convey information about the owner’s age, social and marital status. The field findings of 1928–1929 became the further development on previous studies of the material and intellectual culture of the Baloch, Hazara and Jamshidi of Turkmenistan. However, the 1920s women’s folk costumes of the Iranian-speaking peoples of Turkmenistan are still underexplored and require further research, since many questions regarding them remain unanswered.