A few years ago, archaeologists excavating a site in Oman uncovered a fully intact ancient incense burner. Their Western colleagues had spent decades puzzling over objects like this one, cataloguing them variously as stands, caskets, even stools. The Omani workmen on site recognized it immediately, calling it a "mabkhara," and passing it among themselves with the traditional ceremonial gestures.
This anecdote captures something I have been thinking about for a long time: knowledge exists outside the boundaries of what gets officially recognized, living quietly in the hands and memories of people who would never describe themselves as experts. In every society, there are custodians of knowledge who have never been acknowledged as such.
In Kuwait, much of that knowledge belongs to the older generation. Before oil entered our lives, Kuwait was a port town oriented eastward towards the Indian Ocean. From Mombasa to Java, the men sailed and traded, absorbing languages, customs and ideas. The women stayed behind and held the community together through rituals of hospitality such as the gifting of foods and aromatics. This was the invisible work of maintaining the social bonds on which survival depended. The scent of a home, the quality of food sent to neighbors, the rarity of the aromatics gifted at weddings were carefully tended expressions of identity and power.
My aunt Hessa was my introduction into this world. When I returned to Kuwait after years abroad, I began visiting her daily for a lunchtime bowl of daal, but really, I came to understand later, for an education I hadn't known I was missing. She would pull ceramic incense burners from the depths of her closet, each one more beautiful than the last. She enlisted me in her annual date-gifting ritual, handing me lists of recipients that ran from family to neighbors to the tailors who made her gowns. Ta'alami ya binti, she would say. Learn, my daughter.
From her and numerous other women, custodians of age old-rituals, knowledge was not only what was found in books but embodied, oral, and instinctive. No written recipes, no measurements, everything done by hand and memory. One woman I interviewed described her grandmother's legendary home fragrance, a secret so jealously guarded that she took it to her grave. Her daughter eventually figured out that the concoction had to be buried for six months in an opaque bag in a dark room. She was still never able to replicate it. The knowledge, like the scent, had faded.
Today, the rituals persist but they have shifted from the vital to the performative. Food comes from stores rather than courtyards. Perfumes are European rather than homemade. The younger generation, with different priorities and less time, has little incentive to inherit practices whose survival imperative has long since faded. What is being lost is not merely a set of customs, it is an entire sensory vocabulary, a way of being in the world together that took generations to build and cannot be recovered once it is gone.
The women who carried this knowledge were never recognized as experts. Their understanding did not conform to rationalist, text-based definitions of legitimate knowledge, and so it was overlooked, much like the incense burner misidentified as a stool. And yet they knew things that no institution taught and no archive holds: how to read a room through its smell, how to bind a community together through the careful preparation of a gift, how to make a home that people remember long after they have left it.
This post is based on a paper presented at the International Conference of Asian Studies, Humanities Across Borders: Care, Custody, Conservation II Panel (Surabaya, July 2024) entitled "Holding Down the Fort while the Men Were at Sea: Women as Custodians of Ephemeral Rituals in Kuwait".
If you would like to read the full paper, please email us at info@zericrafts.com.
Written by Laila Alhamad