Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body

Abstract

Consuming Fashion: Adorning Transnational Body. ANNE BRYDON and SANDRA NIESSEN, eds. Oxford and New York: Berg Press, 1998; 196 pp. If imagines a continuum between most idiosyncratic cultural navel-gazing and most militantly positivist social science - and sees Clifford Geertz somewhere in middle - anthropologists brought together by Consuming fashion: Adorning transnational claim a much wider place on continuum than has been customary. Originally a set of papers from a Canadian Anthropology Society meeting in 1995, these analyses are all accomplished and compelling. Some delve ambitiously into auto-cultural critique (which is distinct from auto-cultural research and analysis), and for most part, these forays make collection a lively read. Taken together, though, essays have kind of centrifugal force that can plague edited volumes. The editors offer their book as a response to what they see as the academic denial of body (p. ix), but they shift attention away from social meanings of that their contributors convincingly address. Rather, they aim toward hermeneutics and focus attention on individual and individual's will. desire, and choice in creation, interpretation, and daily performance of adornment. Thus editors call dressing one of most complicated acts of daily existence (p. xi), but they must demonstrate why this matters culturally, and papers in their collection more ably investigate other things. So these provocative papers bear on question, how far can anthropologists go in emphasizing idiosyncratic before we compromise talking about social? When does tellingly marginal become culturally trivial? By emphasizing rather than dress as suggested by Ruth Barnes and Joanne Eicher in Berg press series, Brydon and Niessen risk giving attention to personal at expense of social. All papers in collection are strongly written and well-reasoned; best are robustly ethnographic and comparative. Ian Skoggard's analysis of producers and consumers of Nike athletic shoes addresses all intended themes of volume including transnationalism, consumption, desire, and modernity. He powerfully analyzes a wide range of phenomena to his study including ethnographic research on Taiwanese shoe industry, analysis of retail emporiums in Taiwan and New York, and biography of Nike's founder, Phillip Knight. Skoggard draws attention to geographic, social, and symbolic distance between Nike's producers and its consumers. Knight's company directly handles only design and marketing and contracts out for production in what Li (this volume) calls the world's largest cheap labor pool (p. 79). By so doing, Nike minimizes risk, maximizes profit, and invests next to nothing in welfare of those who manufacture its shoes. While Americans are consumed with consuming, real work of producing shoes has been done by Taiwanese workers half a world away who are desperate for work and financial security. Skoggard shows how Knight profits from and perpetuates unquenchable desires of people on either end. Li brings something new to analysis of fashion by correlating its relatively recent emergence in China with sociopolitical and economic change there. She stops short, though, of fully exploring difference between fashion and costume in Chinese lexicon, a distinction that might have had significance for volume as a whole. The best parts of Molnar's sturdy paper on changing uses of Indonesian textiles and Higgins' exhaustive exploration of how fashion plays into gay lives in Montreal also depart from collection's themes. One of richest papers analyzes history and use of clothing of women in a religious order; this is a long way from consumption and transnationalism. Rebecca Sullivan makes powerful use of Bourdieu's notion of habitus to describe nun's habit as a kind of micro-environment which shapes wearer's daily experience of God and society but also is dynamically created by wearer's daily devotions: habit was intended not merely to conceal woman within but to provide her with a tangible artefact to meditate on her constant struggle to sublimate her identity into a more perfect union with her community and with Christ (p. …