Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time

Abstract

Dress and Ethnicity is the second in the Ethnic Identities Series recently initiated by Berg publishers. book comprises 15 articles and focusses on ethnic expressions in several regions of the world including Scotland and Brittany, Cypress, Greece, Japan (2 articles), Nigeria (2 articles), Herero, Swaziland, Israel/Palestine, the U.S.A. and Ecuador. articles include the proceedings of a seminar on The Social Construction of Ethnic Identity at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford in 1989, as well as other invited contributions. Contributors hail from the disciplines of social anthropology, art history, folklore and human ecology/home economics. All have based their findings on field research. As the title indicates, the exploration of ethnicity has been developed in this volume through the analysis of dress.The editor, Joanne B. Eicher, has devoted her career to the study of dress, particularly in Nigeria, and has published extensively on the topic, including Dress and Gender, co-edited with Ruth Barnes, and Dress and Identity, co-edited with Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Kim K.P. Johnson as well as numerous articles. Eicher's hand is particularly evident in this volume. Many of the North American contributors have studied or collaborated with her. Her influence on a new generation of scholars of dress has been significant and this volume is, in part, both a celebration and a record of that achievement. Eicher's introductory essay pleads for the end of the analytical neglect which dress has suffered in the study of ethnicity and summarizes the kinds of contributions -- as represented by this volume -- which dress can make to the study of ethnicity.Both the study of ethnicity and the study of dress have moved toward analysis of process with a focus on agency and the factors which figure in the negotiation of identity. Dress is a subtle indicator of the nuances and dynamic of ethnicity for many reasons, but primarily because dress is an ever-present proclamation of social position for everyone at all times: everyone always wears clothes. Furthermore, clothing changes faster than political platforms and ideology, and formulates social position faster and sometimes with more facility than this may be verbally expressed. Clothing is a very primary social analytical resource -- when its messages can be decoded. Without exception, the authors in this volume are concerned with the process of identity construction and the peculiar and powerful abilities of clothing to reveal that process.All of the authors have had to wrestle to some extent with the ambiguities of what is conceptualized as just as have the people about whom they are writing. Tradition, by definition, is unchanging, immutable and faithful to some authentic past time -- even though the needs of the times are always changing, and similarly the content of tradition is also changing. substantial literature which deals with the theoretical dimensions of this ambiguity (e.g., Dominguez 1986; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) is referenced by several of the authors, and their conclusions contribute to a literature, also substantial and still expanding, which addresses a variety of dimensions of this issue through clothing (e.g., Niessen, 1993; Schevill et al. 1991).In the opening essay, Malcolm Chapman writes of the image of traditional apparel as a frozen frame in the passage of time, and Linda Welters writes of the micro and the macro dimensions of clothing selection and interpretation. analogies of camera image and lens are useful for reviewing the contents of this book as its analyses range from the close focus on individual agency to the broader scope of social and historical survey, and always the interpretation is of one or a set of clothing images for one or a set of ethnic identities.Deborah Durham for instance, in The Lady in the Logo, takes as her image a particular dress which was selected by the Herero Youth Association as extremely appropriate to represent them. …