The tools of tailoring as technologies-in-use in twentieth century Benin, West Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Beninois tailors use sewing machines to make made-to-order clothing for clients and they award and display artisanal diplomas that attest to the completion of an apprenticeship with a master tailor. This article traces the history of these materials to argue that missions, states, and artisans used the tools of tailoring to construct and contest identities and to assert new notions of social status and mobility. Missions and the French colonial state promoted industrially produced machinery and certified documentation to delineate new categories of homemakers, efficient workers, and elites in the first half of the twentieth century. By the country’s 1960 independence, craftspeople began to develop new practices around making, exchanging, and displaying machines and diplomas, which upset (post-) colonial social categories of class and gender and asserted individual prestige and mobility. This article reveals how these technologies-in-use had multiple and often contradictory uses that were at once political, social, and material.