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Dress and Ethnicity is the second in the Ethnic Identities Series recently initiated by Berg publishers. The 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. The 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...