ITAA Proceedings 1999 Distinguished Scholar Lecture

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ITAA Proceedings, #62 – www.itaaonline.org
1999 Proceedings Santa Fe, New Mexico
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DRESS
Distinguished Scholar Lecture Joanne B. Eicher, Regents' Professor Univ. of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108
Anthropology is a disciplinary area of scholarship that directly impacts our interdis-ciplinary field. I define the anthropology of dress simply as the study of dress by anthro-pologists. I approached this topic in two ways-first, by selecting from anthropology four ideas or concepts (holism, culture, field-work, gender issues) that I find useful in the study of dress and, second, by selecting the work from individuals trained as anthropolo-gists who have published works on dress, both articles and books, over the past century.
A significant difference exists between the goals of textiles and clothing scholars and the goals of anthropologists. Scholars of tex-tiles and clothing work from an interdisci-plinary approach in two ways. First, a depart-ment may be interdisciplinary because the faculty within have different specialties such as textile science, history, economics, or anthro-pology. Second, the interdisciplinarity may be found within individuals who have earned pro-fessional degrees from a variety of the social and physical sciences.
The interdisciplinary field of textiles and clothing originated in colleges that began as "Home Economics," concerned with solving problems of everyday life and improving the human condition. As scholars, through our teaching, research, and service, we are focused on textiles and clothing and practical applica-tions. In contrast, in anthropology the focus is on anthropology and an individual selects a specialty such as anthropology of law or of education. To summarize the difference between our two orientations, we focus on dress, no matter what our training, and anthro-pologists focus on anthropology and may come to the study of dress from there. The discipline of anthropology grew from roots at the end of the 19th century, with an emphasis on studying human behavior or, as Tim Ingold (1994) says:
Anthropologists study people. . . . [but] it is not so obvious how-if at all, anthropology may be distinguished from the many other branches of the human sciences, all of which could claim to be study-ing people in one way or another. . . What then, is the distinctively anthropological way of studying people? (p. xiii) [Italics in original]
Ingold answers his question by stating that two facets of anthropology, the history of the discipline and the contemporary subdisci-plinary divisions, determine anthropology's distinction. Anthropology's subfields bestow the gift of holism by interconnecting the biolog-ical, social, historical, and cultural dimensions of human life (Ingold, 1994, p. xv). I have chosen holism as the first contribution of anthropology to the study of dress because holism demands viewing dress within its larger sociocultural context.