Textile Archives: Traditional Gowns and Sociocultural Change in the Cameroon Grasslands

“For the apparel oft proclaims the man.” Shakespeare

 Abstract

Can the study of cloth consumption deepen our knowledge about the changing nature of social relations, identities and values? Art historians and anthropologists of material culture seem to suggest exactly this. Building on the strengths and insights of these disciplines, this project will investigate the ways in which socioeconomic and political shifts may be analyzed from the vantage point of cloth consumption. Taking as my case study, a garment known in northwestern Cameroon as the “Grassfields gown” traditionally worn by male members of the nobility about a century ago, I seek to investigate how and why this type of garment has come to epitomize a variety of values and modern identities. Understood as a unique type of “textile archive”, the study seeks to uncover how the Grassfields gown has shaped and has been influenced by changes in power, the economy and gender relations. By combining ethnographic and archival research methods, the study will reconstruct the material history of the Grassfields gown relating this to how its production and consumption is intertwined with institutions of power, and broader changes in sociocultural and economic life.

• Research for this project began in the summer of 2014 (with archival work in Bamenda).
• The second phase will focus on interviewing producers and consumers of the Bamenda Gown.