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34 one The Naked and the Nude Historically Multiple Meanings of Oto (Undress) in Southeastern Nigeria Misty L. Bastian For me, the naked and the nude (By lexicographers construed As synonyms that should express The same deficiency of dress Or shelter) stand as wide apart As love from lies, or truth from art. —Robert Graves, ‘‘The Naked and the Nude’’ (1957) An Introduction to a Distinction and Its Problematic Status In the first stanza of Robert Graves’s famous poem above—probably written in response to Kenneth Clark’s ([1956] 1972) equally famous distinction between states of undress in art—the poet sets out a problem in Western perceptions of bodies and their representations. Nudity is a term that was reserved in aesthetic circles for an elevating or ennobling undress, an innocent , reserved, and artistically constructed undress that supposedly represented humankind’s spiritual nature.1 Nakedness, on the other hand, was seen as eroticized undress, a purposeful lack of adornment that was meant to titillate and speak to our baser nature. It was also the lack of adornment associated with alterity, with those who supposedly do not know how to dress or lack a moral and cultural capacity to dress (and undress) appropriately. Other societies do not necessarily agree with how cultivated Westerners characterize either nakedness or nudity; they may, indeed, have a different way of conceptualizing the undressed body altogether. The aesthetic Western dis- The Naked and the Nude 35 tinction between the naked and the nude is suggestive of some of our own issues with gender and sexuality, issues that are not directly translatable to those experienced in other societies. The Western struggle over aesthetic nudity, for instance, has been largely a contest about the male gaze, which must properly be situated within a Western, rather than a universal, history of gender relations. Women’s (and men’s) undress elsewhere—and particularly among Igbospeaking peoples in southeastern Nigeria—has a good deal to do with how bodies are surveilled by others, but not always and necessarily with masculine surveillance over feminine forms and practices. The surface of the body may or may not be available for everyone’s gaze, and the meaning of the covered or uncovered body therefore shifts concomitantly with the identity of the gazer. In short, who is naked and who is nude (to use the Western distinction), or even who is clothed, depends on who is looking. During roughly a century and a half of colonialization, missionization, and independence, the bodies of Igbo-speaking peoples have been watched, commented upon, sometimes reviled, sometimes celebrated, and always represented as important by both external and indigenous observers. These representations were very much seen through the lens of gender, although contemporary Igbo-speaking people did not always perceive their own bodies in the same way as colonialists. Nonetheless, the question of what constituted the proper surface boundaries of Igbo bodies was of great interest to all who looked at them during the colonial period. Certainly present-day Igbo-speaking people take immense pains with their appearance and have specific understandings of how bodies ought to be displayed, both in and out of clothing. These understandings are now specifically and historically gendered. During the colonial period, the apparent nakedness (rather than nudity) of young Igbo women’s bodies titillated European photographers and ethnographers and their metropolitan audiences. Bare-breasted images of ‘‘nubile Ibo girls’’ were a staple of Nigerian colonial travel accounts and were used copiously even in serious ethnographies, such as that of the Anglican missionary George T. Basden. No colonial description of Igbo female youth was complete without some reference to elaborate hairstyles, body scarification, tattooing, or painting, signaling the somewhat prurient attention that colonial men paid to every curve and cranny of the bodies of women they encountered on the eastern side of the River Niger. Igbo female youth, however, used colonial interest in their bodies for their own purposes, gaining access to cash and commodities through posing and display. They also quickly learned the consumer pleasures of European fashion and deployed their bodies, through labor as well as consumption, in order to make these fashions their own. Where women’s undress was used as part of a general program of colonial patriarchy and body objectification, young Igbo men’s transitional (un)dress styles alternatively annoyed and amused their missionary teachers and colonial supervisors, as well as their local elders. Battle lines over male nudity tended to be generational during...

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