Clothing as Material Culture (review)

This anthology is aimed at breaking down two sets of stereotypes that have limited scholarship on textiles and clothing. The first is a tendency in the West, and more specifically in academia, to view clothing as "intrinsically superficial" (p. 3). This is not a new observation, but Clothing as Material Culture does make a strong statement against it. One of the best features of this book is the quality of the data that the authors have drawn from various sources, including fieldwork, museum collections, photographs, and, in one remarkable case, the corporate archives of DuPont.

Even though the authors are not uniformly interested in production (or even trained to understand the technical aspects), there are several chapters that will fascinate historians of technology, including one on the production and marketing of Lycra, one on the industry of recycling used clothing in India, and a series of four chapters at the end of the book on the making of traditional textiles in Polynesia. These also highlight a Polynesian spiritual belief that cloth has the power to connect people of different generations and places, reinforcing and giving a new dimension to the book's theoretical arguments. As coeditor Susanne Küchler states at the end of her chapter on quilting in Polynesia, "clothing is uniquely capable of eluci-dating ideas about who we are and how we should behave not because it is worn on or of the body, but because it brings ideas of consumption up against the realities of production" (p. 189). Clearly, this book demonstrates that clothing is intimately connected to the production and reproduction of culture—not a "superficial" area of study, but rather an area that deserves closer attention.

The second stereotype is what coeditor Daniel Miller refers to as an "ancient antagonism" between scholars who come from a technical (textile or museum) background and those trained in the social sciences. Trying to bridge this gap is a worthy and ambitious project, reflecting changes that are taking place both in anthropology and academia as a whole. Unfortunately, the book falls short of this goal. Part of the problem stems from the selection of authors; nine of the eleven are anthropologists, the other two (coauthors of an excellent chapter on Turkish headscarves) are professors of marketing. One of the anthropologists worked as a professional knitwear designer and another is currently a museum curator, but otherwise the authors seem to have little technical background or knowledge.

This does (ironically?) provide a sense of coherence that could have otherwise been difficult to achieve, since the chapters cover a wide range of territory, from the United Kingdom and United States to Polynesia, Africa, India, and Turkey. Many of the authors have carefully framed their research in the context of theoretical debates on materiality and cultural innovation that are taking place within the discipline of anthropology. At the same time, there are scholars in the field of textiles and apparel who straddle the technical and social aspects of clothing during the course of their ordinary research. Daniel Miller refers to the work of Joanne Eicher and Lou Taylor in his introduction, but scholars such as these are absent from the rest of the anthology. To be sure, art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have written excellent books on textiles and clothing, but I think this one creates a bit of a paper tiger by highlighting the gap between technical and sociocultural studies of clothing while ignoring scholars who have already spent their careers trying to bridge it.

Overall, this anthology is very well written and will definitely engage scholars interested in technology and culture. The inclusion of greater referencing of textiles and apparel scholars could have strengthened the book's focus on bridging a gap between the technical and social. Nevertheless, it does reinforce the perception that scholarship on...