The Anthropology of Dress

Joanne B. Eicher is Regents' Professor in the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel at the University of Minnesota. Since beginning to study the use, significance, and meaning of dress, I have been intrigued with the wide variety of disciplines such as art history, history, anthropology, sociology, folklore, philosophy, economics, and women's studies that contribute to the topic of dress. I am also amazed by the insularity of many scholars who do not venture beyond the boundaries of their disciplines when accessing bibliographic sources for their own research. Thus, I have chosen to highlight anthropology because I suspect that the scope of writing in that discipline may come as a surprise to many scholars writing about dress (and perhaps even to many anthropologists who would not expect the topic to exist).1 Anthropology contributes scholarship that relates to understanding the place of dress in culture, and I define the anthropology of dress simply as the study of dress byanthropologists.2 In this article, I concentrate on published writings in English from anthropologists and exclude other writings even though they may have an "anthropological approach."3 I highlight four aspects of anthropology (holism, culture, fieldwork, and women's involvement) that have contributed to the study of dress. I follow this with a chronological survey of published works on dress by anthropologists, both articles and books, from the roots of the field at the end of the nineteenth century through 1999.