Undergraduate Course: Anthropological encounters with clothing, textiles, and fashion (SCAN10103)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course draws on anthropological texts (plus history and fashion studies, media sources, and visual art) that discuss what it is to wear, make, buy and sell, want, observe, throw away, recycle, or design clothes and textiles. The course highlights the range of approaches anthropologists have taken to studying clothes, textiles, and fashion. Some have foregrounded clothes as auto/biographical objects and matters of kinship and relatedness. Others have focused on clothing's global commodity chains and clothing as a huge and often exploitative and unsustainable industry. Anthropologists learning about clothes, a 'social skin', inevitably learn about subjectivities concerning gender, faith, class, sexuality, and nation. Ethnographic accounts of clothing practices also reveal much about key anthropological themes such as memory, ritual, ageing, hierarchy, and 'the everyday'. |
| Course description |
Clothes have been approached anthropologically through a range of lenses and schools of thoughts. They are part of material culture studies, telling us about lived experiences of different fabrics' sensory and technical affordances. Consumption studies situate clothes as a meeting-point between where people make themselves and where they adhere (or not) to social conventions. For example, clothes can be used to both enforce gender norms and to challenge them.
An important theme in the course are studies of labour and globalisation that look at the working conditions of people who make or sell clothes. Particularly in the era of 'fast fashion', manufacturers' unsustainable practices cause trouble for the environment and for those whose labour is exploited. We will explore ethical controversies around fur and other 'luxury' materials and the political and historical issues around racist costume parties and cultural appropriation.
Ethnographies of clothes show what it is to be seen in public and regarded, for example, as belonging to a particular faith group, class, gender, or subculture. Ethnographies of clothes might also show what it feels like to belong to a particular group.
Students will be invited to write about their own relationships with clothes and to analyse how other anthropologists (and other social theorists and artists) have captured their relationships with clothes either through writing or through other media.
Each week, the course will centre on a key theme in the anthropological study of clothes, textiles, and fashion. Students will read the stated essential texts and watch an essential film ahead of the three-hour seminar.
Indicative themes:
Clothes and auto/biography
Clothes making and breaking gender and sexuality
Clothes, textiles, and relationships
Clothes and celebrity
Secondhand clothes
Working with clothes, textiles, and fashion
Clothes, environment, and climate crisis
Religious clothes
Clothes and controversy
Fragility, repair, and loss
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate an understanding of the key research methods used in the anthropological and ethnographic study of clothes, textiles, and fashion.
- Examine relevant texts to identify how anthropological accounts of clothes, textiles, and fashion speak to key anthropological themes such as gender and class.
- Synthesise anthropological literature with relevant texts from history, fashion studies, the visual arts, and the news media to create an in-depth account of items of clothing.
- Express through research-informed writing opinions on social and political issues related to clothing, textiles, and fashion.
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Reading List
Craciun, M. 2014. Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe. Bloomsbury.
Hansen, K.T. 2000. Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia. University of Chicago Press.
Kirkland, T. 2022.Tartan: Its Journey Through the African Diaspora in Scotland's Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery. Edinburgh University Press.
Luvaas, B. 2016. Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. Bloomsbury
Magee, S. 2018. Material Culture and Kinship in Poland: An ethnography of fur and society. Bloomsbury.
Nelson, I. 2023. Yet Another Costume Party Debacle: Why Racial Ignorance Persists on Elite College Campuses. University of Chicago Press.
Prentice, R. and G. De Neve (eds.) 2017. Unmaking the global sweatshop: health and safety of the world's garment workers. Pennsylvania University Press.
Tarlo, E. 2010. Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Bloomsbury. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
-Develop critical thinking skills through synthesising complex materials and relating the contents of these materials thematically rather than just synoptically.
-Develop curiosity about both practices and processes through which the learner is already familiar (e.g. through learning about the histories of these practices and processes) and about contexts that the learner did not know about previously (through both analysing course materials and listening to classmates).
-Develop communication skills by expressing informed opinions about politically sensitive issues.
-Develop problem-solving skills by contributing to debates on issues such as clothing and sustainability and the exploitative labour practices involved in fast fashion. |
| Keywords | ethnography,anthropology,clothes,textiles,fashion,material culture,gender,kinship,sustainability |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Siobhan Magee
Tel:
Email: Siobhan.Magee@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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