APC Honorary Research Scholar Viestad awarded PhD
Congratulations are due to APC Honorary Research Scholar Vibeke M. Viestad, who has graduated from the University of Oslo. Her dissertation, entitled “Dress as Social Relations: An interpretation of ‘Bushman Dress’ as represented in the Bleek & Lloyd, Dorothea Bleek and Louis Fourie collections in South Africa”, was submitted on 1 September 2014 and defended on 24 April 2015, for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor (PhD), at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo.
Abstract:
This dissertation seeks to introduce the study of dress to the scholarly field of “Bushman studies”. As “Bushmen” in a generic sense often have been perceived to be “nearly naked”, the thesis investigates what “Bushman dress” has come to represent to people trying to understand Bushman culture from the outside, and in what ways dress might have been meaningful to historical Bushman people themselves.
The thesis provides a comparison and interpretation of the representation of Bushman dress in two artefact collections and their associated research notes and photographs, collected in what is today Namibia, Botswana and South Africa by Dorothea Bleek and Louis Fourie in the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, it provides an interpretation of the meaning of dress as reflected in the oral narratives of the colonial /Xam Bushmen, of South Africa, as recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd at the end of the 19th century.
The study shows that the two artefact collections provide two very different pictures of “Bushman dress”, although collected at the same time and in overlapping areas. The Bleek collection presents us with a generic or “typical” Bushman dress, whereas the Fourie collection portrays distinct material differences between each group represented. Both collections provide a representation of Bushman dress that serves more for “us” to understand “them” as different, than they can say to increase our understanding of dress practices as such.
By including a textual analyses of dress as it is represented through the recorded /Xam narratives, it is argued that the bodily practice of dress among the historical /Xam initiated, maintained and continued important social relations between people, animals and other beings of the world. Such social relations were initiated in practices of body modification (cuts, tattoos, body paint, fragrance etc.), whereas body supplements (clothing and ornaments) carried the accumulation of these relations and identities, placing the wearer safely within a network of common values as well as personal characteristics and relationships.
Being dressed meant partaking in the social relations that created and maintained the individual as part of the community and the world at large. It is argued that this interpretation of dress might prove essential to understanding important aspects of social and cultural life among other historical Bushman groups, as well as being an important contribution to the study of dress in more general terms.