Languages of Dress in the Middle East

Bruce Ingham, Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700706709
• eBook ISBN: 9781136803246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Considers how the languages of dress in the region connect with other social practices, and with political and religious conformity in particular. Treating cases as diverse as practices of veiling in Oman and dress reform laws in Turkey, these ethnographic studies extend from Malta to the ME and Caucasus.

Chapter One

Approaches to the Study of Dress in the Middle East

Nancy Lindisfame-Tapper Bruce Ingham

In the Euro-American literature on the Middle East, as in art and photography, descriptions of clothing styles and depictions of the clothed (or sometimes lasciviously unclothed female) body, created exotic and sometimes erotic images of people who live in the region. Indeed, Middle Easterners were often characterized by their dress alone, as if their clothing confirmed them as subspecies of racial types: the Bedouin warrior, the peasant woman, the Berber tribesman. Or they were described in terms of their ‘costumes’, with all the superficial, arbitrary and theatrical overtones such a word suggests.

These images continue to resonate today, appearing in television advertising, women’s magazines and in the ‘colourful’ folkloric images of the travel brochures and national tourist boards. Some are clearly meant to suggest uniqueness and the specificity of a particular setting as a tourist destination. In others – here several of the United Colours of Benetton advertisements come to mind – a simplistic notion of social and cultural diversity is suggested by mixing skin colours and ‘ethnic’ dress.

Such images are not politically neutral. Rather they constitute new ways of marking difference and inequality. Yet other images partake more directly of older forms of orientalist discourse (cf. Said 1978) which link explicit and repressed sexuality and the putative danger and violence of Islam. Thus consider the opulescence and sexuality suggested by a recent advertisement for an expensive perfume in which a blond model stands in front of the Great Pyramid bathed in a sunset glow, wearing a flowing ‘Arab’ gown. Such an image of a ‘Middle Eastern’ woman may be compared with others, especially cliched images of veiled women which represent all that critics see as alien, repressive and threatening in so-called ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims.

However, such stereotypes are not the only way to approach the topic of clothing in the Middle East. In this volume our ambition is to off-set voyeuristic and politically interested accounts of Middle Eastern dress by focusing on the particular. Each of the studies here describes a specific repetroire of clothing styles in their wider historical, linguistic and ethnographic context. And each poses important questions whose answers lead us to an alternative perspective on dress in the Middle East, one which can embrace a range of materials from the meticulous detail of Edward Lane’s The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1923, orig. 1836), to Shelagh Weir’s lively study of Palestinian dress (1989) and Jennifer Scarce’s documentary history of women’s clothing in the Ottoman Empire (1987).

The deliberate play in our title suggests the scope of our ambitions. For us, Languages of Dress in the Middle East refers both to the metaphorical languages of clothing and adornment and to the natural languages from which these metaphors are fashioned. In criticizing the French semiotician Roland Barthes’ writing on clothes and fashion (1983), Alison Lurie explores the richness of the metaphor ‘the language of clothes’,

Besides containing ‘words’ that are taboo, the language of clothes, like speech, also includes modern and ancient words, words of native and foreign origin, dialect words, colloquialisms, slang and vulgaries’ (1981: 6).

Lurie found, when she wrote about the language of dress in Europe and America, that this metaphor stimulated her to ask about clothing vocabularies and the sartorial repertoire available to any individual. As we have found, the metaphor also insists we make sense of the mixing and matching of local garments with what are often known explicitly as ‘foreign’ styles. In this way we are obliged to explore phenomena such as Islamist veiling or a global fashion for blue jeans which have excited much wider polemic and ethnographic interest.

As we shall see, some new items of clothing or styles may be borrowed, copied, and integrated into a particular dress tradition with little remark (see, for example, the plastic shoes worn by the Shahsevan, Lindisfarne-Tapper, this volume). Elsewhere, so-called ‘foreign’ clothes may be used to emphasize differences between people, as when they reflect the personal style, sophistication and wealth of members of the Saudi Arabian elite (Yamani, this volume). New clothing styles elsewhere have been introduced by fiat, as was the case in Iran under both Reza Shah and the Islamic Republic (Baker, this volume) and with the dress reforms initiated in Turkey under Atatürk (Norton, this volume). Indeed, the Turkish case also raises comparative questions about the relation between the reform of the Turkish language and those which concerned clothing. Both were seen as capable of automatically transforming identities from those which were ‘eastern’ to those associated with the ‘west’. In short, the language metaphor also invites us to consider the politics of lingua francas, pidgins and creoles.

More broadly, each of our contributors raises questions about the relation between clothing arts and power: that is, about the political economy of dress. To understand how clothing construes social identity, we must know how clothed bodies are evaluated in a particular setting. As snapshots of local experiences and sentiments, the studies in this volume suggest, in Rugh’s words,

dress styles may occupy a place along the continuum between the extremes according to momentary definitions of what is modest or immodest, form-concealing or form-revealing, appropriate or inappropriate, garish or in good taste (1986: 3).

Such a perspective raises many questions of linguistic, anthropological and social historical interest. How do people alter their appearance? How do they and others understand and describe such changes? Does the impetus for change derive from the movement of peoples and/or ideas and material items both geographically and through time? Do the dialectics of style and notions of ‘good taste’ or ‘high fashion’ evince a relationship between those who dominate and others in any particular social setting? How are a vocabulary of clothing items and a dress aesthetic associated with moral evaluations concerning etiquette and good manners, competitive displays of honour and sexuality, piety and spiritual conviction?

The Breadth of the Study

Following Eicher and Roach-Higgins (1992, and see Eicher 1995; also Yamani, and Norton, this volume), our focus is deliberately on appearance in the widest sense. Eicher and Roach-Higgins write,

the dressed person is a gestalt that includes the body, all direct modifications of the body itself, and all three-dimentional supplements added to it…. [and] that only through mental manipulation can we separate body modifications and supplements from the body itself – and from each other – and extract that which we call dress (1992: 13).

They continue,

We also take the position that the direct modifications of the body as well as the supplements added to it must be considered types of dress because they are equally effective means of human communication, and because similar meanings can be conveyed by some property, or combination of properties, of either modifications or supplements (ibid.)

Such a definition is a deliberate attempt to put an end to the dichotomy between ornament and dress which characterized ethnographic descriptions in the past (1992: 12–3; see also Barnes and Eicher 1992). It is also a definition which avoids constructionist arguments which treat the body as ‘natural’ and a foil against which all that is done to the body may be seen as ‘cultural’ and socially contrived. Rather, as feminists and others have been arguing for some time, the so-called ‘biological body’ is also cultural; bodily form and substance are socially construed from a period before conception until death and after (cf. Gaines & Herzog 1990, Mascia-Lees & Sharpe 1992; Bordo 1993).

The papers in this volume tend to focus on clothing per se,¹ touching only briefly on other topics such as gesture, silhouette, masking, the use of jewellery and make-up, grooming head and body hair, tattooing and other body decoration and perfume. In this the papers reflect an older archival desire to document hitherto undescribed Middle Eastern clothing styles. This is a first step to analyses of other processes of body modification, such as the use of henna or perfume, as in Kanafani’s account of dress and adornment in the Arabian Gulf (1983), or discussions of ways soft tissue can be altered, including through head-shaping (cf. N. Tapper 1991) and male and female circumcision (cf. Kennedy 1978; Boddy 1989 among many others). We would argue that analytically there is no necessary or intrinsic difference between clothing and any or all of these other means of altering personal appearance. Each set of styles and techniques has its own aesthetic, and each, either separately or in combination, may be used to create and confirm or contest personal and collective identities. Each is an embodiment of pleasure and of social discipline and control.

The papers of this collection also make it clear that there is almost nothing that can be regarded as specifically Middle Eastern in terms of dress. When looked at in contrast to Europe, at first glance it seems that local Middle Eastern dress styles tend towards the elaborate and flowing. However, everyday clothing worn until recently in parts of Russia and eastern Europe is similarly loose and suggests a continuity with dress styles in the Caucasus. Other periods have seen the influence of Central Asian styles from Yemen to the Horn of Africa and, via the Hadhramaut and Oman, to India and Southeast Asia (see Ingham, this volume). Regionally then, our area of focus forms links in a series of fashion chains which stretch from Nairobi to Alma Ata and from China to Europe.

It it important to note how items of clothing seem to have spread across the region. An item known variously as the chokha, jukha or chogan, a kind of jacket or morning coat associated widely in the Arab Middle East with the word jukh meaning ‘broadcloth’, appears in India as chogan, in Iran as jukheh, in the Causasus, Turkey and Iraq as chokha and in Arabia as jukha. In Arabia the jacket described in this way was particularly prestigious and among Bedouin it was associated with horsemen known as ‘knights’ (fārts) and had military-like markings of horizontal bands which distinguished the rider in battle. By contrast, in the Caucasus, chokha jackets were regarded as distinctive markers of particular regional identites and were, in the past, an obligatory part of men’s formal dress (Hewitt and Khiba, this volume).

Fashions in dress weaponry have also spread through the region, probably along the Middle Eastern trade routes. The sword as the dress weapon par excellence is a good illustration of this process where three main fashions in swords can be distinguished: the Turkish, Persian and Arab. These three are known in their respective languages purely by the word for ‘sword’, i.e. kilij in Turkish, shamshīr in Persian and sayf in Arabic. The Turkish has a broader blade and a curling hilt of wood or bone, the Persian is finer in shape and shows a narrow hilt with a pommel bending off from the hilt at about 45 degrees, while the Arab has a hilt like the Persian but often with the pommel curving back at about 120 degrees to the hilt and often with a chain from pommel to cross piece, possibly a vestige of a hand guard. Many of the Arab blades are less curved and some are completely straight. These styles are by no means confined to the area of their origin. Among the Bedouin and others of the Emirates and Kingdoms of the 19th and early 20th century Arabia all three were used, as can be seen in 19th century illustrations and later photographs. And as we said above, the swords of the Hadhramaut show definite east Indian affinities reflecting trade links with that area.

Beginning with the Particular

The most compelling entry point for any critical discussion of the clothing of the Middle East is through particular, fine-grained ethnographic and socio-linguistic studies. Such local perspectives encourage an interest in how clothing styles and other forms of adornment or body-marking construe difference, and how people become aware of such differences. Clothing is not some added extra, some post facto ‘symbol’ of difference; rather, the medium is the message and, in this very basic sense, clothing indeed maketh the woman or man.

It is also the case that all meaning is relational. Thus women’s dress may effectively mark gendered differences i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on transliteration and transcription
• Notes on contributors
• List of illustrations
• 1 Approaches to the Study of Dress in the Middle East
• 2 Men’s Dress in the Arabian Peninsula: Historical and Present Perspectives
• 3 Changing the Habits of a Lifetime: the Adaptation of Hejazi Dress to the New Social Order
• 4 The Dress of the Shahsevan Tribespeople of Iranian Azerbaijan
• 5 Felt Capes and Masks of the Caucasus
• 6 Male Dress in the Caucasus, with Special Reference to Abkhazia and Georgia
• 7 Fashions and Styles: Maltese Women’s Headdress
• 8 The Burqa Face Cover: an Aspect of Dress in Southeastern Arabia
• 9 Faith and Fashion in Turkey
• 10 Politics of Dress: The Dress Reform Laws of 1920–1930s Iran
• Index