Afrykański strój, europejskie tkaniny i katolicka moda w Ghanie (original) (raw)

African dress, European fabrics, Catholic fashion This paper discusses a complex history behind today’s African dresses, especially those used in the context of African Christianity in contemporary Ghana where the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork. The history of clothes and fabrics broadly used today as markers of African identity reveals the hybrid and changing character of fashion. The first part of the paper focusses on the history of nakedness as a concept framed by the missionaries’ imagination and colonial hegemonic gaze on the “African body”. Moreover, the process of “inventing clothes for Africans” is discussed with a special emphasis on the development of African wax print. In the final part, examples of contemporary “African dresses” are analysed in the context of today’s post-missionary lived Catholicism in Ghana. Clothes are used as markers of religious and ethnic identities; they also express hierarchies and form gender roles. Additionally, they are intimately connected with individual bodies shaping them as tools in religious practices.