The rationale for dress research in Africa has often been to articulate the various types of indigenous dress (Allman 2004, 2–3). Although a popular field of inquiry, concern has been raised about the use of the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘ethnic’ dress, as they are often linked to a taken-for-granted and perceived static expression of group identity, or other cultural specifics (Baizerman, Eicher and Cerny 2008; Eicher and Ross 2010, 3). This was indeed part of what both Dorothea Bleek and Louis Fourie tried to capture in their artefact collections – the imagined ‘traditional’ Bushman culture, as opposed to the ‘acculturated’ colonial Bushmen. The underlying implication is that the traditional dress somehow represented an unchanging way of life up until the European presence, and the subsequent corruption of indigenous culture. There was, in other words, no room for processes of cultural change in the idea of a traditional Bushman culture, and the effort was made to save the last of ‘authentic’ dress. Many a museum collection has followed such a salvage paradigm, and thus the descriptions and analyses of Bushman dress from a museum perspective will necessarily outline a ‘traditional’ Bushman dress in the research-historical sense. Such collections of material culture therefore present an opportunity for a thorough research-historical critique. To reach a more emic perspective of dress, however, the matter of what being dressed implies needs to be approached within the broader concept of cultural bodily practices.

A definition of dress

Following Joanne B Eicher (2010, 3), I define ‘dress’ as ‘body modifications and body supplements’. This is a very broad definition that accentuates the body as the physical and cultural bearer of dress, and includes body tattooing, scarification, body paint, fragrances, hair styles and so on. In a reconstruction of dress based on photographs, illustrations or written accounts, body modifications and body supplements are of equal importance. When working with museum collections of ethnographic artefacts, it is largely body supplements that are available for discussion. The perspectives and analyses of this study thus encompass an all-inclusive definition of the bodily practice of dress.