Review of Cloth in West African History by Colleen E. Kriger. AltaMira Press, 2006

Abstract

As Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider argued so powerfully in their 1989 volume Cloth andHuman Experience (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), Western scholarship had, up to that point, under-analyzed the centrality of cloth and clothing to politics and to processes of social production. Weiner and Schneider recognized that cloth had been largely disregarded by scholars in part because unlike other forms of value—hard objects such as metals, coins, and stones—soft objects like cloth, feathers, and fibers had been considered ephemeral and fragile, poor conveyers of social histories and individual and collective identities. Yet it was cloth’s potential for decay and loss that made it such an ideal object through which to express the continuities and discontinuities of human life. Likewise, Colleen E. Kriger, an historian as well as a fiber artist, places cloth and cloth producers at the center of a global history into which West Africans were drawn, in part through textiles. Eschewing analysis of fibers based on a single linguistic community, locale, or artisan, Kriger argues that attention to the spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, and embellishing of cloth reveals a social and spatial complexity of production that spanned geographical regions. Moreover, Kriger emphasizes that it was the visual and tactile acumen of African artisans and consumers that shaped the market for fabrics, yarns, and trimmings into which European and Muslim traders endeavored to enter over the pre-colonial and colonial period.