Beyond Clothing: An Analysis of Dress in the Italian Somalia in the Twenties Through the Photographic Archive of MAET

Abstract

The Museum of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology of the University of Turin (MAET) preserves in its archives a valuable collection of photographs and materials from Africa, Oceania, Asia, America, and Europe. The “Carlo Vittorio Musso” fund is one of the most important collections of the Museum. It consists in 111 photographs, taken in Italian Somalia between 1920 and 1923. The iconographic analysis of the subjects who are represented offers multiple insights and perspective on the clothed body, which is configured, on the one hand, as an instrument of resistance to the processes of “cultural dispossession” operated against the local population and, on the other hand, as an indicator of the social, economic, political, and legal position that the inhabits held. The present article aims to observe how, in a border space such as the colony, the processes of gender construction intersect with race and social class triggering interpretative vertigoes in the investigation of the subjectivities that emerge from the photographic shoots. We intend to focus on the divergences between traditional Somali dresses and those characterised by Western features introduced since 1911, glimpsing in the “sartorial grammars” typical of the models portrayed languages of appropriation and gender construction. In fact, the dress proves to be a powerful device especially in the definition of femininity and masculinity in the former Italian colony.

Keywords

• colonial dress
• gender
• photography
• cultural heritage
• frontier