2 "I Dress in This Fashion": Transformations in Sotho Dress and Women's Lives in a Sekhukhuneland Village, South Africa

Abstract

Consciousness, and its "colonisation", has recently attracted some attention in the study of southern African society (JL and J Comaroff 1989; Bozzoli 1991).Although not expressed in quite the same terms, the processes by which such colonisation has been withstood have preoccupied scholars in southern Africa for somewhat longer (P and I Mayer 1971; Alverson 1978, McAllister 1980, 1991).While other writers have examined overt acts of resistance, anthropologists have concerned themselves with subtler means of defying domination, often through the reassertion of apparently traditional cultural forms, with effects sometimes perceptible no more widely than within local communities themselves.Recent studies in this vein examine rural people's portrayal, through local knowledge, of their colonisation and their incorporation as an industrial proletariat within the capitalist world.This knowledge is seen as both enabling people to conceptualise their own history as dominated but resilient subjects (JL and J Comaroff 1987:193) and, in parallel, as facilitating the ongoing construction of group or individual identities by such people (Ferguson 1992; Thomas 1992).The production of this local knowledge often involves the invoking of tradition (Coplan 1987, 1991), and often counterposes this with images of modernity, resulting in sets of opposed dualities: town/country, townsman/peasant, Christian/non-Christian, setswana/segoa (JL and J Comaroff 1987; Roseberry 1989; P and I Mayer 1971).Criticisms have been levelled at this writing.Spiegel, for example, disparages "dualist approaches" for the inappropriateness of their search "for persistences of a pre-industrial world view in the ways in which people order and perceive their contemporary relationships" (1990:46).But the emerging contrast between, for example, setswana and segoa, was not "a confrontation between a primordial folk tradition and the modern world" (JL and J Comaroff 1987:194-5).Rather, Tswana tradition came to be formulated largely through its complementary opposition to "the ways of the European".Indeed, the very images of a preindustrial or pre-capitalist world which feed into the making of such dualities are products of people's encounter with the relationships and realities of the industrial or capitalist one (Roseberry 1989:144, 201-3, passim).

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