African traders’ agency on global cloth markets

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ute Röschenthaler
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456688449

The project highlights the important contribution of African actors in supplying West African markets with a great variety of cloth and dress. It examines what is behind this variety of cloth and style that consumers use to communicate complex messages through the interplay of quality, form, colour and pattern. Dress expresses multiple belongings such as age, sex, religion, origin and class. Scholarship on clothing increasingly explores such dress practices, the agency of consumers in styling the dressed body, and the repercussions of globalization on local artisanal production. However, most studies understand the changing cloth supply and dress practices as shaped by external influences such as European colonization, missionary education, global flows and the influx of cheap Asian products. They rarely note the agency of African cloth traders who decide to a great extent what fabrics and clothing African markets offer to their consumers. The project explores in a comparative study in three West African countries – Cameroon, Ghana and Mali – the trade routes of fabrics and the agency through which they arrive on these markets. It studies the distinctive features that cloth and dress are required to have, their material, quality, colour and pattern in order to sell and meet consumers’ expectations. It also examines how importers and traders acquire “cloth knowledge” to be able to anticipate consumers’ desires and expectations in times of quickly changing fashions and in which way dresses can be remodelled to create a convincing outfit. The project develops the topic through two closely connected thematic fields. The first studies local textile categories and discourses of traders and consumers on cloth and dress, the communicative properties of cloth, and local hierarchies of value into which cloth is sorted according to its origin and quality. The second field focusses on the trade routes and the individuals through whose agency clothing and fabrics arrive on African markets. It also looks at artisanal textile manufacture and its influence on national industrial cloth production and the features of imported fabrics. With its focus on traders’ agency in combination with local artisanal traditions, historical trade routes, colonial and post-colonial policies, the project contributes to a better comprehension of the global dissemination of products, of local knowledge concerning categories of cloth and dress, and practices of individual differentiation and group formation with textile markers. Taking into consideration both local aesthetic preferences for artisanal patterns and models of global fashion, the project shows how textile traders determine to a great extent the type and diversity of products on African markets. It also highlights these traders’ knowledge and entrepreneurial skills that are indispensable for venturing global trading journeys and supplying textile markets in a fast-changing West African economy of cloth and dress.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants