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Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs About Protection and Fertility. Ed. Linda Welters. New York: NYU Press (Berg), 1999. Pp. v + 243. Index, photographs, illustrations. $65.00 cloth, $19.50 paper. Linda Welters, professor in the Textiles, Fashion Merchandising and Design Department at the University of Rhode Island, has published widely. Her research interests include European folk dress, archeological textiles, and the material culture of New England. Her most recent book, co-edited with Margaret Ordonez, is titled Down by the Old Mill Stream: Quilts in Rhode Island (1999). In Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia, Welters brings together twelve essays that cover countries as diverse as Turkey, Greece, Slovakia, Norway, Latvia, and Lithuania; they draw on work in several languages and utilize data gathered during many field trips. The collection's goal is to introduce the cultural significance of dress, especially as it relates to women's concern with their own fertility. Each essay explores the relationship between dress, body, the supernatural beliefs of agrarian communities, and the reinvention of such beliefs to serve the interests of nationalism. The essays are supported by research using primary sources. In her Introduction, "Folk Dress, Supernatural Beliefs and the Body," Welters acquaints the reader with some of the major issues in the study of dress. She begins by discussing the meaning of "folk" and "folklore" and how they affect our understanding of folk dress. She defines some of the terms used by the contributors and presents a theoretical discussion of belief protection and fertility. Marlene R. Breu, in "Traditional Turkish Women's Dress: A Source of Common Understanding for Expected Behaviors," examines how aspects of traditional female dress ensembles in Turkey serve as the presentation and abstraction of meaning for age and gender, and how they serve to signal expected behaviors (particularly in relation to the roles of women as sexual beings and procreators). In her essay "The Peloponnesian 'Zonari': A Twentieth-century String Skirt," Linda Welters focuses on zonari, a fringed belt worn by women in certain areas of the eastern Peloponesian peninsula of Greece as recently as the mid-twentieth century. Welters proposes that, rather than signalling marriageability, zonari served chiefly to protect women in matters regarding childbearing. Two essays focus on archaic elements in folk dress and on associated behaviors that derive from ancient myths, cults, and rituals. Mary B. Kelly, in "Living Textile Traditions of Carpathians," and E. J. W. Barber, in "The Curious Tale of the Ultra-long Sleeve (A Eurasian Epic)," are especially interested in the durability of magical thinking associated with dress. Finally, in "The Dynamic Relations Between Lithuanian National Costumes and Folk Dress," Ruta Saliklis discusses how dress can become an emblem of social and political control in a post-structuralist world. She focuses on Lithuanian-Americans and deals with the expression of national identity through folk dress. Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs About Protection and Fertility thus provides the reader with an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural view of the supernatural beliefs associated with folk dress by collecting the work of a variety of scholars from various disciplines. The book contributes to the growing body of literature on the cultural meanings of dress, and it will interest scholars of material culture, anthropology, folklore, art, history, ethnohistory, and linguistics. Suheyla Cavuser |
