Lucy Norris

Shedding skins: the materiality of divestment in India

This article calls for a reconsideration of the materiality of things in dynamic processes of self-making and personhood. Grounded in research in contemporary urban India, it is argued that it is in the act of divestment that the capacity for the recreation of the self is made most apparent, due to the intimate connection between clothing and the body. Cloth is also a vital element of gift-giving and the re-creation of social networks. The case study of a woman trying to get rid of an unwanted garment highlights the options available and the different regimes of value by which the worth of used clothing can be assessed. These include handing on treasured pieces to family members, recycling within the home, giving to servants, bartering them for new stainless steel pots or burning them for their silver and gold content. The sacrifice and destruction of such intimate objects are the necessary prerequisite for the renewal of self within a network of mutually constitutive person-object relations.

Recycling and Reincarnation: the Journeys of Indian Saris

The paper addresses the consumption of recycled sari clothing by Western tourists in India. Second-hand saris are traded across north India, and re-made into new styles of clothing for the Western market by local tailors. The saris are cut up, destroying both the Indian form of the garment and the structure of patterns across its surface. These are then transformed either into copies of their own clothing or into hybrid forms favoured by backpackers travelling across Asia. It examines the potential of these decorative silk fabrics to translate images of the travellers transience and impermanence through their own adaptability and change in form, while enabling various nuanced perceptions of belonging. It is argued that such feelings of association simultaneously work on the level of opening up an avenue for individual self-expression, for fitting in with other tourists through the creation of a specific sartorial culture, and for referencing at a distance the host culture through which they are travelling by the re-use of local aesthetics. Finally, it points to the potential for new research into the consumption of these garments in their native countries, and incorporation of such clothing into the wardrobes of travellers once they return home.

Urban prototypes: Growing local circular cloth economies

Abstract Circular economy (CE) models are driving the next restructuring of global textile production and secondary markets, but their socio-political configurations are largely untested. New textile recycling technologies have the potential to redirect material resource flows, disrupt global secondary markets and reconfigure the waste hierarchy. Mainstream CE modelling tends to include people simply as product users in a system of material flows governed by large brands. However, anthropological research into collaborations of small-scale urban designer-producers show how they are using CE principles to prototype new regional cloth economies that aim to reproduce the types of societies they wish to live in.