The Cosmic Body: Arts of Adornment in Africa

Around 70,000 BCE, an African artist turned a shell into a pendant, signaling the longstanding importance of body arts to African cultures and worldviews. Indeed, in all known human societies, the surface of the body is a symbolic stage and bodily adornment is the language through which socialization is expressed. Working closely with resources in Special Collections and the Middlebury Museum of Art, in this seminar, we will ask how people use adornment to convey and define knowledge of the body, and how dress expresses beliefs about gender, health, political and spiritual power, and the cosmos in Africa and beyond.