Mandari women
89 x 89 mm | Print gelatin silver
Date of Print:
Unknown
Previous PRM Number:
JB.2.64
Accession Number:
1998.97.82.3
Description:
A full length portrait of two Mandari women, one wearing a textile body cloth, the other a goat-skin apron.
These women are presumably both married, since textiles tied around the breasts and goat-skin aprons (which hang down behind) are generally worn by women after marriage.
However, the usage of the apron was beginning to be mostly replaced by body cloths at the time of Buxton's fieldwork, and so this image was probably taken to show 'old' and 'new' styles of married women's attire.
Photographer:
Jean Carlile Buxton
Date of Photo:
1950 - 1952
Region:
[Southern Sudan] Bahr el Jebel Tali
Group:
Mandari Dari
PRM Source:
Ronald Carlile Buxton via Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Acquired:
Donated 1988
Other Owners:
Jean Buxton Collection
Class:
Textile , Clothing Skin , Ornament
Keyword:
Textile , Ornament Neck
Documentation:
See Related Documents File. Buxton field notebooks in Tylor Library.
Other Information:
In Some Notes on the Mandari of Equatoria Province, A.E.
Sudan, (typescript notebook of c.1951 in Tylor Library, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford), book I, page 33, Jean Buxton notes that 'When a woman is married she always wears a skin - usually that of a goat from which the hairs have been removed, and which is treated with fat to make it soft and pliable and is then coloured a rich rust brown with red ochre - tied round her waist so that it hangs down behind.
Nowadays this skin is beginning to be replaced with pieces of cloth, which in an older woman is often tied across the breasts.' [Chris Morton 20/1/2005]
Recorder:
Christopher Morton 20/1/2005 [Southern Sudan Project]
