Dressing the Part: Power, Dress, Gender, and Representation in the Pre-Columbian Americas

Dress has the power to speak volumes about who you are. Dress is functional but also communicates multiple aspects of personal and group identities. In its layers, dress can express and embody numerous identities simultaneously, and when manipulated, dress can be used to transcend social boundaries or subvert authority. The contributors to Dressing the Part explore these subtleties of dress in the pre-Columbian Americas, focusing on the interrelationships of gender and power with the goal, as editors Scher and Follensbee note in their introduction, of examining “the social and political dynamics of ancient societies” (5). Drawing from history, anthropology, ethnography, and material culture studies, the authors in the volume explore how gendered identities are part of the greater fabric of social relations, political power, and religious authority. Most notably, the discussions of gender found in this volume are relevant to contemporary discourse, as authors explore diverse identities in the American...