Costume: Performing Identities Through Dress

What does it mean to people around the world to put on costumes to celebrate their heritage, reenact historic events, assume a role on stage, or participate in Halloween or Carnival? Self-consciously set apart from everyday dress, costume marks the divide between ordinary and extraordinary settings and enables the wearer to project a different self or special identity. Pravina Shukla offers richly detailed case studies from the United States, Brazil, and Sweden to show how individuals use costumes for social communication and to express facets of their personalities.

Pravina Shukla is Associate Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India (IUP, 2007), winner of the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport prize and the Coomaraswamy Prize, Association for Asian Studies. She is editor (with Ray Cashman and Tom Mould) of The Individual and Tradition: Folkloristic Perspectives (IUP, 2011).