Practicing beauty: Crisis, value and the challenge of self-mastery in Dakar, 1970-1994

This study examines the expansion and transformation of artisanal garment production and fashion (cutur in Wolof) in Dakar, Senegal during a period of national economic decline from the 1970s through the 1990s. I explain the acceleration of fashion, increase in consumption and proliferation of numbers and forms of shops as a manifestation of a crisis of middle class social formation. Ecological and agricultural decline, massive urban migration, unemployment at all levels and collapse of the educational system have proven the unsustainability of neo-colonial institutions and economic arrangements. I argue that the arena of modern fashion enables institutional innovation as well as the representation of well-being during uncertain times. I treat "crisis" as a moment of intensified transformation and heightened moral dilemmas.;In my analysis I link the micropolitics of the labor process of garment production, dressing up and gift exchange with local ideologies of Beauty, Value and Mastery. I use Mastery as an umbrella term for local strategies around labor, finance and self-presentation. I argue that gendered struggles around these strategies mediate transnational processes, the reconstitution of value forms and the redefinition of work.;I demonstrate that value must be seen as having multiple forms. Their transformations and representations are at stake in the field of cutur. Middle class women have been especially active in negotiating instabilities of values by entering cloth trade and garment production, invigorating African practices of wealth circulation and maintaining familial reputation through the appearance of wealth and beauty. This has sparked vigorous debates over women's consumption habits and authority of women over money and men, that is, about gender and value.;The fieldwork was conducted with Muslim, primarily Wolof, garment producers and consumers in Dakar, Senegal from November 1991 to April 1994. I worked within established networks of middle level producers at the HLM cloth market and with a national association of producers. Methods included participant-observation, interviews, firm histories, life histories, photodocumentation. I attended life cycle and religious rituals and social events. Additionally, I undertook a short "apprenticeship" and was a client.