Some years ago a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford asked me to look at a photograph taken in South Sudan in the early 1950s. Several South Sudanese men were shown standing on an open plain. They were wearing little in the way of clothing. But on the edge of the frame, resting on the ground, were several small piles of white cloth. The curator wanted to know what I thought the cloth piles were. Had the photographer decided that his subjects would look better without their cotton shifts or jellabeyas? He would certainly not be the first, or last, outsider to decide that 'authentic' Nilotic South Sudanese should not wear a garment associated with Muslim northern Sudan. One can see a similar ethos at work in a 1910 image from the Pitt's C.G. Seligman collection. The black and white photograph is titled "Gok Dinka Men". The description reads, in part: "Gok Dinka men living around Talodi. Three of the men are wearing Arab-style headgear, and possibly holding removed tunics in their hands, showing the cultural influence of surrounding Muslim groups near Talodi." At work in the text is the idea of how 'Gok Dinka' should appear. Rather [...]
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