Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Emma Tarlo

Emma Tarlo has conducted long term anthropological fieldwork in India and Britain. She has a specialist interest in the anthropology of dress, material culture and urban anthropology and has published widely in these fields.  Her work engages with issues of colonialism, nationalism, diasporic identities, aesthetics, religious revivalism, identity politics, stigma and representation. She is particularly interested in the relationship between visual, material and narrative forms.  

Emma Tarlo is currently Chair of Learning and Teaching in the Anthropology Department.  She aims to encourage students to develop and expand their research and writing skills to assist them within and beyond the academy.

Teaching

Dr Emma Tarlo teaches the following courses:

• Anthropology and the Visual I
• Anthropology of Art II
• PhD writing up seminar
• Urban Anthropology

Areas of supervision

Emma Tarlo is keen to supervise students working on dress, fashion, material culture, museums, craft, urban space, memory and embodied religious practice. She would  particularly welcome students working on contemporary Muslim communities in Europe and on South Asian communities in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.

Research Supervision

Research interests

I have carried out research in India and Britain on a variety of issues including clothing, textiles, identity politics, urban anthropology, contested histories and critical events.

My original research in India focused on clothing and textiles as a means to explore a wide range of cultural debates and practices concerning issues of local, regional and national identity. The research was both historical and ethnographic and was based on archival work on written and visual sources and on fieldwork in rural Gujarat and Delhi. My book, Clothing Matters (1996) documents the decisive role played by dress in the assertion and maintenance of colonial authority in the late 19th century and in development and spread of Indian nationalism. It also explores how tensions concerning gender, caste, class and religion continued to be played out through dress and textiles in the 1980's and 1990's.

In the mid 1990's I spent three years in Delhi where I was involved in collective and individual research about the politics of urban space. In particular I conducted research amongst people who had been displaced through the massive "slum clearance" and "family planning" drives during a period known as the Emergency in the mid 1970's. The research which was archival, visual and ethnographic explored the relationship between official histories, archival records, local narratives and lived experiences. My book, Unsettling Memories (2003) is a rewriting of the Emergency from these multiple sources. It is also an anthropological investigation of state practices and their consequences.

My current research concerns the relationship between religion and dress in Britain, focusing in particular on Muslim clothing debates and practices. This research addresses a number of issues concerning the significance of visibility, religious conviction, materiality, biography, politics, emotion, fashion, globalisation, and cyberspace in the formulation and expression of Muslim identities in Britain.

I have collaborated with researchers at Art Map (Paris), IRD (Paris), ISIM (Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden) and SOAS/UEL (London), University of Amsterdam, the London School of Fashion, the Horniman Museum and the V&A Victoria and Albert Museum.   

My recent research concerns the relationship between religion and dress in Britain, focusing in particular on Muslim clothing debates and practices. This research addresses a number of issues concerning the significance of visibility, religious conviction, materiality, biography, politics, emotion, fashion, globalisation, and cyberspace in the formulation and expression of Muslim identities in Britain.

I am currently developing new research on the global trade in human hair and the manufacture and distribution of wigs.

Recent Collective Research Projects

Norface-funded Research Project: 
Islamic Fashion: The emergence of Islam as a social force in Europe, 2007-9.

Comparative research project in Britain, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. I am currently co-editing (with Annelies Moors) a volume based on this research, entitled, Islamic Fashion in New Spaces (Berg, forthcoming)

AHRC –funded Project: Modest Fashion and Internet Retail , 2010-11.

Collaborative project with the London School of Fashion on the emergence and popularity of Modest Fashion in an interfaith context with particular reference to Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities in Britain and the United States.

Selected publications

Books

Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith, 2010, Berg (Oxford)

Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, 1996, Hurst (London), Viking (Delhi) & University of Chicago Press, (reprinted Chicago 2005)

Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, 2003 Hurst (London), Permanent Black (Delhi), University of California Press (Berkeley)

Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, co-edited with V. Dupont and D. Vidal, 2000, Manohar (Delhi).

Muslim Fashions, (co-edited with Annelies Moors). 2007, Special double issue of the Journal, Fashion Theory, vol. 11, issue2/3, June/September 2007.

Selection of articles

Tarlo (in press), “Dress and the South Asian Diaspora”, ed. D. Washbrook and J. Chatterjee,  in South Asia Diaspora Handbook  (Routledge)

Tarlo E 2011, ‘Reflections on Ghetto Anthropology’, Anthropology of thisCentury, issue 1, no 1.

Tarlo E., 2010 “Hijab online: the fashioning of cyber Islamic commerce.” Interventions, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, special issue entitled Muslims in the Frame, edited by P. Morey and A. Yacin.

Tarlo E., (2010), “Multicultural Muslim Fashions”, in Breward C. , Crill R. and Crang P., ed., British Asian Style, London: V&A  Publications.

Tarlo E. 2010 “British Attitudes to Indian and European Dress in Colonial India” in Riello G. and Mcneil P. (eds.), The Fashion History Reader, London: Routledge.

Tarlo E. ,  2009, “From Finsbury Park to Damascus, Islamic men’s fashions in Britain’,  The Middle East in London Magazine, SOAS London.

Tarlo E. , 2009,  “Fashion” in Barnard and Spencer eds, Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (revised edition) London:,Routledge

'Hijab in London: Metamorphosis, Resonance and Effects', in Journal of Material Culture, 12(2), July 2007

"From Victim to Agent: Memories of the Emergency from a Resettlement Colony in Delhi", 1995, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. xxx, no. 46, pp. 2921-2928.

"Welcome To History: A Resettlement Colony in the Making" 2000, in Dupont, Tarlo, Vidal (eds.) Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, Manohar (Delhi).

"Paper Truths: The Emergency and Slum Clearance through Forgotten Files", 2001, in Benei V. and Fuller C. (eds.), The Everyday State in Modern India, Hurst (London).

"Body and Space in a Time of Crisis" in Das Veena, Kleinman Arthur, Rampele Mamphel and Reynolds Pamela (eds.), 2000, Violence and Subjectivity, University of California Press.

"Married to the Mahatma: The Life and Predicament of Kasturba Gandhi", 1997, Women: A cultural Review, Special Issue, Independent India, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 264-177.

"Weaving Air: The textile journey of Rezia Wahid", 2004, Moving Worlds, Volume 4, No. 2, pp. 90-99.

"Reconsidering Stereotypes: Anthropological Reflections on the Jilbab controversy." 2005, Anthropology Today, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 13-17 and front and back covers.

"The Hijab Effect", forthcoming 2007, Journal of Material Culture, vol.12: 2.

Islamic Cosmopolitanism: The sartorial biographies of 3 Muslim women in London", 2007, Fashion Theory, vol. 11, no. 2/3, pp. 143-172.