Exploring the Costume Styling and Material Composition of the Effutu Festival Costumes

This study investigates the costume styling and material composition of Effutu festival costumes. It is delimited to Effutu festival performance costumes. The qualitative design was adopted. The ethnography approach was employed through narrative analysis and oral history. Unstructured interviews and on-site direct observations were the qualitative data collection instrument used for the data collection. The narrative analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings revealed that historically costumes are seen as relics that can tell the story about the exploits and traditional mythologies of the communities. Again, costumes that materialise culture and identities do not just mirror pre-existing sets of ideas or symbolic systems but facilitate values as ‘they form part of an ethnohistorical repository of knowledge. The findings further revealed that, costume styling could be categorised into Royal, Ritual, Asafo (war/battle), Generational, Women ensembles (Adzewa costumes) and Fanciful costumes. The basic material composition of costumes includes fabrics (both applied and structural designs), leather, horsetail, metal helmets, pillows, kaolin, beads (plastic and glass), mpoboa (shoes), symbolic colours and other material collaboration. It is recommended that costumes used for the Effutu festival be recorded and digitalised for future reference

Archaeology · Art · Battle · Ethnography · Folklore · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropology · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · History · Public Spaces through Art

• A Biographic-Narrative of the Masquerade Collections of Alhassan Mahamudu Saliga

  Open Access•Kweku Safo-Ankama, Enock Swanzy-Impraim•TEXTILE•2026

  Incluir item

• Journey to Ethnographic Research

  Open Access•Leah Shagrir•Journey to Ethnographic Research•2017

  Incluir item

• The Systematic Study of African Dress and Textiles

  F T H Smith, Fred T Smith et al.•African Arts•1982

  Incluir item

• Old Textiles – New Possibilities

  Open Access•Eva Andersson Strand, Karin Margarita Frei et al.•European Journal of Archaeology•2010

  Incluir item

• Materializing identities

  Open Access•Christopher Tilley•Journal of Material Culture•2011

  Incluir item