Role and functioning of traditional female Arbresh clothes in Italy in modern sociocultural space

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2020-52-4/45-63

Abstract

The article is devoted to the traditional women’s clothing of the Arbresh diaspora in Piana degli Albanesi in Sicilia. The Arbresh are immigrants from the Balkan Peninsula who migrated to Italian lands in the 15th century. The traditional clothes of Piana degli Albanesei are considered as an integral ethnocultural phenomenon that has been being created for centuries and continues to exist in the modern sociocultural space. The author traces the change in women’s costume and reveals the specifics of its individual elements functioning. The Arbresh consider themselves to be keepers and successors of their own traditions, so they try to create and preserve a certain type of costume, which, despite the borrowed elements, is perceived and transmitted to the world community as an ethnic one. The research base of the work was made up of ethnographic and art studies, as well as the author’s own field materials collected during fieldwork in Sicily in Piana degli Albanesi and Palermo (2016–2017), in Kosovo (2015) and southern Albania (2014–2015).

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