Woman’s Bonnet
This bonnet is part of a series of objects J. H. Lawrie collected in the South Pacific. Lawrie spent seventeen years in Vanuatu where he conducted missionary work between 1879 and 1896, fifteen years of which he spent on the island of Aneityum.
European and North American missionaries started to settle in Aneityum from the mid-nineteenth century, translating and adapting some local elements to a Biblical context. As Christianity spread on Aneityum, there was an impulse on the part of European settlers in the Pacific to refashion the culture, appearance, and clothing of the local population. For them, clothing was intricately connected to religion, and some of the missionaries writing in the 1850s reported that Aneityumese people wore European-style garments and accessories on the weekends and for special occasions.
Women especially enjoyed wearing bonnets and headdresses, influenced by the European clothes of missionaries’ wives, who constituted a relatively large part of the settlers’ population. The headdresses that they brought with them probably inspired the production of composite bonnets such as this one.
Although the overall design remains European in inspiration, the materials used and technique of fabrication were adapted to local methods of production. The use of pandanus leaves, a material that peoples of the South Pacific had used for centuries for mats, skirts, and other garments, was common in bonnet making. The cotton was either locally harvested, product of an expanding cotton industry on the island, or imported. The lining of newsprint from an Edinburgh paper, however, is certainly a nonindigenous product.
Unlike European practice, a bonnet such as this was worn on the shoulders to accommodate local women’s voluminous hair types. Bonnets became common on the island and increasing demand stimulated the production and market, along with stylized handkerchiefs, dresses and suits. Clothing was one aspect of a complex system of signifiers, which included other visual references such as tattoos and body alterations, indicating class and status within the community. Ni-Vanuatu islanders used European-style garments to reinvent and transcend their place within the hierarchy.