Dirt, Undress, and Difference

Dirt, Undress, and Difference
Author: Adeline Masquelier
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005-12-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780253111531

"A magnificent volume! It offers brand new perspectives on body politics and identity or subjectivity formation in the post-colonial world." -- Dorothy Ko, Barnard College While there is widespread interest in dress and hygiene as vehicles of cultural, moral, and political value, little scholarly attention has been paid to cross-cultural understandings of dirt and undress, despite their equally important role in the fashioning of identity and difference. The essays in this absorbing and thought-provoking collection contribute new insights into the neglected topics of bodily treatments and transgressions. In detailed ethnographic studies from around the world, the contributors recast assumptions about filth and nakedness, exploring how various forms of transgression associated with the body's surface are drawn up into relations of power and inequality. They demonstrate imaginatively how body surfaces are powerfully mobilized in the making and unmaking of moral worlds.

Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece

Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece
Author: Mireille M. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107055369

This is the first general monograph on ancient Greek dress in English to be published in more than a century. By applying modern dress theory to the ancient evidence, this book reconstructs the social meanings attached to the dressed body in ancient Greece. Whereas many scholars have focused on individual aspects of ancient Greek dress, from the perspectives of literary, visual, and archaeological sources, this volume synthesizes the diverse evidence and offers fresh insights into this essential aspect of ancient society.

African Fashion, Global Style

African Fashion, Global Style
Author: Victoria L. Rovine
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0253014131

African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.

Veiling in Fashion

Veiling in Fashion
Author: Anna-Mari Almila
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-12-27
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1788315766

Veiling in Fashion enters the worlds of women who wear the hijab, both as an aspect of their religious observance and community belonging, and as a fashion statement, drawing upon global Islamic fashion history. The book uses rich ethnographic investigation of everyday veiling practices among Muslim women in the city of Helsinki as a lens through which to reflect on and advance understanding of matters concerning Muslim dress in international Muslim minority contexts. The book provides an innovative approach to studying veiling by connecting varied realms of practice, demonstrating how domains as apparently separate as fashion, materiality, city spaces, private life, religious beliefs, and cosmopolitan social conditions are all tightly bound up together in ways that only a sensitive multi-disciplinary approach can reveal. It will appeal to scholars and students in fashion, gender, religion, material cultures, and the construction of space.

Cosmos, Gods and Madmen

Cosmos, Gods and Madmen
Author: Roland Littlewood
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1785331787

The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities.

Thinking Through Tourism

Thinking Through Tourism
Author: Julie Scott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000181537

The study of tourism has made key contributions to the study of anthropology. This volume defines the current state of the anthropology of tourism, examining political, economic, ideological and symbolic themes. An extraordinarily rich collection of case studies illustrate topics as diverse as hospitality, sex and tourism, enchantment, colonial and neo-colonial consumption, and the relation between tourism and gender and ethnic boundaries, as well as questions of global, economic and cultural systems, modernism and nationalism. The book also covers practical and policy issues relating to urban, rural and coastal planning and development. Thinking through Tourism assesses the enormous potential contribution that analysis of tourism can offer to mainstream anthropological thinking. The volume opens up new avenues for enquiry and is an essential resource for students and scholars of anthropology, geography, tourism, sociology and related disciplines.

Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity

Dress in Mediterranean Antiquity
Author: Alicia J. Batten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567684687

Insights from anthropology, religious studies, biblical studies, sociology, classics, and Jewish studies are here combined to provide a cutting-edge guide to dress and religion in the Greco-Roman World and the Mediterranean basin. Clothing, jewellery, cosmetics, and hairstyles are among the many aspects examined to show the variety of functions of dress in communication and in both establishing and defending identity. The volume begins by reviewing how scholars in the fields of classics, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology examine dress. The second section then looks at materials, including depictions of clothing in sculpture and in Egyptian mummy portraits. The third (and largest) part of the book then examines dress in specific contexts, beginning with Greece and Rome and going on to Jewish and Christian dress, with a specific focus on the intersection between dress, clothing and religion. By combining essays from over twenty scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, the book provides a unique overview of different approaches to and contexts of dress in one volume, leading to a greater understanding of dress both within ancient societies and in the contemporary world.

Wrapping and Unwrapping Material Culture

Wrapping and Unwrapping Material Culture
Author: Susanna Harris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2016-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315415631

This innovative volume challenges contemporary views on material culture by exploring the relationship between wrapping materials and practices and the objects, bodies, and places that define them. Using examples as diverse as baby swaddling, Egyptian mummies, Celtic tombs, lace underwear, textile clothing, and contemporary African silk, the dozen archaeologist and anthropologist contributors show how acts of wrapping and unwrapping are embedded in beliefs and thoughts of a particular time and place. Employing methods of artifact analysis, microscopy, and participant observation, the contributors provide a new lens on material culture and its relationship to cultural meaning.

Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria

Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria
Author: Hannah Hoechner
Publisher: International African Library
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1108425291

Through the eyes of northern Nigerian Qur'anic students, this book explores what it truly means to be young, poor, and Muslim.

Images of Otherness in Russia, 1547-1917

Images of Otherness in Russia, 1547-1917
Author: Kati Parppei
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN:

Defining the Others, “them”, in relation to one’s own reference group, “us”, has been an essential phase in the formation of collective identities in any given country or region. In the case of Russia, the formulation of these binary definitions – sometimes taking a form of enemy images – can be traced all the way to medieval texts, in which religion represented the dividing line. Further, the ongoing expansion of the empire transferred numerous “external others” into internal minorities. The chapters of this edited volume examine the development and contexts of various images, perceptions and categories of the Others in Russia from the 16th century Muscovy to the collapse of the Russian empire.