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The predicament of dress: polyvalency and the ironies of cultural identity
Author(s) -
Durham Deborah
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1999.26.2.389
Subject(s) - sensibility , meaning (existential) , subjectivity , sociology , identity (music) , ethnic group , gender studies , connotation , embodied cognition , aesthetics , politics , state (computer science) , epistemology , political science , anthropology , philosophy , law , linguistics , algorithm , computer science
To appreciate better the uncertain and unstable way that Herero women of Botswana understand their distinctive dress, I extend Bakhtin's notion of "sparkle" to include the disparate modalities through which meaning is constituted. An embodied subjectivity, or experiential sensibility, intrudes upon structured contrasts that also give the dress meaning in such registers as gender, ethnic relations, and the political economy of the liberal democratic state. I use Herero women's sense of the dress to question recent approaches to "culture" among scholars who look only at its differentiating function, since Herero women also see the dress as a means of building mutuality.