Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body's Surface / Edition 1

by Adeline Masquelier

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253217837
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	12/20/2005
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Adeline Masquelier is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University and author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger.

Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments

Dirt, Undress, and Difference: An IntroductionAdeline Masquelier
1. The Naked and the Nude: Historically Multiple Meanings of Oto (Undress) in Southeastern NigeriaMisty L. Bastian
2. Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist EncounterMargaret Wiener
3. Body Talk: Revelations of Self and Body in Contemporary Strip ClubsKatherine Frank
4. The Naked Spirit: Disrobing, Deviance, and Dissent in Bori PossessionAdeline Masquelier
5. Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth CenturySatsuki Kawano
6. Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian SudanJanice Boddy
7. Did You Bathe This Morning? Baths and Morality in BotswanaDeborah Durham
8. The Politics of Dirt and Gender: Body Techniques in Bengali IndiaSarah Lamb
9. Corrupted Alterities: Body Politics in the Time of the Iranian DiasporaJanet Bauer

List of Contributors
Index