Summary/Abstract |
To a social thinker who is used to dealing with macro aspects of sociopolitical phenomena,
the issue of clothing may sound trifling, or at best may be viewed as an insignificant detail of social life and thus be discounted as secondary. However, what are considered mundane issues may themselves be so heavily loaded and may bear such subtle and unique meanings that inattention to them may result in missing some very important insights allowing a much closer analysis of larger issues, such as the experience of modernization, in particular, in a non-western context. As Comaroff and Comaroff rightly put it, ‘Cultural revolutions usually rooted themselves on modest terrain, in simple acts of fabrication, use, exchange. Even the most elaborate social formations arise from such quotidian acts’.
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