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Accepted Paper:

Gifting dignity and wearing grief in rural Kyrgyzstan: clothes and human looks at and around death  
Louise Bechtold (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Paper short abstract:

Clothes in rural Kyrgyzstan are central to women’s social life. At and around death clothes are utilized to materialialise and negotiate dignity and embody grief, at the intersection of the personal and social.

Paper long abstract:

Clothes are central to the social life of women in rural Kyrgyzstan. Under conditions of no running water, dusty and muddy roads, and child-care activities, women still try to maintain a clean, beautiful and dignifying appearance. Clothes are central material objects that women use to connect with one another by exchanging them as gifts, congratulating one another for their accomplishments and supporting each other in difficult moments, such as at death.

Clothes in ‘blue’ colours of mourning help to make grief visible and tangible, and the norms around wearing ‘blue’ suggest a structuring of its embodiment along gender and kinship lines. The clothes of the dead in turn are distributed to enhance the dignity and good ‘looks’ of the deceased.

Focussing on clothes at and around death, this paper discusses the questions: How is human dignity negotiated and lived through handling the clothes of dead women? How do acts of looking ‘touch’ the persons wearing mourning clothes, and how does this structure their movement through feelings? How do women utilize the ‘materiality’ of clothes, such as its constancy and visibility and the possibility to dress and undress them, in order to shape both personal embodied experience and social relations?

Panel P09
Fashion ‘n’ anthropology: a convergence of ‘looks’ at dress and adornment