[Anthropgrad] Pre-fieldwork Seminar

[Fay.Castles]

Pre-fieldwork Seminar:

Coombs Building, Arndt Room (Seminar Room B)
Friday, 24 August 2007 (11.30am)

NEGOTIATING MODESTY:
Face-veiled Women in Contemporary Indonesia
Eva F. Amrullah
(Anthropology, RSPAS – ANU)


Abstract:
Recently, donning the face-veil has appealed to an increasing number of
women in Indonesia. Besides wide-spread images of these women who are
often dehumanized by comentators who refer to them as “ghosts” or as women
who cannot "remain human" while adopting full body covering, the meaning
behind their presences is also often oversimplified as merely associated
with the Islamist movement. The objective of this research is to
understand everyday life experiences of women wearing face-veils in
Indonesia. By studying the experience of the everyday life of these women,
I will examine the perspective “from below” in order to have a more
complex understanding of the meaning of wearing such covering. I
hypothesise that this self-transformation is tied with larger process of
social transformations in Indonesia. By adopting such covering in
Indonesia where the practice is considered unusual, they seem to want to
reconstruct their identity and to embrace a public performance of identity
that distances them from the Indonesian cultural context. Focusing on
Muslim women in Indonesia who cover their faces, this study will
investigate the backgrounds and motivations of the women involved, trace
the genealogies of this practice, focus on how the development of
transnational networks have played a role, and investigates how wearing a
face veil enables the formation of collective identities and/or particular
notions of self.
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Fay Castles
Departmental Administrator
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
+61-2-612 52162  Fax: +61-2-612 53023
Fay.Castles at anu.edu.au
http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
ANU CRICOS Provider Number: 00120C
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