Early Christian Ritual Life by Richard E. DeMaris Jason T. Lamoreaux Steven C. Muir & Jason T. Lamoreaux & Steven C. Muir

Author:Richard E. DeMaris,Jason T. Lamoreaux,Steven C. Muir & Jason T. Lamoreaux & Steven C. Muir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

From doughnuts to dress

It is my contention in this chapter that the rituals of boundary maintenance involve the everyday practices that are difficult to distinguish from routine, regular ways of being in and interacting with the world. Eating is one such practice; getting dressed is another. In addition to regulations concerning meals and the proper way to eat communally, we also find association regulations concerning dress practices and the proper way to wear garments when with others. Dress is, after all, an essentially social practice – no matter how much we might wish to think that we dress only to please ourselves, our clothing and adornment of the body is our primary tool for social communication. The same was true in the ancient Mediterranean, to an even more heightened degree. I will now turn my focus to the use of clothing and dress as ritual boundary maintenance.

Ritual, following Asad, involves repeated physical action, following an authoritative script, that results, through repetition, in the acquisition of certain abilities and the formation of disposition. Of all human practices, dress lends itself best to repetition, as none of us can leave our private, domestic spaces each day without participating in some form of dress. As Joanne Entwistle asserts, we are not just bodies, but dressed bodies:

Conventions of dress transform flesh into something recognizable and meaningful to a culture and are also the means by which bodies are made “decent,” appropriate and acceptable within specific contexts. Dress does not merely serve to protect our modesty and does not simply reflect a natural body or, for that matter, a given identity; it embellishes the body, the materials commonly used adding a whole array of meanings to the body that would otherwise not be there.

(Entwistle 2000, 323–24)

Dress is the primary way we make sense of ourselves and others, the way we locate ourselves and one another in our specific social worlds. We can articulate conformity or resistance, support or subversion through clothing, intentionally or unintentionally.

There are certain implicit rules of dress we follow every day, whether we are aware of these rules or not; I do not show up to teach my classes in sweatpants, for example, as I somehow know that this form of dress would be unacceptable. There are other rules of dress, though, that are imposed explicitly upon us in certain situations, and these explicit rules can be considered under Asad’s rubric for ritual. Explicit rules for the appearance of the body – dress codes – are often enacted with the goal of shaping the behavior and constructing the disposition of the wearer. Readers who have had to wear a school uniform at some point in their lives will probably be familiar with this idea: if you had to wear a white collared shirt without a logo, for example, you might have thought more consciously about the visual influence and impact of social class; if you had to wear a short pleated skirt every day, you probably learned certain ways of walking and

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