Week 7

Context
This plan was submitted in the seventh week of class for Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India, by Pravina Shukla. The theme for this week was assemblage.

Plan
1. Part of the appeal of The Grace of Four Moons was its insistence that "ordinary people" and their habits and ways of life were just as worthy of study as any other collection of people or traditions elsewhere in the world. Why is it so hard to study "ordinary" people? Or why is it sometimes discouraged?

2. The extended discussion of darshan helped me to grasp the connections between sacred/religious sight and secular/everyday sight, particularly as it relates to how one dresses for and is viewed by others. A purposeful gaze, or perhaps just a fleeting one, teaches you about a person and yields a multitude of information, even if it might only be for a second. Directed knowledge can also shape the power of the gaze and what one gains from it; turning to the self-gaze, even more is revealed about a person and the society she lives in (p. 54). I wonder if it is impossible to escape any form of gaze when it comes to self-presentation. We are always being seen - if not by others, than by ourselves. One issue that confused me still is that of preserving the individual within a "culture" or society (as when Shukla writes that clothing is a way to express personal identities and culture all at once). How much is a person's dress a sign of their individuality and how much of it is just a reflection of common cultural/societal standards? Is it a mistake to even conceive of this as a spectrum? (Do both co-exist peacefully?) See also Performance