"I dress in this fashion": women, the life-cycle, and the idea of SeSotho

Abstract

Anthropologists have become interested in "the colonisation of consciousness", and in the processes by which this colonization has been withstood. While some scholars have examined acts of resistance whose social and political effects were more easily measured, a longstanding concern of anthropologists has been the subtler means of defying domination, often through the reassertion of apparently traditional cultural forms, with effects sometimes perceptible no more widely than within local communities themselves.