The Life of Beauty. Location, Experience, Methodology

Katyayani Dalmia, Dominique Grisard, Anne Kukuczka (ed.)

The Life of Beauty challenges any straightforward or linear understanding of how bodily beauty comes to matter in people’s lives. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research in Taiwan, India, Tibet, Cameroon, Rwanda, Brazil, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the contributions to this volume examine an impressive range of issues through the lens of embodied aesthetics, including migration, sex work, pregnancy, nationalism, caste, class, race, materiality, and fieldwork itself. The chapters guide readers through known and perhaps unknown worlds, with protagonists such as feminist writers and teachers, cis- and trans-gender sex workers, hairdressers, beauty service workers and customers in beauty parlours. They invite readers to consider connections between everyday materials, like hairdresser training heads, depilatory wax, second-hand clothing, and processes of marginalisation and global inequality. By attending closely to subjective experience, and meticulously locating beauty in individual lives, objects, and socio-political contexts, the volume foregrounds intersections between everyday life and politics which are often studied in isolation.

Authors/editors

Katyayani Dalmia is a sociocultural anthropologist based in India. Her current book project examines subjective experiences of skin colour in relation to bodily stereotypes of caste, gender, religion and class. She earned a PhD in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research, New York, and is presently a research associate at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich.

Dominique Grisard (PhD) teaches Gender Studies at the University of Basel and directs the Swiss Center for Social Research. She is writing a gender history of the colour pink and researching gender relations in visual arts institutions as part of the research project ‘Gender and Diversity Monitoring in the Swiss Cultural Sector’ at the University of Bern.

Anne Kukuczka is a junior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the body and gender, labour and im/mobility and feminist anthropology, with a regional focus on Tibet and Nepal. Anne’s PhD thesis centres on skills training and the quest for mobility among young women in urban Nepal.

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