Shared Knowledge in Daily Life: Dress Codes and Religiosity

Abstract

Sociological studies have focused on the political and ideological uses of religion and have only rarely concerned themselves with the religious phenomena of daily life linked to ordinary people, such as prayer, clothing, the choice of a spouse, and bank loans. This article tries to highlight the importance of studying religiosity in its relationship with shared knowledge. The author sees no contradiction between the study of religiosity and of the ideological uses of religion. The success of ideologies depends on the ability to simplify their ideas and make them available to the masses, and ideally to penetrate and conquer the various spheres of society, starting with the visible, such as appearance and clothing, and moving on to the intimate, such as taste in music and sexual life. This, he stresses, explains our choice of women’s clothing, which has become a subject for religious and ideological discourse and a prominent element of religiosity. Common knowledge about traditional clothing dominated with its terminology, categories, and justification, while ideological discourse was marginal, and religious discourse largely absent. The paper goes on to describe how the headscarf was in the first stage of its spread linked most strongly with religious justifications and behaviors. Then it focuses on the process of normalization which is marked by the absorption of the new and unfamiliar in the context of a familiar world dominated by shared knowledge.