Dress as a Reflection and Sustainer of Social Reality: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

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Abstract
Traditional anthropological participant-observation and cultural interpretation can provide insight into the relationship of dress to human individual and social experience that more expedient methodologies may ignore. This interpretation of female dress of the Karen, a hill tribe in northwest Thailand, relies primarily on anthropological symbolic theory. It suggests that dress may serve as a symbolic metaphor of the relationship of the individual to the cultural system. As such, dress can be an extremely powerful symbolic way of expressing and reinforcing subtle values, relationships, and meaning in human culture. Dress can contribute to the maintenance of cultural continuity by interaction with ritual to cause individuals to want to act as they must act in order to preserve their own cultural system.

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