This anthropological investigation of dress featuring selected scholarly readings is ideal for courses focused on global perspectives and cultural aspects of dress.

Everywhere around the world, people make daily decisions about what to wear or how to dress. Using Western and non-Western examples, 'The Visible Self' presents a systematic approach to analyzing these daily rituals that we all share - not simply the act of putting on clothing, but also cleansing the body and adorning it.

The authors elaborate on what dress is, define ethnocentrism and position dress in todays society. Using Western and non-Western examples, the book fosters an appreciation of the diversity of surface appearance through an exploration of the common purposes served by dress to protect, satisfy and communicate. The Visible Self, 2nd Edition, analyzes the act of dressing - not simply putting on clothing, but cleansing the body and adorning it.

All over the world, people get dressed, mostly for the same reasons. Why, then, do we look so different from each other? The answers lie in the constellations of factors that contribute to the human condition, from climate to conformity, gender expression to race and ethnicity. Beginning with the body as the organizing principle around which to study dress, this 50th anniversary edition of The Visible Self makes sense of humans as biological, social, and aesthetic creatures based on cross-disciplinary concepts and examples. It explores the daily act of dress in cultures around the world, using the word “dress” to describe the wide variety of behaviors connected to the act of adorning our bodies-or not-through the use of clothing, modifications, and/or supplements. Political economies are addressed holistically to understand the global world through contemporary topics such as racism and how dress can be used to sustain or rebel against dominant structures. With current examples and relevant readings in every chapter, the authors convey how dress can achieve standards of appearance and social ideals, relate to individuality and conformity in fashion, and communicate identity and character in the arts. Exploring the global mash-up of fashion, dress, culture, production, and sustainability-including life in a post-pandemic world-The Visible Self offers a powerful understanding of the way we look and how we look at others. New to this Edition: - Focus on the body as the organizing principle in the study of dress including additional insight on fashion and using this concept to define the target customer - Investigation of current issues such as race and the post-pandemic world - Updated readings, at the end of each chapter, with discussion questions that directly connect chapter concepts to reading content - Activities that apply chapter concepts to design, product development, merchandising, and everyday life STUDIO Features Include: - Links to third party video clips to help visualize how dress is used to identify the self - Self-assessment quizzes to test yourself on what you have just read - Flashcards of key terms and concepts covered in the book Instructor Resources - Instructor's Guide to help incorporate the text into your classroom - Test Bank to highly key concepts and test student comprehension on those concepts - PowerPoint Slides for every chapter

In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.