Estrategia 3. Medidas para vehículos y transporte

Dress can be regulated through personal authority, as when parents tell children what to wear, or on the basis of explicit, written codes, whether they are highly detailed, as in codes for ceremonial military uniforms or liturgical dress, or relatively open-ended, as in the Biblical admonition that, ‘women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel’ (I Tim 2: 9), or in the Qur’an (33: 59), ‘O Prophet tell your wives, daughters and believing women to put on their jilbabs [long, loose shirtdresses] so that they are recognized and thus not harmed.’ But rules of dress can also be based on unwritten traditions, or disseminated by role models of various kinds, for example, fashion models, or the stars of popular music, movies, sports, etc.

The example below relies on anthropological accounts of dress in two traditional Mennonite communities in the USA (Graybill and Arthur, 1999; Hamilton and Hawley, 1999). One is a small Holdeman community in Northern California – about 350 members – the other a much larger Mennonite community in Eastern Pennsylvania. Both are agri- cultural communities living in relative isolation from others, denying themselves access to modern media – and preserving traditional dress. Nevertheless, they shop in the same shops as non-Mennonites, and so are aware of, and have access to, a large variety of dress styles. They select from these according to the interests and values of their religion, but, as we will see, with some room for personal style, and they also make their own clothes. The prescribed dress for women is a head covering and a modest, long, loose simple dress in a restrained colour, cut in a style prescribed by the church, and worn fairly uniformly by all women. The dress code for men is less precise – they should just dress simply. Most favour jeans and a plaid or plain shirt during the week and wear a dark suit to church with a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck and no tie.

This dress code is in the first place controlled through the impersonal authority of the Bible – for example, the quote above – and more specifically written disciplinary statements or Church regulations, Ordnungen, as the Amish call them. But these rules leave room for interpretation, so that other forms of control also play a role.

First of all, it is important to realize that, to the members of these communities, following the rules is not experienced as slavishly conforming to rules imposed from outside. The rules are internalized and personalized. To use the modern jargon, people ‘own’ them. As one woman said:

I can say that in this kind of dress, I found my role … For years and years I was looking for something to express that I was a Christian woman … Once I came here and they gave me some dresses, I thought ‘Now I am living how Christ wants me to live.’

Yet there is a great deal of informal social control of the kind that is typical of tradi- tion, where rules are upheld by the talk of the group. ‘When you are having trouble with the rules’, people say, ‘your clothing can show it. This is why everyone watches what everyone else is wearing and how they are wearing it, because clothing shows acceptance of all the rules of the church’ (ibid.: 25). Or, in discussing a specific case: ‘For quite some time, Leah was in “church trouble”, She was ill, spiritually ill. She was expelled for having “foreign spirits”. We could all see it in her behaviour and her dress. She was just out of control’ (ibid.: 9).

Finally, there is formal social control, with different kinds of sanctions, adminis- tered by elders or ministers. ‘Marginal members’ can get into ‘church trouble’ and ‘set back’, denied communion, until they make a public confession of wrongdoing and are accepted again. If that does not happen, expulsion will follow.

How strict are these rules? First of all, they do not apply to everyone in the same way. We have already seen that men have more freedom than women. Young girls also have more freedom and can choose from a wider variety of designs and dress styles. Often they test the limits, for instance by wearing dresses with a tighter fit. The community recognizes that they need to do so to attract a husband, but after marriage women are expected to start dressing ‘plain’. Still, even then it is possible for women to be ‘marginal’ and wear dresses that are considered acceptable even though they deviate somewhat from the norm (see figure 3.2).

However strongly the dress rules of these communities are governed by written codes and traditions, there is room for change, especially if a high status role model initiates the change, and is then imitated by a sufficient number of others.

Amish women are supposed to keep their hair covered except at home in the presence of close family members. While the Amish permit unmarried women to use a bandanna to keep their hair covered while in public during the summertime, married women are supposed to wear the black bonnet in public, regardless of weather. Yet many married women were observed in town with only the white bonnet in summer- time. One woman noted that as long as the bishop’s wife does it, she could also.

(Hamilton and Hawley, 1999: 42) This can then result in a change in the written rules, the Ordnung, if the bishop decides not to do anything about it.

In communities of this kind people regard dress as semiotic and know what it is they express through the way they dress: ‘plainness’, ‘being in this world but not of it’ (ibid.: 13); submission to male authority – as one woman said, ‘Women wear a black head covering over uncut hair to symbolise a woman’s submission to God and her husband’, (ibid.: 16) – and group solidarity – ‘It expresses that we are one body’ (ibid.: 20). But the rules also take account of age and gender and of doctrinal varia- tions, and they do leave some room for individual difference (‘marginality’). Finally, however fixed these rules may seem, there are both formal and informal ways in which Figure 3.2 Dress of an orthodox and a marginal Mennonite woman (from Graybill and Arthur, 1999: 17)

they can change. I will now compare this traditional semiotic regime with the ‘role model’ and ‘expertise’ oriented semiotic regimes that have become dominant in Western consumer society.