Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on perceptions of bodies worldwide. Against this background, Beauty and the Norm assembles ethnographic and conceptual approaches from a variety of disciplines and across the globe to debate standardization in bodily appearance. Its contributions range from empirical research to exploratory conversations between scholars and personal reflections. Bridging hitherto separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science, disability studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, this volume reflects upon the gendered, classed, and racialized body, normative regimes of representation, and the global beauty economy.

Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on perceptions of bodies worldwide. Against this background, Beauty and the Norm assembles ethnographic and conceptual approaches from a variety of disciplines and across the globe to debate standardization in bodily appearance. Its contributions range from empirical research to exploratory conversations between scholars and personal reflections. Bridging hitherto separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science, disability studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, this volume reflects upon the gendered, classed, and racialized body, normative regimes of representation, and the global beauty economy.

In a world supposedly characteried by the production of new differences and cultural permutations resulting from the twin processes of globaliation and cultural syncretisation, hardly anything has remained as obscure and theoretically under-theoried as the very notion of the "new" itself. This book seeks to unravel and demystify the ideology of the new on the basis of concrete case studies from various regions across Africa and beyond.

Afe Adogame is a lecturer in world Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.

Magnus Echtler is a researcher at the department for religious studies, University of Bayreuth.

Ulf Vierke is a researcher at the Iwalewa-House, Africa Centre of the University Bayreuth.