Concluding Thoughts
摘要
This concluding chapter draws together the multiple ways in which coloniality, neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy affect women’s hair practices and their social worth, and are shaped by cultural context. The experiences of women in India, South Africa and Finland are juxtaposed. The chapter summarises the meanings on-the-move revealed through what the hair accomplishes as it crosses disparate cultural, social and economic boundaries. The same hair is associated with radically different ends in the three countries, ranging from the Indian providers’ guarantee of future protection to Finnish consumers’ welfare project and South African women’s quest for equality. Finally, it explicates the interactions between the economic and cultural dimensions of the macrostructures of inequality, and shifts the focus from hair practices as produced by unequal hierarchies to how such practices could reproduce the inequalities on which they are based.