ABSTRACT
Clothing – especially women’s – is an aspect of ‘tradition’ that in the refugee camps is important in the processes concerned with what it means to be a modern Karenni person and what it means to become and be a Karenni refugee. These processes and the clothing itself are highly politicised, embedded in webs of myth, history and nationalist aspiration. Here, I consider both the clothing of newly arrived refugees and its meanings for different sectors of the refugee population, and other interpretations of ‘traditional’ clothing in the camps.
