ABSTRACT
This chapter questions the assumed secularity of beauty, which is shown to be not only historically problematic, but also tied to an imperial mindset that divides the world into the beautiful West and the ugly rest. Beauty is analyzed as a social relation tied to cosmological understandings of what it means to be an embodied and gendered human being. Drawing on anthropological field research in Turkey, this chapter explores the ways engagement in beauty is a way of “doing” religion. Like elsewhere in the Islamic world, in Turkey, pious women are now an important target group for the beauty and fashion industries. They have to negotiate their beauty practices on the background of theological debates on body aesthetics and the consumption of beauty services that may celebrate beauty as divine on the one hand and condemn aesthetic body modification as “devil’s work” on the other.
