Abstract

As this handbook amply demonstrates, the range and variety of veiling practices across the world is partly matched by the number and diversity of different sorts of scholars and analysts who work on veiling matters. The field of veiling studies has grown exponentially over the last few decades, encompassing forms of analyses from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives. But the apparent variety also tends to occlude the gaps and absences in the field. Works by individual scholars often tend to be of the case study type, examining in detail the micro-level practices of particular groups in specific locations. Of course, such analyses are absolutely vital for the purposes of understanding the nuances and subtleties of veiling activities and the sense made of them by particular people. But the case study approach too often remains rather unconnected to more systematic, long term, historical and macro-level ways of thinking (for recent notable exceptions, see e.g. Ahmed 1992, 2011), and it is precisely these frameworks that now need to be brought much more into the field of veiling studies, so that they may more rigorously inform case study material in the future and locate specific veiling practices within much broader geographical and historical contexts than they often hitherto have been placed. This way the field can further push and develop the wider approaches and historical considerations that only some scholars have hitherto fully engaged with.