Anyone who has lived in Britain will be familiar with the phenomenon of the school uniform. Schools insist upon uniforms in order to generate a feeling of school community, create equality among students and to enforce a degree of discipline through the regulation of dressing behaviour. Students, however, constantly seek to modify and wear their uniform in different ways; boys deliberately wear their tie in a loose knot, while girls alter the length of school skirts. Such reactions to the requirement to wear a uniform are not simply fashion statements but can also be understood as deliberate attempts to resist regulation and authority by reconfiguring dress, albeit within established rules, in order to express a sense of individual identity.

Struggles to assert individual, group or local identities in ways that at once conform to, but at the same time also resist, dominant paradigms are widespread. They are particularly relevant in an increasingly globalised contemporary world culture in which individuals and communities continually create ‘islands of identity’ out of the ocean of culture flowing round them (Ó Crualaoich 2003). In this way, aspects of global culture are meaningfully interpreted and recreated in a local communal context; international trends are reinterpreted for oneself (de Cléir 2011). Research has sought to analyse responses to domination and the ways in which people resist oppression in everyday life. This perspective has seen expression in archaeology where material aspects of resistance have recently been a focus of investigation (e.g. Frazer 1999; Wilkie 2000; Leone 2005).

The identification of such responses to domination, or ‘discipline’ as Foucault (1977) calls it, raises the question as to what lies beneath such responses. In other words, by what means do people simultaneously act as part of society yet at the same time resist being reduced to mutely acquiescing machines?