Between «culturème» and «identitème»: The Process of Patrimonialization of the Hijab in France

Abstract

What characterizes the notion of “identiteme” is the media and political promotion of a word or a group of words, that the use transform into an identity referent. Whether we choose it or refuse it, whether we praise it or stigmatize it, whether we trivialize it or demonize it, the veil, in its process of construction as an identiteme, seems to have passed all the necessary stages of patrimonialization for a sign to establish itself as an identiteme. By taking into account the media and scientific promotions of the “veil business”, almost permanent in France since the end of the 1980s, it is a question of staging, through a sociolinguistic survey,  the process of patrimonialization by which, a ethno-sociocultural sign "the veil" has become an identiteme in France.