Gender Studies / Anthropology Masquelier
—Dorothy Ko, Barnard College
“Demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of the topic of dirt and undress, not just for an anthropology of the body, but for a broader politics and ethics of embodiment.” —Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary
While there is
widespread interest in dress and hygiene as vehicles of cultural, moral, and political value, little scholarly attention has been paid to crosscultural understandings of dirt and undress, despite their equally important role in the fashioning of identity and difference. The essays in this thought-provoking collection contribute new insights into the neglected topics of bodily treatments and transgressions. In detailed ethnographic studies from around the world, the contributors recast assumptions about filth and nakedness, exploring how body surfaces are mobilized in the making and unmaking of moral worlds. Colonial beliefs in the civilizing power of particular modes of dress or hygiene form one common thread running through the essays, while certain configurations of gender, power, and “gaze” in relation to nakedness or nudity are another. In one essay, we see how bare breasts in Bali have gone from being everyday local dress a century ago, to colonial-era obsession of missionaries and travelers, and finally to a practice most modern Balinese associate with foreign tourists. Other chapters consider the historically shifting meaning of undress in Nigeria and nineteenth-century Japan; the dynamics of concealment and revelation in contemporary U.S. strip clubs; veiling, purity, and pollution in the Iranian diaspora; the ambiguities of disrobing in spirit possession in Niger; soap and civilization in colonial Sudan; the gendered construction of impurities in India; and the civic culture of baths in Botswana. This interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the anthropology of the body and to the study of gender, ritual, colonialism, and diaspora.
Dirt, Undress, and Difference
“A magnificent volume! It offers brand new perspectives on body politics and identity or subjectivity formation in the post-colonial world.”
Dirt, Undress, and Difference Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface
Contributors are Misty L. Bastian, Janet Bauer, Janice Boddy, Deborah Durham, Katherine Frank, Satsuki Kawano, Sarah Lamb, Adeline Masquelier, and Margaret Wiener. Adeline Masquelier is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University and author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Cover illustration: Jean-Léon Gérome, “The Bath,” circa 1880–1885, oil on canvas, 29 x 23 1/2. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum Purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection.
http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796
INDIANA
Edited by Adeline Masquelier
Dirt, Undress, and Di√erence
Dirt, Undress, and Di√erence Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface Edited by Adeline Masquelier
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
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[email protected] ∫ 2005 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American Anthropological Association. Meeting (2000 : San Francisco, Calif.) Dirt, undress, and difference : critical perspectives on the body’s surface / edited by Adeline Masquelier. p. cm. Papers originally presented at a panel entitled ‘‘The Politics of Dirt and Nudity in Africa’’ held at the 2000 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34628-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21783-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Clothing and dress—Social aspects—Congresses. 2. Nudity—Social aspects—Congresses. 3. Hygiene—Social aspects—Congresses. 4. Bathing customs—Social aspects—Congresses. 5. Body, Human—Social aspects—Congresses. I. Masquelier, Adeline Marie, date II. Title. GT525.A63 2005 391—dc22 2005004481 1 2 3 4 5
10 09 08 07 06 05
Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be—her voice trembled—penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Her own fingernails are none too clean. Country dirt: honorable, he supposes.—J. M. Coetze, Disgrace
There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the body.—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Contents
acknowledgments / ix Dirt, Undress, and Difference: An Introduction Adeline Masquelier / 1 1. The Naked and the Nude: Historically Multiple Meanings of Oto (Undress) in Southeastern Nigeria Misty L. Bastian / 34 2. Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter Margaret Wiener / 61 3. Body Talk: Revelations of Self and Body in Contemporary Strip Clubs Katherine Frank / 96 4. The Naked Spirit: Disrobing, Deviance, and Dissent in Bori Possession Adeline Masquelier / 122 5. Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century Satsuki Kawano / 149 6. Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Janice Boddy / 168 7. Did You Bathe This Morning? Baths and Morality in Botswana Deborah Durham / 190 8. The Politics of Dirt and Gender: Body Techniques in Bengali India Sarah Lamb / 213 9. Corrupted Alterities: Body Politics in the Time of the Iranian Diaspora Janet Bauer / 233 list of contributors / 255 index / 257
acknowledgments
The idea for this book originated in the context of a panel presentation titled ‘‘The Politics of Dirt and Nudity in Africa’’ which I organized and chaired at the 2000 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in San Francisco. The papers by Misty Bastian, Deborah Durham, and myself were first presented there. They were enriched by the critical suggestions provided by our discussant, Janice Boddy, and by the challenging questions raised by our audience. When I raised the possibility of publishing the papers together as a collection, my fellow panelists, including our discussant, responded enthusiastically. Eventually, I decided to expand the volume’s geographic and cultural range to include contributions dealing with other regions of the world. I solicited abstracts and papers from a range of non-Africanist colleagues and, thanks to additional contributions by Janet Bauer, Katherine Frank, Satsuki Kawano, Sarah Lamb, and Margaret Wiener, had the good fortune of ending up with this remarkable collection of essays. I am therefore profoundly grateful to all the contributors—an extraordinary bunch of scholars whose work has strongly influenced me. Misty Bastian deserves very special thanks: she read more drafts of the introduction than anyone else, each time providing generous comments. This book has other, more indirect origins as well. Through my work on bori spirit possession and Islam in Niger, I became interested in the issues of bodiliness and power, purity and transgression. Yet the scarce and scattered literature on these topics frustrated my attempts to deal critically with these issues when I encountered them. Compiling this volume and writing the introduction has given me an excuse to think comparatively (and at times obsessively) about dirt and undress. Over the last three years, some of my students at Tulane have probably heard more than they ever wanted to know about the power of filth and the politics of nudity. Some have offered support and inspiration, for which I am grateful. To Tim Knowlton I am especially indebted for his careful and efficient sifting of the literature on soap and hygiene. Rebecca Golden also provided valuable research assistance. I am grateful for the advice, encouragement, and enthusiasm provided along the way by Rebecca Tolen at Indiana University Press. It has been a pleasure working with her. Special thanks are due to Shoshanna Green and Jane Lyle for their expert assistance in the final preparation of the manuscript.
Acknowledgments Dorothy Ko and Brad Weiss did an extraordinary job of reviewing the manuscript. Aside from expressing a keen interest in the project, they provided precious insights which have helped greatly in the revision process. My heartfelt thanks go out to both of them. Bill More was not directly involved in this project, but without the logistical support and attentive partnership he offered, this book probably would not exist. A grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2004–2005 enabled me to devote myself fully to my editorial responsibilities. Last but not least, my daughters, Margaux, Eléonore, and Julia, deserve credit for reminding me almost daily that some of the most significant struggles over the definition of personal hygiene and propriety occur right in our homes.
x
Dirt, Undress, and Di√erence
Dirt, Undress, and Di√erence An Introduction Adeline Masquelier
The Naked, the Nude, and the Other in Western Discourse Precisely because lack of proper cover is such a visible marker of difference, what struck European travelers first and foremost during their original encounters with indigenous people was the apparent nakedness of these populations. When, upon meeting Amerindians, Columbus wrote that ‘‘they all go naked, men and women, as the day they were born’’ (in Todorov 1984: 35), he was commenting on the absence not only of clothes but also of cultural property. Much later, British travelers to India in the nineteenth century were similarly impressed by the ‘‘nakedness’’ of most Indians, although they eventually adjusted, ‘‘owing to the dark color of the skin, which as it is unusual to European eyes has the effect of a dress’’ (Calcott in Cohn 1989: 331). If nakedness is in the eye of the beholder—after all, nakedness is not ‘‘a customary but rather an assumed state, common to all but natural to none,’’ Hollander (1975: 84) notes—the naked skin has nonetheless been made to bear a wide variety of meanings: whether it is seen as ‘‘wicked,’’ ‘‘natural,’’ both, or neither, what is noteworthy is that motives as profound and complicated as those that regulate dress similarly govern the state of undress (Hollander 1975: 84). For instance, stripping, which has been variously used by willful disrobers
1
Dirt, Undress, and Difference as a catalyst of ritual transformations (Sanders 2000), as a tool of resistance, or conversely, as a way of reinforcing the status quo (Frank, this volume), has vastly different implications when those who are denuded do not control the process—and this is true regardless of what portion of the body is being stripped or what is considered ‘‘proper’’ dress in the first place. If the rules of undress are as critical and complex as the conventions governing dress, it remains nonetheless that ‘‘the more significant clothing is, the more meaning attaches to its absence’’ (Hollander 1975: 83)—or purported absence. To sartorially committed Europeans unable to recognize that seemingly naked bodies could be fully dressed, the scanty clothing worn by people in distant lands unambiguously signified cultural poverty or savage innocence1 and rarely passed as dress. In the context of Christian missions more specifically, nakedness implied ‘‘darkness, disorder, and pollution’’ (Comaroff 1996: 22)—in short, difference. For if, for Christians, the body was essentially corruptible, such corruptibility was further enhanced in nakedness when the weak, ugly, or ridiculous nature of human bodies, as well as their erotic qualities, could be made more visible (Hollander 1975: 84). As seventeenth-century writer Jacques Boileau put it, ‘‘God hates nakedness, because he is purity itself; the Devil loves it, because he is impure’’ (Ableman 1982: 39). From this perspective, unclothed ‘‘natives’’ stood, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in a blissful state of amorality. Such a state would soon be remedied by the missionary’s campaigns to cover the heathen body with cloth and create more stable, self-contained, and chaste personhoods (Bastian, this volume; Comaroff 1996; Hunt 1999), however. Aside from indexing the transformation of ‘‘savage’’ bodies into Christian ones, clothes were ‘‘a ready-made means’’ of exposing indigenous people to a commodity economy (Comaroff 1996: 36). In diverse colonial and missionizing contexts, then, the body surface was—and still can be—a central terrain on which battles for the salvation of souls and the fashioning of persons were waged through sartorial means. While the Judeo-Christian tradition of associating nakedness with shame has a long and complex history, there have also been marked exceptions to this way of thinking. At the height of Victorian repressiveness, Charles Kingsley, an Anglican divine, could thus write to his wife that ‘‘When I feel very near God I always feel such a need to undress’’ (Ableman 1982: 39). Like many others throughout Europe and North America, Kingsley developed a private cult of nakedness in an effort to re-create an Edenic state in the midst of civilization. Nakedness, here, was a means of recovering one’s humanity. While Christian theologians advocated modesty2 and concealment at times to the point of obsession—in some European Catholic families, children until World War I wore gowns while bathing, lest they engage in the sinful contemplation of their nudity—the story of Adam and Eve’s naked innocence periodically opened the door to the unabashed cultivation of nakedness as a source of purity and a return to innocence (Ableman 1982; Wiener, this volume). Whether or not the experience of nudity can be traced to the resonant
2
Introduction myth of Eden, what the scholarly literature on dress, bodies, and personhood suggests is that, far from being rooted in discrete sets of unambiguous and unchanging contrasts, understandings of nudity, propriety, and modesty are produced and reproduced in historically specific contexts. Even if we agree that, at some basic level, clothing serves mainly to provide a means of covering some parts of the body from the sight of others, we can no longer assume that nakedness is necessarily being without clothing or that it automatically implies a negative experience, a loss, or a lack of something. Nor can we posit a direct, unproblematic, and stable opposition between, on the one hand, the clothed body and, on the other, the nude body and its attendant associations, such as the connection between undress and openness (Crooke 1919; Downs 1990; Edelsward 1991; Okediji 1991; Satlow 1997; Shrum and Kilburn 1996). Paradoxically, both the corpus of representations rooted in the Greek tradition— positing the nude as the ideal body—and that inspired by ancient Judaism— for which unclothed bodies were abominable—remain paradigmatic models through which states of undress have been classically understood and experienced in the West. For Western art critics and historians who posit a fundamental difference between a merely naked body and its idealized representation, the ‘‘nude’’ is an art form that bears no connection with the actual state of partial or total undress in which the models posing for the artist find themselves. ‘‘The nude,’’ art critic John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing (1972: 54), is ‘‘condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.’’ From this perspective, to be nude is to be other, while nakedness exposes the essential self.3 This assumption has long guided the Western search for knowledge: to know is to lay an object entirely bare (McClintock 1995; Perniola 1989) and in such a way that it becomes the ‘‘naked’’ truth. From Francis Bacon onward, scientific discourses were thus permeated by the vision of a veiled female nature being unclothed by male science. In the Paris medical faculty, the metaphor took a more concrete form with the erection of a statue of a young woman, ‘‘her breasts bare, her head slightly bowed beneath the veil she is taking off, which bears the inscription ‘Nature unveils herself before Science’ ’’ (Jordanova 1980: 54). Such a gendered metaphysics of power and knowledge is a productive point of departure for exploring questions of bodily transgression in their diverse sociomoral ramifications, which is what this book aims to do through an exploration of the politics of dirt and undress. The contributing chapters are unified by a concern for the ways that notions of transgression are often bound in categories of dirt and power. They examine what happens when body surfaces—whose treatment is normally implicated in the reproduction of socially situated persons—are made to ‘‘mess’’ with hygienic conventions and dress protocols. Ever since the publication of Mary Douglas’s (1966) classic study of pollution and its perceived dangers, the notion of dirt as ‘‘matter out of place’’ has become something of an anthropological cliché. Yet it has rarely been explored in depth and beyond a focus on some fundamental categorical im-
3
Dirt, Undress, and Difference perative for orderliness. The present volume makes a break with the anthropological wisdom that dirt and disorder can be explained in terms of universal and unchanging structural patterns to illuminate the complex and nuanced strategies at work in local processes of dirtying and undressing. By scrutinizing the small-scale and, at times, seemingly trivial processes through which tainted, untidy, immodest, and therefore aberrant beings are made to transgress—or, conversely, reproduce—a variety of socially enforced boundaries, the essays included here uncover larger dynamics at work in the differentiated organization of moral and social communities. In so doing, they show that gender is a central axis of difference through which ideas of dirt, pollution, and immodesty can be instantiated. For one thing, women’s bodies have historically provided a fertile terrain for imagining, reasserting, or contesting the porous boundaries of moral worlds. The sexualization of power relations and the erotics of conquest—often represented as the male penetration of a veiled female interior—have proven remarkably resilient, judging from the recent decision by the French government to ban Islamic head-scarves in public schools and the equally recent U.S. campaign, spearheaded by Laura Bush, to liberate Afghan women from both Taliban control and the tyranny of the burqa. If the process of unveiling has remained to this day a useful trope for imagining progress, justifying colonial interventions, and promoting the ‘‘liberation’’ of countless Muslim women from their sartorial and symbolic shackles (Fanon 1967; Lazreg 1994), there is nonetheless plenty of evidence that nakedness is not universally equated with revelation. Chinese painting makes no use of nudes because clothing turns out to be more useful than flesh in representing the contours of selfhood; rather than hiding the body, garments are thus an essential dimension of the person (Hay 1994). Nor can we assume that unveiling necessarily implies emancipation. Increasingly, in the Middle East, Western Europe, and elsewhere, Muslim women are rejecting the image of female pseudo-liberation associated with Westernization to embrace the veil and its concomitant values of modesty and respectability (Macleod 1991; Masquelier 1999). Even in contemporary U.S. culture, the assumed connection between nakedness and truth can be problematic despite the ever more visible place of eroticism in consumer culture. Notwithstanding the classic distinction between the naked—which elicits embarrassment—and the nude—which ‘‘carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone’’ (Clark 1956: 3)—we must nevertheless admit that ‘‘being nude’’ may, for some, come uncomfortably close to ‘‘being naked.’’ That much became clear in 2002, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he had spent $8,000 of taxpayers’ money for drapes to cover up the exposed breast of The Spirit of Justice, an 18-ft. aluminum statue of a woman that stood in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Hall of Justice. While the semiotics of dress and fashion in Western society have long been a staple of critical analyses (Barthes 1967; Bell 1968; Bourdieu 1984;
4
Introduction Hollander 1975; Sahlins 1976), it was not until the publication of Strathern’s insightful essay on the embodiment of shame in Papua New Guinea in 1975 and Turner’s seminal article on Kayapo bodily ornamentation in 1980 that the importance of the treatment of the body surface in preindustrial societies was cogently outlined. The skin, Strathern and Turner demonstrated in their respective ethnographies, is more than a mere physical envelope. It is ‘‘the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted’’ (Turner 1980: 12). The realization that the ‘‘skin’’ is not solely synonymous with epidermis has complicated classical understandings of dress, nudity, and nakedness. As the immediate point of junction between the self and the outside world, the skin is also the symbolic screen through which contact between subject and social context is mediated, objectified, and occasionally transformed. Exposure and decoration of certain body surfaces (or, conversely, their concealment), Turner showed, can have considerable semiotic value because, like actual clothing, they are part of the ‘‘social skin’’ on which identities and relations are made visible or, conversely, erased. Though they may be only ‘‘skin deep,’’ these forms of inscription and erasure can become a morally charged medium for expressing improper distinctions or challenging hegemonic claims, as more recent works have revealed. Colonial studies focusing on missionary efforts to civilize indigenous populations by clothing their ‘‘nakedness’’ have provided further insights into the ways in which nudity and nakedness, as well as dirt, are culturally and contextually specific categories tied to particular notions of gender, sexuality, childhood, social malevolence, liminality, and ethnic differentiation (Burke 1996a, 1996b; Cohn 1989; Comaroff 1996; Hansen 1992; McClintock 1995; Stoler 1996). Other studies, emerging out of American and British feminist and cultural studies, have given us additional theoretical purchase on the power of dress, the semiotics of style, and the poetics of resistance (Ash and Wilson 1992; Benstock and Ferriss 1994; Friedman 1991; Gaines and Herzog 1990; Hebdige 1979). Drawing on Strathern’s and Turner’s insights, this collection of essays broadens our anthropological purview further by critically exploring the manipulation of body surfaces through which individuals in various cultures and contexts systematically, defiantly, or inadvertently create spaces of contestation, liminality, and empowerment that enable the subsequent reconfiguration of identity and community. That the bodily surface, through its ability to transgress embodied conventions, turns out to be an effective instrument for contesting the production of moral order (or, conversely, at times a means of reasserting moral boundaries) is a major theme unifying the chapters in this volume. The body surface, these chapters show, can simultaneously mediate the ‘‘self ’’ and the ‘‘social’’ and exclude one from the other. It is precisely this paradoxical potential of the bodily surface to signify inclusion in the community as well as separation or deviation from it that makes it such a powerful vehicle of moral contestation. Considering how alternative moral visions become concretized onto body surfaces has broad implications not just for an
5
Dirt, Undress, and Difference anthropology of the body but for a wider politics of embodiment. Acknowledging these implications, the present book explores the shared capacity of dirt and undress to muddle social categories by marking bodies that come to signify transgression (and, at times, simply difference) in a wide variety of contexts and power relations.
Cleanliness as Godliness, Grime as Crime Just as nakedness has long been conveniently synonymous with barbarity, disorder, and pollution in the colonial imagination, so the ‘‘dirt’’—real or imagined—clinging to the surface of bodies has often been associated with alterity and considered morally suspect. In the mid-nineteenth century when, thanks in part to the emergence of modern plumbing and mass-produced soap, cleanliness became a moral and not simply a physical duty for American and European families, the filth of African, Native American, or immigrant bodies carried prurient associations (Bushman and Bushman 1988; Hoy 1995; McClintock 1995; Tomes 1998; Valverde 1991). Unwashed hands, greasy clothes, offensive smells, grime on the skin all entered into complex judgments about not only the social position of the ‘‘dirty’’ person but also his or her moral worth (Boddy, this volume; Bushman and Bushman 1988; Stallybrass and White 1986). By the 1850s, personal cleanliness had become such a symbol of middle-class status, self-respect, and civility that public baths were seen as the most effective way to improve the health, morality, and social respectability of the urban poor. In major U.S. cities, bathhouses were thus built to fight what Josiah Quincy, mayor of Boston and supporter of public baths, defined as ‘‘the greatest enemy of mankind’’ (Williams 1991: 5): in a word, dirt. In these concerted campaigns against filth, appeals to practical reason were also always moral injunctions. The prevailing confidence in the reforming power of soap and water often brought with it an urge to proselytize (Comaroff 1996). On the basis of a connection between cleanliness of body and purity of moral character, sanitary reformers were expected to teach the poor that ‘‘there is religion in cleanliness’’ (Bushman and Bushman 1988: 1218). It is precisely because public baths were thought to ‘‘cleanse’’ the social fabric of a society threatened by the poverty, crime, and disorder of burgeoning urban slums that journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis could write that ‘‘[s]oap and water have worked a visible cure already that goes more than skin deep. They are moral agents of the first value in the slum’’ (Williams 1991: 22).4 Yet purification campaigns did more than cleanse bodies. While they had the potential of converting the unwashed to middle-class habits, they often served, paradoxically, to distinguish and isolate the unfit, the poor, or the ethnic and religious other. Nowhere is this more evident than in colonial societies where, in contexts ranging from living spaces and childrearing to scientific racism, from sanitation works to the codification of customary laws,
6
Introduction representatives of the various European empires attempted to classify, cleanse, and control the territories they were assigned to administer (Boddy, this volume; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Hunt 1999; Mitchell 1988; Summers 1991; Thomas 1990; Vaughan 1991; Zulawski 2000). Cleanliness, here, became central to the semiotics of boundary maintenance. Because dirt has so routinely served to inscribe class or ethnic distinctions and to justify exclusionary practices, it has often been analyzed through the eyes of the clean, who cast judgment upon the unwashed (Bauer, this volume; Durham, this volume; Malkki 1995). Dirt, however, can become a surprisingly powerful weapon when deployed by the ‘‘unwashed’’ against the ‘‘washed.’’ When IRA prisoners initiated their ‘‘dirty protest’’ in an Irish prison to protest against the British attempt to criminalize them, they used the subversive power of urine, feces, and menstrual blood to create a ‘‘new form of political violence’’ (Aretxaga 1997: 136). By flouting the most basic rules of hygiene and conjuring up dirt in the ‘‘wrong’’ places, the dirty protesters living amidst their bodily waste challenged the basic categorical distinction between savagery and civilization. Menstrual blood became an especially ‘‘dreaded source of pollution for the warders,’’ for whom the mere utterance of the word ‘‘period’’ was already threateningly contaminating, Aretxaga notes (1997: 135). Given that dirt is such a visible index of difference, it becomes at times almost synonymous with nakedness in its capacity to inscribe stigma onto human bodies—whether or not the ‘‘dirty’’ control the process of inscription. To be ‘‘dirty,’’ in such instances, is to be ‘‘naked’’ and vice versa: what is ultimately made visible is exclusion from the moral community. When dirt is only skin deep, it can become synonymous with dark, and undesirable, complexion (Lamb, this volume) or, paradoxically, constitute a form of dress, a ‘‘social skin’’ that radiates health, beauty, status—and, more rarely, eroticism.5 The ‘‘greasy native’’ mentioned in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European descriptions of Africans (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 224) was, for those who engaged in such applications of grease, a shiny body whose glossy protective layer insulated it against dirt and other environmental damages (Burke 1996b: 192). What these bodily practices, despite their immense diversity, reveal is that the skin in its various states of (un)wash and (un)dress plays a crucial role in articulating distinctions that are themselves rooted in wider moral economies of power, production, and consumption.
Dirt and Undress in Ethnographic and Historical Perspective Scholars have long recognized the capacity of the body surface to mediate between self and context, to signify processes of identity formation, or to concretely situate political action. Ndembu initiation rites, during which the bodies of male novices are decorated with patterns of white clay, are a prime example of such mediating capacity: onto the body surface are etched the ritual transformations that will produce both fully socialized beings in the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference forms of adult men and newly social formations, through the changes in the initiates’ relationships with others to whom they are related through kinship, marriage, money, etc. (Turner 1967). Elsewhere, the body’s powers of mediation have inspired complex economies of punishment. In eighteenth-century France, a common means of punishing regicides involved publicly torturing them: while they held the crime weapon in their right hand, their exposed bodies were made to feel the pain they had inflicted on the country by killing the king (Foucault 1977). From birth to death, in health as in illness, the body is thus widely made to symptomatize personal processes while also metonymically signifying social ones. Save for some notable exceptions (Beidelman 1968; Douglas 1966; Dummont 1966; Strathern 1975; Turner 1980), however, few ethnographic studies have focused on the body’s mediating potential to explore specifically how dirt and undress make cultural identities, mark social distinctions, and carve out moral boundaries. None has moved beyond the specifics of the case at hand to draw links between the subversive potential of dirt and that of undress. Through an examination of the multiple ways in which unwashed and uncovered bodies end up concretizing or, conversely, challenging notions of order, civility, and morality, the contributing essays extend previous analyses of embodied identities and confront classical perspectives on such taken-for-granted notions as filth and nakedness. Some of the contributors’ focus on disrobing and exposure has been motivated in part by the nagging realization that while dress has been an object of extraordinary scrutiny over the last two decades, undress, by contrast, has been remarkably under-theorized outside of art history and psychoanalytic theory. Dress, it is now widely recognized, is implicated in complex and far-reaching ways in the fashioning of bodies and persons.6 In contrast, considerably less attention has been paid to the varied processes of undressing through which people engender difference, create spaces of resistance, or confront moral hegemonies. Similarly, while much has been written about the body surface as a central site of symbolic action in ritual, medical, or aesthetic contexts,7 the hygienic treatment (or neglect) of bodily surfaces as a marker of difference has received much less consideration. By situating dirt and undress within novel theoretical and ethnographic frameworks, the contributors hope to foster renewed scholarly interest in these issues, given the wide range of possibilities they enable for the study of colonialism, gender, ritual, and power. Neglected as dirt and undress may have been, the scant references to them that can be gleaned from the ethnographic record nonetheless provide useful clues for measuring cultural diversity. Altering the surface of the body through washing, grooming, dying, and dressing, or conversely through processes of neglect, undress, or disrobing, produces a series of contrasts articulated around the notions of ‘‘dirt,’’ ‘‘nakedness,’’ or ‘‘nudity.’’ Far from simply corresponding to ‘‘natural’’ facts or following a universal perceptual logic, however, the distinction between ‘‘dirty’’ and ‘‘clean’’ appears to be remarkably varied, complex, and nuanced. Skin contact with sand, for instance, elicits
8
Introduction widely divergent responses depending on whether sand is considered cleansing or polluting. While Muslims lacking access to water can accomplish their ablutions with sand in preparation for worship, Margaret Mead reported that the coastal populations of New Guinea regarded sand as filthy and took every precaution to keep food, objects, and bodies from coming into contact with it ([1935] 1963: 3). Similarly, because nakedness is not merely the opposite of being clothed (although it can be), it carries a wide range of meanings and can have many different implications, some benign, transformative, or even positive, others offensive and radical. This notable lack of consensus on matters of modesty, hygiene, propriety, and aesthetics suggests that definitions of dirt and nudity or nakedness are ultimately more a matter of culture than nature. While the many striking ways in which social identities become inscribed onto the surface of non-Western bodies has generated a host of voyeuristic, even pornographic representations on the part of Euro-American observers (Alloula 1986; Fabian 2000; Gilman 1985; Said 1978),8 paradoxically, early ethnographic accounts of ‘‘primitives’’ were remarkably devoid of analyses that took into accounts how the anthropological other understood dress, hygiene, and propriety. The Nuer, to take a classic ethnographic case, were regularly and indiscriminately described as ‘‘naked’’ by European observers until T. O. Beidelman demonstrated that they held complex notions relating to matters of dress, ornamentation, and undress (1968). Not only did Nuer people make a strict distinction between nakedness—a shameful state of undress—and nudity—marking, at times, an individual’s liminal situation—but they also used these distinctions to articulate other crucial categories having to do with sexuality, marriage, and affinity. According to E. E. Evans-Pritchard (in Beidelman 1968: 118), Till marriage girls are naked. After marriage, they wear a special little skirt, but may take it off when they please till they have had a child. After the birth of a child only their husbands see them naked in the privacy of a hut when the spouses sleep together. After the birth of a child no woman goes naked in public again.
Given what the trope of ‘‘nakedness’’ has long implied for Westerners eager to associate uncovered bodies with immorality and primitivism, it is hard to miss in Evans-Pritchard’s description of ‘‘naked’’ Nuer girls the faint echo of earlier European narratives of ‘‘scantily clad’’ natives whose exposed body parts epitomized for their Western observers a definite lack of culture and civility. Five years before the 1940 publication of Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, Margaret Mead wrote that the mountain-dwelling Arapesh of New Guinea ‘‘are naked and their women, whom they guard jealously, are naked until marriage, and then wear the most diminutive of aprons’’ ([1935] 1963: 11). Here too, an unavoidable suggestion of primitive innocence arises from the anthropologist’s description of the Arapesh in their ‘‘state of undress.’’ It is further reinforced by Mead’s observations that since the men, influenced by
9
Dirt, Undress, and Difference coastal fashions, have started wearing bark-cloth ‘‘G-strings,’’ they fasten them ‘‘with a carelessness and disregard of their purpose’’ ([1935] 1963: 8) and often publicly push them aside to scratch themselves without any sense of shame. Notwithstanding the inappropriateness of the terms used to describe the appearance of young Nuer and Arapesh girls, what is significant is how simple garments—an armlet, a waistcord, a leopard skin—which, by Western standards, were hardly synonymous with ‘‘decent dress,’’ nevertheless conveyed complex distinctions of gender, age, and status to those who knew how to read them. Paradoxically, if nakedness long remained suspect to Euro-American observers, so did certain forms of concealment: the foot-bound Chinese woman who saw but refused to be seen hence ‘‘figured as a nagging reminder of China’s alterity’’ (Ko 1997: 13) for European men unable to recognize that no amount of unwrapping would ever reveal the ‘‘inner truth’’ below the binders. To elite Chinese men, the erotic quality of a bound foot resided precisely in its concealment.9 Like undress, the experience of filth worldwide has been apprehended along a wide variety of historical, social, and cultural registers. As the historical and ethnographic records have already shown, dirt is not inherently ‘‘dirty,’’ disgusting, or debasing but sometimes points to metaphorical rather than literal pollution. By implication, dirt is not always a physical substance that can be swept away with a broom or washed off with soap. Cleanliness can be a matter of removing all ‘‘natural’’ excrescence from the surface of the body, but at times it has more to do with the elimination of substances or states symbolically associated with disorder and impurity than with the promotion of hygiene in a strict sense. This is why, when it is used in the ritually appropriate manner by Christian, Hindu, or Muslim individuals, water may have purifying effects even though it may be contaminated with pathological organisms. Because cleanliness is intimately connected to the elaboration of a ‘‘social skin’’ which acts as a social filter between the self and society, it is complexly implicated in the definition of social categories and identities. In sixteenthcentury France, cleanliness was thus defined not by the absence of dirt on the body but by the whiteness of the linen worn, indicating a freedom from vermin —and implying, of course, access to wealth and status (Vigarello 1988). This suggests that dirt, as a situational, rather than substantive, category, can only be defined in relation to a system of order. Furthermore, what may be considered dirty, even harmful, by one person or one group of people may appear perfectly clean and even cleansing to another. The connection between water and cleanliness is taken for granted today, but in medieval France, people treated water with suspicion: it was believed to open the skin, thereby providing an entry point for bad air (Vigarello 1988). Because dirt often stands for deviance, anyone that cannot, will not, or should not fit into a particular social system or pattern can be defined as ‘‘dirty,’’ polluting, or impure, regardless of whether that individual agrees with such a definition or even understands it. Refugees, who have been ‘‘stripped of
10
Introduction the specificity of culture, place, and history’’ (Malkki 1995: 12) and who lie ‘‘betwixt and between’’ (Turner 1967) conventional sociopolitical categories, are thus perceived as polluting. Because it challenges ‘‘time-honored distinctions between nationals and foreigners’’ (Arendt 1973: 286), their transitional status becomes a source of metaphorical ‘‘dirt’’ and, therefore, danger. Ironically, the very individuals who shed light on these politics of dirt may themselves become the epitome of pollution; when they act as ethnographers in the field, their foreignness may end up defining who they are and what they lack in the eyes of indigenous people. In their respective chapters, Lamb, Durham, and Bauer variously report how and why they became labeled as ‘‘dirty’’ (or were suspected of dirtiness) despite their best efforts to learn the complex rules that governed local understandings of hygiene and purity. What they eventually found was that purity is not simply about following rules but also about the strategic capacity to project a virtuous public image. In other words, one must appear to follow the rules. From this perspective, those who, for whatever reasons, break away from the time-honored norms of propriety they are expected to follow become dirty. Within a particular cultural context, dirt may thus index poverty, lack of education, nonconformity, lunacy, or liminality. In the English language, those who do not act honestly or fairly are accused of ‘‘foul play’’ and thereby associated with impurity and decay. An athlete who breaks a rule commits a ‘‘foul’’ because breaking the rules implies violating categorical boundaries. Committing a foul deliberately will earn the individual the unenviable title of ‘‘dirty’’ player. By the same token, an older male who displays sexually aggressive tendencies will be known as a ‘‘dirty old man’’ (Milner 1987) and his behavior, like that of other morally reprehensible trespassers, will be labeled ‘‘disgusting.’’ Filth, in short, may be nothing but sin and vice versa. Those who engage in morally suspect activities (prostitution, usury) are considered ‘‘dirty’’ and in need of ‘‘cleansing,’’ while those who ‘‘stink’’ and cannot wash are condemned as morally corrupt, put in seclusion, or placed at the bottom of the social ladder.10
Of Purity and Pollution Much of the anthropological interest in messy categories and processes can be traced back to the publication of Purity and Danger (1966). Some forty years ago, Douglas profoundly affected the fields of religious studies and cultural anthropology when she elegantly demonstrated that there was no such thing as absolute dirt and that ‘‘reflection on dirt involve[d] reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death’’ (1966: 5). From this perspective, all that did not unambiguously fit in was thrown out (1966: 35) and subject to a variety of physical, linguistic, or ritual treatments. Because, Douglas argued, the human body was ‘‘a model that [could] stand for any bounded system’’ (1966: 115), nearly anything (pus,
11
Dirt, Undress, and Difference vomit, blood, urine, excreta, etc.) that left its proper place within the body could be deemed impure. Working from earlier insights about the role of the body as a presocial ‘‘base’’ upon which collective meanings and categories were inscribed (Mauss 1973; Needham 1973; van Gennep 1960), Douglas elaborated a framework for describing why something was classified as ritually pure or impure and for correlating degrees and kinds of purity concerns to modes and systems of social organization. Because the correlations between individual and social bodies, their structures, and their boundaries revealed the extent to which the human form and the social world were intertwined, Douglas even wrote that ‘‘to understand body pollution we should try to argue back from the known dangers of society to the known selection of bodily themes’’ (1966: 121). Today, growing evidence suggests that a concern with the notions of boundary and orifice operates everywhere to mark not simply the distinction between ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ but also social and moral categories based on the control of bodily flows (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Delaney 1991; Devisch 1993; Elias 1978; Hugh-Jones 1979; Reinhart 1990; Taylor 1988; Weiss 1996). In nineteenth-century Europe, middle-class efforts to protect the purity of bourgeois space from the contamination leaking out of poor bodies were central to the consolidation of a bourgeoisie as ‘‘a respectable and conventional body,’’ Stallybrass and White (1986: 133) have argued. And while Douglas’s unidimensional cause-and-effect model of purity has proven problematic when confronted with the messiness of social realities, it is nonetheless true that in a multitude of social contexts, polluting and threatening things are thought to originate from the outside—whether outside the body, the household, the clan, the village, the suburb, or the nation. Such is the case in rural Turkey, where boundaries are a focus of intense anxiety while exits and entrances of all kinds (those of the nation, the village, the house, or the woman’s body) are controlled and surveilled (Delaney 1991). By spurring a renewed interest in the symbolic implications of dirt as pollution, Douglas’s work especially benefited gender studies. A spate of ethnographic studies soon emerged that documented the widespread association between pollution and menstruation (Gillison 1980; Goodale 1980; Gottlieb 1982; Hershman 1974; Jowkes 1999; Meigs 1984; Paige and Paige 1981). Early ethnographies, following Douglas, provided evidence that in societies where menstrual blood was considered polluting, women were perceived as a threat to men, male spaces, and male activities (Gillison 1980; Meigs 1984). More recent studies, acknowledging the limitations of Douglas’s perspective, have called for a more contextual understanding of pollution as a situational, rather than substantive, category (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988; Herbert 1993; Hoskins 2002a; Masquelier n.d.; van de Walle and Renne 2001). Because it assumes that menstruation is inherently dangerous, Douglas’s model, these studies show, only accounts for instances where menstrual blood (as a sign of failed fertility) appears contiguous to, and therefore threatening to, processes and
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Introduction principles of fertility. Aside from challenging the image of a widespread cultural taboo operating universally, these works have showed that menstrual blood can be both polluting and purifying—in short, empowering. It also appears that an excessive emphasis on pollution has sometimes obscured occult uses of menstrual blood in societies that do not ritually exclude menstruating women (Hoskins 2002b; Rasmussen 1991). Overall, what these critical takes on the unevenly polluting capacities of menstrual blood have made clear is that the concern is often not with cleanliness in an absolute or ‘‘hygienic’’ sense but rather in a moral, social, or ritual sense.11 In his analysis of Islamic treatments of impurity, Reinhart notes that something can be both quite septic or physically dirty and, from the perspective of the taharah ¯ (purification) system, ‘‘cleansed,’’ or even ‘‘cleansing’’ (1990). By the same token, the bodies of some individuals may be squeaky clean but considered unfit to handle a Qur’an, worship, or accomplish the pilgrimage because these persons’ ablutions have been negated (1990). Hindu bodily practices provide an even more striking case of the malleability of the concept of dirt so crucial to the organization of society in India.12 While Punjabis consciously conceive of hair as something ‘‘dirty’’ that must be shaved when one needs to remove oneself from the impurities of the world, the sadhu, a holy man, leaves his hair uncombed and uncut so that, as a matted mass, it becomes an attribute of the divine (Hershman 1974). As snake-like matted locks, the sadhu’s hair exemplifies how religion, at times, ‘‘sacralise[s] the very unclean things which have been rejected with abhorrence’’ (Douglas 1966: 159). If dirt can be divine, it can also be synonymous with lack of virtue. Following Foucault’s demonstration that practices (such as sexuality) so often assumed to be ‘‘natural’’ are instead constructed through particular systems of knowledge, scholars have focused on the historically specific intersections of health and morality in public discourse (Comaroff 1993; Keegan 2001; Laqueur 1990; McClintock 1995; Mort 1987; Patton 1990; Sontag 1977; Vaughan 1991; Walkowitz 1992). Because purity and pollution, Rosaldo (1974) once noted, suitably encompass two of the most basic and antithetical definitions of womanhood, women who cannot circumscribe their sexuality or who transgress the boundaries of domesticity to engage in male activities are often labeled dangerous, anomalous, or ‘‘tainted.’’ With the rise of discourses linking olfactory intolerance with moral disgust in sixteenth-century France, Le Guérer (1992: 31) writes, women who engaged in prostitution thus came to be known as putains (‘‘whores,’’ from the Latin putida, meaning ‘‘stinking’’).13 At a time when lepers and Jews no longer served effectively as icons of stench and immorality, municipalities, searching for new scapegoats, zeroed in on local prostitutes who not only symbolized moral rot but became literally putrid women (Le Guérer 1992: 31). The equation of physical contamination with social evil has a similarly complex history in nineteenth-century England. There, moral interventionism, bolstered by a powerful medical ideology on the dangers of deviant female
13
Dirt, Undress, and Difference sexuality, produced the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 that, more than any other public legislation, effectively disenfranchised prostitutes by isolating their sexuality as unnatural and threatening (Mort 1987; Stallybrass and White 1986). Spongberg (1997) argues that the prostitute was pathologized as the inherently polluting female to divert male responsibility for the spread of venereal disease and avoid casting other women (defined as innately ‘‘pure’’) as agents of disease. Ironically, women themselves, at times, actively condemn the ‘‘tainted’’ female and deny their own sexuality in an effort to contrast their world with that of men. Rosaldo noted that, in a Spanish village she studied, women’s ‘‘dazzlingly white sheets and severe sexless garments testified to their purity’’ (1974: 38). While men ‘‘dirtied themselves in work, compromise, and public competition’’ (1974: 38–39), their wives and mothers secured a moral sphere all their own. As several of the essays in this volume make clear, the intricate associations between hygiene and morality, cleanliness and conformity, and pollution and gender are hardly a Euro-American monopoly.14 Anthropologists have noted how the highly ritualized and, at times, elaborate bodily techniques through which new social identities are carved onto the bodies of initiates, newly appointed rulers, brides, or recently widowed individuals often involve a process of cleansing (Boddy 1989; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Delaney 1991; Turner 1980) and, less frequently, a lack thereof (Hershman 1974). Aside from the skin oiling, waxing, painting, tattooing, hair treatment, scarification, skin piercing, and other cutaneous inscriptions that may take place during rites of passage, ablutions serve to symbolically remove elements of the previous identity and make way for a new persona.15 Body cleansing—or body neglect—here becomes a means of indexing rebirth. Significantly, the ritual transition from one state (such as uncircumcised) to another (circumcised) may be described as a transition from ‘‘dirty’’ to ‘‘clean’’ (Delaney 1991; Boddy 1989; Turner 1967).16 For all their social and ethnographic invisibility, daily baths and other habitual grooming practices are no less significant, however.17 For one thing, baths often transcend mere hygiene: soaking in hot water, indoors or outdoors, is often considered a pleasure in itself (Downs 1990). Aside from their recreational or even therapeutic dimensions, baths may be crucial to the performance of personhood, as Burke (1996b), Bushman and Bushman (1988), Durham (this volume), Kondo (1990), and Lamb (this volume) suggest. Through regular acts of cleansing—often performed, in contrast with ritual cleansing, only in private (Miner 1956)—individuals carve out expressions of gender, class, morality, honor, and civility by using the skin and, by extension, hair and clothing as ‘‘public surfaces’’ (Broch-Due and Rudie 1993: 38) inscribed with visual statements of social signification. Among precolonial and early colonial societies in what is now Zimbabwe, smearing—the application of a mixture of soil and oil or fat to the skin—was thus both hygienic and decorative, the glossy sheen of bodies being regarded as a ‘‘fundamental com-
14
Introduction ponent of an aesthetically pleasing appearance’’ (Burke 1996b: 192). More rarely, cleanliness can be an obsession that, rather than having healthy and positive implications, becomes pathological. Lamb (this volume) thus notes how some Bengali women become afflicted by a ‘‘mania for purity’’ through which they can reassert control over their lives. Elsewhere, excessive concern with cleanliness can have more ominous consequences. In Maya communities surrounding Lake Atitlán, in Guatemala, older women told ethnographer Lois Paul of a huge female deity who came out of the water and scolded young women when they dallied while washing themselves (Paul 1974).18
The Politics and Power of Nudity As noted earlier, because clothing gives people their ethnic, social, and moral identity, it has generally been assumed in modern Euro-American thought that lack of clothing signifies a ‘‘negative state, a privation, loss’’ (Perniola 1989: 237). To be denuded, stripped, or divested is to be dispossessed of something one ought to have. From this perspective, being unclothed means finding oneself in a degrading position, typical of the mad, the cursed, or the very poor—when it is not associated with the structural liminality of rites de passage19 (Turner 1967; van Gennep 1960). In ancient Israel, the primacy of clothing acquired a metaphysical meaning associated with the notion of chabod—splendor, honor, and glory (Perniola 1989: 237). Because God Himself ‘‘clothed’’ the earth in the process of creation and manifested Himself ‘‘clothed with honor and majesty’’ (Psalm 104.1–2 in Perniola 1989: 238), robes became connected with the priesthood and clothing with the service of God. Bonfante (1989) thus writes of the fundamental opposition of Hebrew tradition to the Greeks’ celebration of athletic nudity—the ideal human figure being, in ancient Greece, essentially nude—while Smith (1966) notes Judaism’s ‘‘horror’’ of nudity.20 As Satlow (1997) argues for Judaism21 and as several contributors demonstrate in their essays, ‘‘nakedness’’ is often, and perhaps even always, gendered. This should hardly surprise us. Ever since Berger (1972) argued that ‘‘ways of seeing’’ artistic nudes were structured around male entitlement to pleasure and female objectification as sites of that pleasure, attention to the complex parameters of gender has revealed radical differences between male and female perceptions and experiences of nudity and nakedness. Yet if, thanks to an abundant literature on the gendered representations of Western bodies, there is now much evidence that Westerners live in a world ‘‘ordered by sexual imbalance’’ (Mulvey 1989), there are concomitantly few ethnographies addressing the gendered implications of exposure in non-Western contexts. As some of the contributing chapters show, much can be gained by following Berger to trace how the meaning of nakedness, nudity, and modesty shifts concomitantly with the identity of the observer—a male gaze producing distinctions and definitions of female forms that contrast radically with what a
15
Dirt, Undress, and Difference female onlooker would see. The cases described by Bastian, Kawano, and Wiener in this volume nonetheless complicate a decidedly Eurocentric picture by outlining the historically specific ways in which European economies of desire have at times conflicted with local, indigenous understandings of dress and undress. Through their critical reflections on colonized bodies in various stages of dress and undress, these authors point to the limitations of classical Western models of body politics by showing that as transgressive— rather than bound—entities, such bodies are not easily contained by male bourgeois notions of personhood and subjectivity. Just as dress conveys complex meanings and messages that serve to unite or separate people from each other, so the ‘‘semiotics’’ of nudity and dirt can be not just projected and shared but also contested. Uncovering parts of the body that should be covered, inverting values of beauty, morality, and cleanliness routinely inscribed onto the body, or altogether flouting the sartorial signs of status and respectability are often significant and effective ways of resisting a dominant order. When, in 1925, young Igbo-speaking girls appeared naked in the Umuahia marketplace in southeast colonial Nigeria, it was not their undress but rather the actual act of stripping that had radical implications—if not for British officials, at least to native Igbo speakers. Before the advent of mission Christianity, girls generally avoided clothing until they bore a child (Bastian 2001, this volume). By stripping girls of their purchased cloth, senior women who had anxiously watched their younger counterparts ‘‘iconically [wrap] themselves in the fabric of colonial rule, mission ideologies, and economic exploitation’’ were angrily resisting the progressive subversion of the indigenous order and its reproduction (Bastian 2001: 125).22 Lest we assume that the transgressive power of nakedness has become passé, the southeastern Nigerian women who bared all or threatened to do so in order to protest against ChevronTexaco in July 2002 (Bastian, this volume) remind us that when used wisely, stripping in inappropriate places can become an effective means of rallying outrage. Aside from catching the world’s attention, if only for a moment, the nude protest of Itsekiri and Ijaw women in the Niger Delta appears to have inspired other demonstrations of nakedness elsewhere. In New York City, some thirty naked women lay down in snowy Central Park on February 7, 2003, to protest possible U.S. military action in Iraq. At the same moment, hundreds of female protesters elsewhere similarly bared their bodies for peace. Whether or not this use of nakedness as a weapon can be interpreted as a re-‘‘invented tradition’’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), it is nonetheless remarkable that for normally clothed women increasingly frustrated by mainstream media indifference, disrobing became at that moment the most potent means of literally23 spelling out their misgivings about war. Precisely because they blurred the distinction between civility and primitiveness, the bare bodies of these peace-loving women were the ultimate attention grabber. Rather than arousing erotic feelings in their audiences, however, their ‘‘to-be-looked-atness’’ (Mulvey 1989: 19) became transgressive: it mimicked the conventional
16
Introduction Western ‘‘way of seeing’’ female nudes only to reject such objectification of undressed women. By shedding their layers of both clothing and civility, the protesters effectively uncovered a universal and naked humanity underneath. At other times or in other places, similar sartorial transgressions have been interpreted as signs of deviance rather than resistance. Nakedness in latetwentieth-century Igbo marketplaces was thus considered a sign of madness or a preliminary to a confession of witchcraft (Bastian 2001; see also Douglas 1996: 176). Okediji (1991) similarly points out that once a person is caught naked in a Yoruba marketplace, she is considered not only insane, but also incurable because of the widespread assumption that she has been damaged permanently by public exposure. Traditionally, a captured thief would thus be stripped naked and paraded through the streets: displaying the offender in his vulnerable nakedness was thought to reduce him to impotence (Okediji 1991). Elsewhere, nakedness characterizes anti-social beings. In Madagascar, witches are recognized by the fact that they dance ‘‘naked on top of [tombs of ] dead people’’ (Feeley-Harnik 1989: 79).24 Whether or not those who break the conventions of dress and propriety are judged mad, immoral, or otherwise rebellious, what is significant is the seriousness with which societies enforce their vestimental codes and interpret transgressions of these codes. In Deuteronomy 22.5, Moses proclaims that ‘‘a woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whosoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.’’ Aside from making and marking gender oppositions, sartorial codes visibly sharpen class, wealth, and status differences. To preserve the sharp stratification of their society, Aztec rulers in precolonial Mexico enacted very strict sumptuary laws that dictated not only the fiber and ornamentation of each class’s clothing, but also the manner in which it should be worn (Anawalt 1980). While rulers and lords could wear fine embroidered cotton mantles, ‘‘the common people [would] not be allowed to wear cotton clothing, under pain of death’’ (Durán in Anawalt 1980: 36), and the same penalty would apply if their cloaks reached below the knee. That hemlines can become a matter of life and death should not surprise us, given the signifying power of fashion and the subversive possibilities of dress (Garber 1992; Hebdige 1979; Luck 1993; McRobbie 1988). Precisely because matters of authority, propriety, wealth, and honor can be so visibly inscribed onto the body surface, the latter often becomes the site of symbolic struggles and sartorial battles fought by subjects against their rulers, revolutionaries against despots, wives against their husbands, or children against their parents. In colonial India, while modes of covering and uncovering heads and feet that were ‘‘proper’’ and customary by indigenous standards were seen as immodest or disrespectful by the colonial administration, vestimental laws designed by the British to subjugate indigenous populations were resisted by Indians, at first through noncompliance and eventually through the design of a ‘‘uniform of rebellion’’ (Cohn 1989). Sartorial wars are neither a thing of the past nor
17
Dirt, Undress, and Difference confined to colonial or neocolonial contexts, judging from the myriad contemporary struggles in which dress is a focus of disputes and a means of resistance. A recent press report thus describes the ‘‘whore wars’’ which contemporary American parents and teachers complain they have to fight with teenage girls in their efforts to ban the less-is-more look that ‘‘flaunts breasts, bellies, and bottoms’’ (Stepp 2002: E10).25 These intergenerational struggles over the rules of vestimental appearance remind us once more of the central place that the body surface, in its various and changing stages of un/covering, occupies in processes of socialization and moral reform on the one hand and in movements of resistance and counterdefinition on the other (see also Bauer, this volume).
Plan of the Volume I remarked earlier that little attention has been paid to the history of dress and nudity outside of ‘‘Western history.’’26 The first two chapters (as well as chapter 6) seek to redress this omission by exploring the varied sartorial consequences of Euro-American colonial, tourist, and missionary encounters with what were, in Western eyes, scantily clad others. Through an examination of the complex and uneven processes through which Igbo-speaking people in southeastern Nigeria learned to cover their ‘‘nakedness,’’ Misty Bastian shows that even today, undress means different things to different people and remains selectively deployed for vastly divergent ends. Despite centuries of contact with the globalizing forces of modernity, southeastern Nigerians’ understandings of covered and uncovered bodies remain gendered and generational, and this is why selective nakedness still has the power to outrage or stigmatize. While men adopted European notions of full body coverage during the colonial period, they did so creatively by playing with the elements and composition of the covering. Western female attire early on sparked generational tensions between older women trained to survey the virginal nudity of their juniors and more youthful women eager to wrap themselves in cloth. Like more recent attempts to use nakedness as a form of protest, Bastian argues, these struggles to control the un/covering of bodies testify to the creative ways that bodies are used as both sites of individual agency and instruments of social control. In the end, missionary efforts to clothe (especially female) Igbo bodies with the ‘‘fabric of civilization’’ not only fostered new needs and new fashions. They also played into the making of new social divisions and struggles for power. Just as the ‘‘naked’’ bodies of young Igbo women titillated European observers in colonial Nigeria, so the bare-breasted Balinese woman became an essential element of Western images of Bali in the 1920s. In her carefully documented examination of changing notions of dress and undress among Balinese and Bali-bound tourists, Margaret Wiener traces the role that nudity has played in the transgressive fantasies informing and produced by tourism on
18
Introduction the island. While tourists flocked to Bali in search of bare breasts, ironically, their vision of paradisiacal primitivism was instrumental in producing modern, and clothed, Balinese subjects. As local norms of modesty and dress codes altered, tourism expanded, unleashing crowds of nude Western tourists on Balinese beaches. Undress may be a relative and malleable concept, but in the way it articulates morality, gender, and pleasure in the transcultural space of tourism, it has proven nonetheless central to the production of divergent economies of desires, Wiener shows. The idealization of Balinese nudity (and of Balinese breasts) by writers and travelers did not simply affect the ‘‘tourist gaze.’’ It also inspired the creation and marketing of the Bali Bra, a story which Wiener recounts in all its nuanced and ironic implications as she traces the history of undergarment use in the U.S. and Bali. Norms of modesty, health, and respectability on the island, as in the West, have exhibited drastic variations from one decade to the next, at times even moving in opposite directions. Aside from providing an insightful discussion of the complex entanglements of modernity (in the form of bras) with the ‘‘primitive’’ (in the form of Balinese breasts), Wiener demonstrates that a history of nudity cannot be established without an integrated vision of dress and body. Katherine Frank’s exploration of the interactions between exotic dancers and their customers in contemporary U.S. strip clubs shows that for American audiences, it is through this interactive context that particular revelations of the body’s surface come to mean a revelation of the subject. Nudity, in its revelatory nature, is not so much a state as a process that is carefully controlled and contained through a whole economy of artifice, power, and desire. Drawing on both her own experience as a dancer and that of co-workers and customers, Frank argues that ideas about gender and social class are pivotal to the ways that nudity is produced, consumed, and understood. Although ‘‘naked’’ in strip clubs may be playfully used to mean ‘‘nude,’’ dancers are hardly ever fully naked, so artfully deceptive are the accessories (shoes, jewelry, make-up, etc.) that they use to enhance their desirability. They know well that it is out of the dialectic of dress and body that eroticism emerges and they cleverly play with this dialectic on the dance floor, even when they pretend not to know how. Such seeming freedom from sartorial shackles has its price and limitations, nonetheless. Mindful that the activities of strip dancers have been described by some as liberating, Frank warns us not to uncritically assume that stripping is essentially a vehicle of contestation. While it evokes the forbidden and plays with the transgressive, undress in such contexts is also, paradoxically, controlled by powerfully conservative ideologies and conventions. Among Hausa-speaking people of southern Niger, padding the body with cloth variously signifies prosperity, prestige, and respectability while nakedness is often taken to be a sign of deprivation, madness, or social deviancy. During bori ceremonies, possessed hosts are conspicuously wrapped in cloth that provides contours and volume to otherwise amorphous spirits and nakedness is proscribed. In my chapter, I examine the case of a host’s ‘‘acciden-
19
Dirt, Undress, and Difference tal’’ disrobing by her spirit and I explore the possible implications of such bodily exposure in light of the current controversies surrounding Muslim dress for women in contemporary Niger. At a time when women’s bodies have become the privileged sites for ideological battles about morality, I argue that the subversive nakedness of a spirit host in the anti-Muslim space of bori must be seen as a strategic expression of protest against emerging Islamic forms of female encompassment and vestimental control. As in the Igbo case described by Bastian, nakedness here becomes a vehicle of protest. But what do we make of the young host Zeinabou’s insistence that stripping here is all about seduction? Since the agency of the spirit is not neatly separable from that of her host, one cannot easily distinguish the agent of the stripping from its object to then argue exclusively for or against Zeinabou’s interpretation. In the end, we must pay attention to the multiplicity of—at times, divergent—readings that possession performances elicit from both audiences and performers and recognize that even when it is neither really planned, nor even authorized, undress has complex and far-reaching implications. In late-nineteenth-century Japan, Western visitors’ encounters with bare bodies prompted (as in the southeastern Balinese case) a reassessment of what should count as proper dress, but the campaign to clothe the Japanese was neither brought on by Western missionaries (as in the Nigerian case) nor promoted by local intellectuals (as in the Balinese case). As Satsuki Kawano shows, it was the state which opted to ‘‘civilize’’ its people by imposing the Misdemeanor Law, in an effort to fend off foreign visitors’ critical evaluations of Japan’s lack of civility. The Meiji state’s campaign to cover Japan’s ‘‘nakedness’’ did not always run smoothly. Nor did it produce even results. In fact, the state’s sartorial and moral reforms were regularly met with resistance by the part of the population that had no use for Western-based notions of modesty or privacy. Moreover, Japan’s nationwide effort to ‘‘modernize’’ itself should be seen neither as an uncompromising process of Westernization, nor as the state’s straightforward imposition of new rules on its citizenry, Kawano warns. In the process of covering or uncovering their bodies, Japanese subjects did more than simply conform to or resist Western fashions. They also actively participated in the cultural constitution of Japanese modernity. In the end, and while they failed to standardize bodily modesty among commoners, the Meiji state’s reforms unexpectedly succeeded in intensifying the sexualized gaze on nude bodies. No longer an object of repulsion, nude female Japanese bodies became an object of erotic contemplation for Western audiences. In her account of hygiene, social evolution, and religion in Victorian discourses, Janice Boddy examines the semantics of soap and the politics of cleanliness in the context of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British efforts to conquer the Muslim population of northern Sudan. There, hygiene became an imperial project to sanitize and discipline native bodies whose ‘‘filth’’ and darkness betrayed, for their colonial masters, their lack of culture. While soap was a central tool of civilization in colonial Sudan, British
20
Introduction campaigns for cleanliness did more than wash bodies, Boddy argues. They reaffirmed the boundaries between civility and savagery. This she demonstrates most vividly by tracing the complex intersection of the discourses of commerce, science, and Christianity in British stereotypes of native Sudanese as lazy, dirty, and superstitious—stereotypes that implicitly reasserted racial, moral, and social distinctions. By focusing on the themes of hygiene, religion, and evolution in British popular literature and advertisements and in official discourse on the abolition of the practice of female circumcision, Boddy points to the specific ways that body surfaces were politicized in the British Empire. In her discussion of how female circumcision became a nationalist cause for the Sudanese even as it remained, for the British, a ‘‘barbarous custom,’’ she shows—as Bastian, Wiener, and Bauer do in their own chapters—that attention to women’s bodies can illuminate how issues of bodily transgression are bound up in the differentiated organization of moral orders. Colonial European perceptions of Africans as dirty may be slow to die, but contemporary Herero’s obsessive concerns with cleanliness have nonetheless managed to confound American visitors—who, in turn, often appear unclean to their hosts. This does not imply that all Herero are characteristically clean, Deborah Durham notes in her lively discussion of the perceptions of cleanliness, bathing, and dirtiness held by the residents of an urban village in Botswana. While not all situations call for careful grooming, baths are nonetheless crucial components of the fabric of civic and domestic life—the proper preparation and taking of baths, for instance, contributing greatly to the health of marriages. Because hygiene is as much a matter of civic responsibility as a process of dirt extraction, whether, when, and how one bathes speaks loudly about one’s achievements as a moral, self-made, and self-sufficient member of the modern Botswana state. Durham’s detailed examination of the civic logic of bathing provides the corollary to the soap-as-empire scenario described by Boddy: once soap has been thoroughly integrated in domestic economies and daily life, it ceases to be a civilizing tool and becomes an instrument of civic consciousness. In this new context, bathing is about democracy. Besides highlighting the complex relations between soap and self-improvement, Durham’s exploration of Herero hygienic sensibilities effectively demonstrates the limitations of Douglas’s structuralist theory. Bathing, Durham suggests, ‘‘signals more the inherent ambiguity of social life than its potential for clear-cut order and structure’’ (p. 193). In India, Sarah Lamb points out, women’s bodies are widely thought to be vulnerable to ‘‘impurity,’’ relatively open, and in constant need of cleansing and protection. This is particularly true among Brahmans of rural West Bengal, for whom bodily purity ideally matters a great deal. Through a focus on the ways that women variously play with local ideologies of im/purity for a variety of purposes, Lamb shows that while some women fanatically maintain their bodily purity, by limiting their bodily contact with others and repeatedly bathing, others openly or secretly subvert public expectations of purity. Aside from
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference underscoring the centrality of dirt and cleanliness in the making of gendered identities and the marking of spatial, social, and sexual boundaries, the Bengali case reminds us once more how the body and its surfaces are at once privileged sites of personal action and convenient instruments of social control. Like Durham’s chapter, this essay provides a useful critique of Douglas’s static categorization of dirt and disorder by demonstrating how impurity emerges and must be renegotiated on a daily basis. It is through this constant renegotiation that Bengali women in particular maintain their moral character. If women are less pure than men, it is not because they are out of place, but precisely because they are in place, Lamb argues. Accounting for the complexity of Bengali understandings of im/purity in all their gendered nuances thus means recognizing that the distinctions people make between dirt and cleanliness are neither fixed nor uniformly agreed upon. It also implies acknowledging that dirt—like undress—is not strictly and unambiguously about transgression. Filth, the Bengali case illustrates, is less about the violation of moral boundaries than it is about the constitution of these very boundaries. Just as Bengali women’s purity depends in part on their ability to project an image of morality, so for Iranian women living in Iran and abroad, external appearances are central to the protection of a virtuous selfhood. Of late, their struggle to conceal and protect their bodies from impurities and contamination has been further complicated by processes of modernization and exile, Janet Bauer argues. Now that signs of purity, piety, and penetration can be reconfigured at will, thanks to fashion and plastic surgery, policing the boundaries between chaste and tainted bodies has at times meant rethinking the aesthetic grammar of bathing, clothing, and manners that traditionally guaranteed the integrity of selves—personal or communal. Mindful that while they have become ever more potent symbols of the besieged Iranian nation, they also have access to a widening array of techniques for perfecting and purifying themselves, refugee women face difficult choices as they deploy gendered identities that become inevitably othered within the hybrid space of the Iranian diaspora. The strategies they elaborate to ‘‘fit in’’ while also maintaining their ties to the Iranian community become ways of disguising the self through a complicated dynamics of concealment and revelation which must be continually reinvented. Preserving purity, here, is not simply about covering the body; in attempting to hide one’s inner self, the body itself becomes the most perfect of coverings.
Conclusion Bringing together in this volume a wide spectrum of ethnographic and historical studies has enabled us to discern patterns and commonalities in the ways that the surface of the human body has been made to signify transgression—or conversely normativity and submission. By focusing on practices and discourses having to do with hygiene, un/cleanliness, and the covering and
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Introduction uncovering of bodies, the contributing chapters also provide a critical reexamination of such taken-for-granted concepts as ‘‘the body,’’ and raise questions about what ‘‘dirt,’’ ‘‘nudity,’’ or ‘‘modesty’’ might actually mean not to Western social theorists but to local actors who experience or comment on these bodily states. A growing number of studies have provided a welcome corrective to conventional anthropological approaches that took Anglo-American (or Western) commonsense categories, themselves culturally constructed (gender, the body, nature, sexuality, madness), as the basis of universal human experience (Csordas 1994; Delaney 1991; Foucault 1965, 1978; Geertz 1973; Lambek and Strathern 1998; Zito and Barlow 1994). This collection attempts to make a parallel contribution by rethinking traditional notions of dirt and undress and by complicating simple, stable, and tidy sets of binary oppositions—dirty vs. clean, naked vs. clothed, etc.—with the fluid, messy, and inconsistent categories and processes through which people mark social identity and difference. Since this volume is concerned with dirt, its politics as well as its poetics, it seems pertinent to note here the extent to which the language of dirt suffuses contemporary cultural analysis. While reminding us once again that dirt is ‘‘good to think with,’’ this reliance on the image of fluidity—in implied opposition to a now maligned notion of stable systems—and the pervasive use of a ‘‘messy versus tidy’’ rhetoric in contemporary works effectively reproduce the very sets of contrasts these studies aim to dissolve. The present book is no exception. That it recovers these categories—even as it aims to criticize them— by using the very language that is the object of analysis is an irony not lost on its contributors. As Foucault and Ricoeur have pointed out, we—and everything we do—are tangled up in language. So it is perhaps fitting that we should choose to contrast the tidiness of our analyses with the messiness of ‘‘real’’ life. One of the central theses of this book, that what is messy is often transgressive and, by implication, at once powerful and threatening, has interesting implications for the ethnographic process itself: at the very least, it can be said to capture succinctly the conflicts facing social scientists as they struggle to contain within the orderly parameters of their scholarly writing a bursting tide of ‘‘social facts’’ that rarely fit neatly together. Returning briefly to the themes of dirt and undress proper, the object of this book is to contribute a set of critical reevaluations of body politics through a focus on the wide-ranging, yet often undocumented, implications that filth, pollution, nakedness, and nudity have or have had. Though they do not necessarily espouse similar perspectives or reach parallel conclusions, the contributors all challenge us to consider dirt and nudity in novel ways. How do some people distinguish nudity from nakedness? What parts of the body must be un/covered for one individual (but perhaps not another) to be considered un/clothed? And by whom? How does dirt or clothing affect—or conversely protect—the boundaries of the ‘‘social skin’’? How are the treatment and presentation of body surfaces connected to issues of gender, class, labor, sexuality, and morality? What are the criteria that distinguish between different kinds of
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference dirt and what do these tell us about the historical production of moral communities? How do such distinctions become routinely manipulated and how do they occasionally evolve as a response to changing relations of power, production, and reproduction? How have the shifting frontiers of modesty helped redefine nakedness historically? How is the adherence to strict conventions of cleanliness and modesty implicated in the management of empires, the production of a morally accountable citizenry, or the reconfiguration of diasporic identities? Conversely, why are refusals to un/dress and noncompliance with hygienic practices interpreted as forms of contestation and how do they undermine moral authority? In short, how are they transgressive? While common trends can be discerned across cultures and continents (among colonial societies, for instance), the foremost concern is to address these and other related questions through a discussion of local practices in specific cultural and sociopolitical settings. By privileging local contexts and focusing on particular bodies and their surfaces and thresholds, the contributors to this volume highlight the universal preoccupation with matters of dress, cleanliness, and body presentation while attending to the culturally and historically specific ways in which ritualized as well as seemingly mundane bodily habits become creatively implicated in the making and unmaking of moral worlds. NOTES 1. Modern Europeans were not alone in equating ‘‘lack of clothing’’ with primitive otherness. The Waorani people of Ecuadorian Amazonia were—and still are— known to their Quichua neighbors as ‘‘Aucas,’’ a Quichua term that can be translated as ‘‘naked savages’’ (Corry 1985: 43). 2. The Church’s teachings with regard to modesty and morality were effective, judging from the fate of the heroine in Saint Pierre’s eighteenth-century novel Paul et Virginie (1984). Upon being urged to escape the sinking ship that was returning her to her Caribbean home, Virginie, a young Creole woman of good education, refuses to take her clothes off and jump in the water with a nude sailor. She chooses death—an inevitable fate, given the cumbersome crinoline and the multiple layers of fabric she wears—rather than suffering the shame of nakedness. 3. The Scandinavian practice of the sauna is similarly based on the assumption that when you are naked, ‘‘you can be yourself ’’ (Edelsward 1991: 194). Because it facilitates intimacy, solidarity, and openness, people go to the sauna together so that they can metaphorically lay their private selves naked before others. 4. The soap industry quickly noted that, in John Wesley’s famous words, ‘‘cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness.’’ In the 1880s, Henry Ward Beecher was featured in Pears’ Soap ads, where he ludicrously asserted that ‘‘if Cleanliness is next to Godliness, soap must be considered as a Means of Grace and a Clergyman who recommends moral things should be willing to recommend Soap’’ (Bushman and Bushman 1988: 1218). 5. McClintock (1995) and others have alluded to the mutual fascination with dirt felt by Arthur Munby, a barrister in Victorian England, and Hannah Cullwick, a housemaid who secretly became his lover and eventually his wife. Cullwick thus often
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Introduction met Munby ‘‘after a grueling day’s work, her clothes dank and filthy, her face deliberately blackened with boot polish’’ (McClintock 1995: 137). She even posed ‘‘in her dirt’’ for numerous photographs variously depicting her as an ‘‘almost nude’’ male slave, a maid, or a male chimneysweep blackened from head to foot (1995: 136). 6. A growing corpus of ethnographic and historical research has pointed to the critical role of dress in the elaboration, representation, and negotiation of social identities (Allman 2004; Ash and Wilson 1992; Barnes and Eicher 1992; Comaroff 1996; Cordwell and Schwarz 1979; Durham 1999; Eicher 1995; Garber 1992; Hendrickson 1996; Roach and Eicher 1965; Rubinstein 1995; Weiner 1992; Weiner and Schneider 1986; Wilson 1985). 7. See, for instance, Boddy (1989), Bovin (2001), Comaroff and Comaroff (1992), Devisch (1993), Douglas (1966), Paulme (1973), Strathern and Strathern (1971), T. Turner (1980), V. Turner (1967). 8. The Western fascination with native female bodies and the complex ways in which colonial discourses often coincided with matters of sexuality, race, and gender in the scientific observation of human anatomy have been the focus of a growing number of studies (Gilman 1985; McClintock 1995; Pratt 1992; Ryan 1997). 9. Similarly, Arab women, whose veiled bodies had been eroticized by generations of European men, could only be civilized by being unveiled. In the context of the Algerian war of independence, where the female body came to stand for the national body, the theatrics of undress took on a heightened significance as it revealed, ‘‘piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare’’ (Fanon 1965: 42). 10. From the European mission to civilize Africans with soap and water (Burke 1996a, 1996b; Boddy, this volume; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Hunt 1999; Vaughan 1991) to the Nazi regime’s ‘‘disinfection programs’’ for the elimination of the ‘‘unworthy’’ (Aly, Chroust, and Pross 1994; Procter 1988) to the American public bath movement’s campaign to convert the ‘‘great unwashed’’ to the gospel of cleanliness (Bushman and Bushman 1988; Williams 1991), efforts everywhere to promote bathing, create ‘‘hygienic’’ conditions, and introduce new bodily disciplines have merged and intermingled with matters of religion, moral identity, and social order. 11. There is ample evidence in the anthropological literature that people everywhere associate certain professional activities with ‘‘dirt’’ or malodorous smells. Tanners, potters, blacksmiths, and dyers may be considered ‘‘dirty’’ because they handle products that give off, are perceived to give off, or are associated with, foul odors (Corbin 1986; van Beek 1992). If we agree with Lévi-Strauss (1970) that, as the result of a transition between two stable states, smells epitomize liminality, olfactory perception thus becomes an effective means of socially discriminating against certain classes of individuals whose occupations set them apart from other individuals. 12. In his monumental work Homo hierarchicus (1966), Dumont argues that the political and economic domains in Indian society are bounded by religion, itself articulated in terms of a fundamental opposition between purity and pollution. For Dumont, the Brahman represents the highest form of purity attainable by Hindus while the ‘‘untouchables’’ are on the very bottom of the social ladder. For a critique of Dumont’s perspective, see Dirks (2001). 13. In nineteenth-century France, Corbin (1986) shows, the corpus of representations surrounding the prostitute was firmly rooted in pre-Pasteurian mythologies and structured by an archaic definition of health and disease. In addition to having a ‘‘rotten’’ body, the putain (whore) played a crucial role in the local economy of cleanli-
25
Dirt, Undress, and Difference ness by being also a ‘‘seminal drain’’ that assured the elimination of excessive sperm before it could ‘‘clog’’ the system. Because her stinking body prefigured death, she was also associated with corpses, and with the ailment that best epitomized the infection of the social structure: syphilis (Corbin 1986: 211–12). 14. There is no space, here, to dwell on the useful critiques that the indiscriminate use of Foucauldian analyses of the ‘‘body’’ in non-Western contexts has spawned. While bio-power and Foucauldian use of the body surface are useful analytical approaches in reference to culturally specific experiences and representations of the body in Western history, they become problematic when imported to illuminate bodily practices in other cultural contexts (Burke 1996b: 191; see also Turner 1994). 15. Interestingly, nudity can play a similar role by indexing the liminality of the initiate once the body has been stripped of its social identity. 16. In my experience, baptism in the Roman Catholic Church in contemporary France is similarly conceived as a transition from a polluted to a pure state. Parents are admonished not to come to church with their infants fully dressed in their baptismal dress, lest it wrongly suggest that babies are born untainted by the mark of original sin. It is only after the children have been immersed in holy water and become part of the Body of Christ that they can be suitably attired in white baptismal gowns. 17. Miner effectively reminded us of the highly ritualized form daily ablutions can take when he wrote in his ‘‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’’ that the magical beliefs and ritual practices of these people (Americans) ‘‘present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go’’ (1956: 503). 18. The punishment met by vain bathers could be more severe. Disappearing pregnancies and fetal deaths were commonly reported outcomes of bathing too long at the lake (Paul 1974). 19. Turner notes, for instance, the role of nakedness (which is at once the mark of a newborn infant and of a corpse prepared for burial) in signaling the liminal status of transitional beings: ‘‘They have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally from their fellows. . . . In the words of King Lear they represent ‘naked unaccommodated man’ ’’ (Turner 1967: 98–99). 20. In Leviticus, the Lord tells Moses to convey to his people a series of sexual taboos. The series begins with ‘‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness’’ (Ableman 1982: 37–38). 21. In ancient Judaism, Satlow shows (1997), unlike male nakedness, female nakedness was an index of moral character and had no significance vis-à-vis the sacred. Context was essential to the interpretation of nakedness: in the field or in the bathhouse, male nakedness incurred little or no rabbinic opprobrium. 22. Igbo-speaking people are hardly unique in their use of the subversive power of the naked body. When, in the Central African Republic, Emperor Bokassa arrested a large number of children on charges of sedition and massacred some of them, several hundred women demonstrated naked outside the prison until the survivors were released (see Ableman 1982). 23. In some cases, women used their naked bodies to form the words ‘‘No War’’ or ‘‘No Bush.’’ Elsewhere, the bodies of the protesters spelled ‘‘Peace.’’ 24. As an index of difference and liminality, dirt can play the same role as nakedness in the identification of witches. Sniffing out witches or other individual ‘‘abnor-
26
Introduction malities’’ is possible in certain cultures because of the assumption that evil gives off unpleasant odors (Burton in van Beek 1992: 52). 25. This trend, dubbed by some ‘‘thong feminism’’ because young girls claim that spaghetti straps and ultra-low-rise jeans give them confidence, is a ‘‘rebellion against parents and other adults who seem to have forgotten their own fling with hot pants, miniskirts and the no-bra look,’’ journalist Laura Stepp writes (2002: E10). 26. See, for instance, the recently published Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (2004), by Ruth Barcan.
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Introduction Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Downs, James F. 1990. ‘‘Nudity in Japanese Visual Media: A Cross-Cultural Observation.’’ Archives of Sexual Behavior 19(6): 583–94. Dumont, Louis. 1966. Homo hierarchicus: Le système des castes et ses implications. Paris: Gallimard. Durham, Deborah. 1999. ‘‘The Predicament of Dress: Polyvalency and the Ironies of Cultural Identity.’’ American Ethnologist 26(2): 389–411. Edelsward, L. M. 1991. ‘‘We Are More Open When We Are Naked.’’ Ethnos 56(3–4): 189–99. Eicher, Joanne B., ed. 1995. Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time. Washington, D.C.: Berg. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen. Fabian, Johannes. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove. Feeley-Harnik, Gillian. 1989. ‘‘Cloth and the Creation of Ancestors in Madagascar.’’ In Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, pp. 73– 116. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage. ————. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. ————. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Friedman, Jonathan. 1991. ‘‘Consuming Desires: Strategies of Selfhood and Appropriation.’’ Cultural Anthropology 6(2): 154–63. Gaines, Jane, and Charlotte Herzog. 1990. Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body. New York: Routledge. Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic. Gillison, Gillian. 1980. ‘‘Images of Nature in Gimi Thought.’’ In Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, pp. 143–73. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gilman, Sander. 1985. ‘‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.’’ Critical Inquiry 12: 204–42. Goodale, Jane C. 1980. ‘‘Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Kaulong Model of Nature and Culture.’’ In Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, pp. 119–42. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gottlieb, Alma. 1982. ‘‘Sex, Fertility, and Menstruation among the Beng of the Ivory Coast: A Symbolic Analysis.’’ Africa 52(4): 34–47. Hansen, Karen Tranberg, ed. 1992. African Encounters with Domesticity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Hay, John. 1994. ‘‘The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?’’ In Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, pp. 42–77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen. Hendrickson, Hildi, ed. 1996. Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-colonial Africa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Herbert, Eugenia W. 1993. Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hershman, P. 1974. ‘‘Hair, Sex, and Dirt.’’ Man 9(2): 274–98. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollander, Anne. 1975. Seeing through Clothes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoskins, Janet. 2002a. ‘‘Blood Mysteries: Beyond Menstruation as Pollution.’’ Ethnology 41(4): 299–301. ————. 2002b. ‘‘The Menstrual Hut and the Witch’s Lair in Two Eastern Indonesian Societies.’’ Ethnology 41(4): 317–34. Hoy, Suellon. 1995. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness. New York: Oxford University Press. Hugh-Jones, Christine. 1979. From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Processes in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Jordanova, L. J. 1980. ‘‘Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality.’’ In Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, pp. 42–69. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jowkes, Rachel K. 1999. ‘‘Problematizing Pollution: Dirty Wombs, Ritual Pollution, and Pathological Processes.’’ Medical Anthropology 18(2): 1633–86. Keegan, Timothy. 2001. ‘‘Gender, Degeneration, and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, c. 1912.’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 27: 459–77. Ko, Dorothy. 1997. ‘‘Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory.’’ Fashion Theory 1(1): 3–27. Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lambek, Michael, and Andrew Strathern. 1998. Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge. Le Guérer, Annick. 1992. Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Power of Smell. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Kodansha International. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row. Luck, Kate. 1992. ‘‘Trouble with Eden, Trouble with Eve: Women, Trousers, and Utopian Socialism in Nineteenth-Century America.’’ In Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson, pp. 200–12. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Introduction Macleod, Arlene Elowe. 1991. Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Masquelier, Adeline. 1999. ‘‘Debating Muslims, Disputed Practices: Struggles for the Realization of an Alternative Moral Order in Niger.’’ In Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives, ed. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, pp. 219–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ————. n.d. ‘‘The Blood Stain: Possession, Menstruation, and Transgression in Southern Niger.’’ Unpublished ms. Mauss, Marcel. 1973. ‘‘Techniques of the Body.’’ Trans. B. Brewster. Economy and Society 2: 70–88. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. McRobbie, Angela. 1988. Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Mead, Margaret. [1935] 1963. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. Reprint, New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks. Meigs, Anna S. 1984. Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Milner, Murray, Jr. 1987. ‘‘Dirt and Development in India.’’ Virginia Quarterly Review 63: 54–71. Miner, Horace. 1956. ‘‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema.’’ American Anthropologist 58(3): 503–507. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mort, Frank. 1987. Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England since 1830. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ In Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Laura Mulvey, pp. 14–38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Needham, Rodney. 1973. Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classifications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Okediji, Moyo. 1991. ‘‘The Naked Truth: Nude Figures in Yoruba Art.’’ Journal of Black Studies 22(1): 30–44. Paige, Karen, and Jeffery Paige. 1981. The Politics of Reproductive Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press. Patton, Cindy. 1990. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge. Paul, Lois. 1974. ‘‘The Mastery of Work and the Mystery of Sex in a Guatemalan Village.’’ In Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 281–99. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Paulme, Denise. 1973. ‘‘Adornment and Nudity in Africa.’’ In Primitive Art and Society, ed. Anthony J. Forge, pp. 11–24. London: Oxford University Press for the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Perniola, Mario. 1989. ‘‘Between Clothing and Nudity.’’ In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, ed. Michel Feher, pp. 237–65. New York: Zone. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Procter, Robert. 1988. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Rasmussen, Susan. 1991. ‘‘Lack of Prayer: Ritual Restrictions, Social Experience, and the Anthropology of Menstruation among the Tuareg.’’ American Ethnologist 18(4): 751–69. Reinhart, Kevin A. 1990. ‘‘Impurity/No Danger.’’ History of Religions 30(1): 1–24. Roach, M. E., and Joanne B. Eicher, eds. 1965. Dress, Adornment, and the Social Order. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. 1974. ‘‘Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview.’’ In Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 17–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rubinstein, Ruth P. 1995. Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Ryan, James R. 1997. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de. 1984. Paul et Virginie. Paris: Collection de l’Imprimerie Nationale. Sanders, Todd. 2000. ‘‘Rains Gone Bad, Women Gone Mad: Rethinking Gender Rituals of Rebellion and Patriarchy.’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 6: 469–86. Satlow, Michael L. 1997. ‘‘Jewish Construction of Nakedness in Late Antiquity.’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 116(3): 429–54. Shrum, Wesley, and John Kilburn. 1996. ‘‘Ritual Disrobement at Mardi Gras: Ceremonial Exchange and Moral Order.’’ Social Forces 75(2): 423–58. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1966. ‘‘The Garments of Shame.’’ History of Religions 5(2): 217–38. Sontag, Susan. 1977. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spongberg, Mary. 1997. Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse. New York: New York University Press. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allen White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Stepp, Laura Sessions. 2002. ‘‘Nothing to Wear: Teens and Younger Girls’ Fashions Are Long on Skin, Short on Modesty.’’ New Orleans Times Picayune, June 15: E1, E10. Stoler, Ann L. 1996. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Strathern, Andrew J. 1975. ‘‘Why Is Shame on the Skin?’’ Ethnology 14(4): 347–56. Strathern, Andrew J., and A. Marilyn Strathern. 1971. Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen. London: Gerald Duckworth. Summers, Carol. 1991. ‘‘Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925.’’ Signs 16(4): 787–807. Taylor, Christopher C. 1988. ‘‘The Concept of Flow in Rwandan Popular Medicine.’’ Social Science and Medicine 27(12): 1343–48. Thomas, Nicholas. 1990. ‘‘Sanitation and Seeing: The Creation of State Power in Early Colonial Fiji.’’ Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 32(1): 149–70. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper Colophon.
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Introduction Tomes, Nancy. 1998. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Turner, Terence. 1980. ‘‘The Social Skin.’’ In Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, pp. 112– 40. London: Temple Smith. ————. 1994. ‘‘Bodies and Anti-bodies: Flesh and Fetish in Contemporary Social Theory.’’ In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas, pp. 27–47. New York: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Valverde, Mariana. 1991. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reforms in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. van Beek, Walter E. A. 1992. ‘‘The Dirty Smith: Smell as a Social Frontier among the KapsikiHigi of North Cameroon and North-Eastern Nigeria.’’ Africa 62(1): 38–58. van de Walle, Etienne, and Elisha P. Renne, eds. 2001. Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vigarello, Georges. 1988. Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages. Trans. John Birrell. New York: Cambridge University Press. Walkowitz, Judith R. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weiner, Annette. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Annette, and Jane Schneider, eds. 1989. Cloth and Human Experience. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Weiss, Brad. 1996. The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Williams, Marilyn T. 1991. Washing the ‘‘Great Unwashed’’: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840–1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1985. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: Virago. Zito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow. 1994. Body, Subject, and Power in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zulawski, Ann. 2000. ‘‘Hygiene and the ‘Indian Problem’: Ethnicity and Medicine in Bolivia, 1910–1920.’’ Latin American Research Review 35(2): 107–29.
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one
The Naked and the Nude Historically Multiple Meanings of Oto (Undress) in Southeastern Nigeria Misty L. Bastian For me, the naked and the nude (By lexicographers construed As synonyms that should express The same deficiency of dress Or shelter) stand as wide apart As love from lies, or truth from art. —Robert Graves, ‘‘The Naked and the Nude’’ (1957)
An Introduction to a Distinction and Its Problematic Status In the first stanza of Robert Graves’s famous poem above—probably written in response to Kenneth Clark’s ([1956] 1972) equally famous distinction between states of undress in art—the poet sets out a problem in Western perceptions of bodies and their representations. Nudity is a term that was reserved in aesthetic circles for an elevating or ennobling undress, an innocent, reserved, and artistically constructed undress that supposedly represented humankind’s spiritual nature.1 Nakedness, on the other hand, was seen as eroticized undress, a purposeful lack of adornment that was meant to titillate and speak to our baser nature. It was also the lack of adornment associated with alterity, with those who supposedly do not know how to dress or lack a moral and cultural capacity to dress (and undress) appropriately. Other societies do not necessarily agree with how cultivated Westerners characterize either nakedness or nudity; they may, indeed, have a different way of conceptualizing the undressed body altogether. The aesthetic Western dis-
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The Naked and the Nude tinction between the naked and the nude is suggestive of some of our own issues with gender and sexuality, issues that are not directly translatable to those experienced in other societies. The Western struggle over aesthetic nudity, for instance, has been largely a contest about the male gaze, which must properly be situated within a Western, rather than a universal, history of gender relations. Women’s (and men’s) undress elsewhere—and particularly among Igbospeaking peoples in southeastern Nigeria—has a good deal to do with how bodies are surveilled by others, but not always and necessarily with masculine surveillance over feminine forms and practices. The surface of the body may or may not be available for everyone’s gaze, and the meaning of the covered or uncovered body therefore shifts concomitantly with the identity of the gazer. In short, who is naked and who is nude (to use the Western distinction), or even who is clothed, depends on who is looking. During roughly a century and a half of colonialization, missionization, and independence, the bodies of Igbo-speaking peoples have been watched, commented upon, sometimes reviled, sometimes celebrated, and always represented as important by both external and indigenous observers. These representations were very much seen through the lens of gender, although contemporary Igbo-speaking people did not always perceive their own bodies in the same way as colonialists. Nonetheless, the question of what constituted the proper surface boundaries of Igbo bodies was of great interest to all who looked at them during the colonial period. Certainly present-day Igbo-speaking people take immense pains with their appearance and have specific understandings of how bodies ought to be displayed, both in and out of clothing. These understandings are now specifically and historically gendered. During the colonial period, the apparent nakedness (rather than nudity) of young Igbo women’s bodies titillated European photographers and ethnographers and their metropolitan audiences. Bare-breasted images of ‘‘nubile Ibo girls’’ were a staple of Nigerian colonial travel accounts and were used copiously even in serious ethnographies, such as that of the Anglican missionary George T. Basden. No colonial description of Igbo female youth was complete without some reference to elaborate hairstyles, body scarification, tattooing, or painting, signaling the somewhat prurient attention that colonial men paid to every curve and cranny of the bodies of women they encountered on the eastern side of the River Niger. Igbo female youth, however, used colonial interest in their bodies for their own purposes, gaining access to cash and commodities through posing and display. They also quickly learned the consumer pleasures of European fashion and deployed their bodies, through labor as well as consumption, in order to make these fashions their own. Where women’s undress was used as part of a general program of colonial patriarchy and body objectification, young Igbo men’s transitional (un)dress styles alternatively annoyed and amused their missionary teachers and colonial supervisors, as well as their local elders. Battle lines over male nudity tended to be generational during the colonial period, with the unclothed young man’s
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Early-twentieth-century photograph of young Igbo women, originally captioned ‘‘Three Stages of Girlhood.’’ From George T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (1921; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1966), facing page 88.
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The Naked and the Nude body understood locally as a sign of proper enterprise in farming or other masculine tasks. Male elders were expected to swathe themselves in cloth, using their wealth in fabric to signify a movement beyond physical labor into the more spiritual and dignified work of age. Colonial officials were less concerned with the nakedness of male agricultural laborers than they seemed to be with that of equally rural and laboring girls. However, missionaries and colonialists alike insisted upon Europeanized masculine uniforms for men working in urban settings or for boys being educated along Western lines. Indigenous youths’ play with these uniforms set one of the rubrics for struggle in southeastern Nigeria’s growing cities during the early twentieth century, particularly when young men combined objects of European sartorial formality with local undress styles. Internal, if regionalized, Igbo ideas about the value of cloth and the proper concealment and revelation of body parts were transformed over time through an engagement with commodification and evangelical Christianity, as well as by local and highly mutable taste cultures.2 External and internal forces during the twentieth century therefore changed Igbo notions of what constituted ‘‘undress’’ (oto), as well as the value associated with the display and concealment of Igbo bodies. No matter how transformed the process, however, Igbo ‘‘body agents’’ still manage to outrage, inform, and entertain with their use of selective nakedness in contemporary urban Nigeria.
Indiscipline or Action: Indigenous Ideas about Nudity/Nakedness in Contemporary Southeastern Nigeria The quintessential performance of undress for many contemporary Nigerians is to appear naked in the public marketplace, a sure sign of madness, since there are other, more private ways to be oto that are completely acceptable.3 Once a person had been revealed as mad to the market through his undress, he would generally refuse to wear clothing forever afterward. The mad person would also drift away from his lineage home and refuse to acknowledge his relationships with family members or old friends. As an informant noted to me in 1987, ‘‘Nwa ala [the child of madness] is stripped of everything. What is his name? He can’t tell you. Who are his people? He doesn’t know, or he won’t tell you. Being crazy is indiscipline! That madman in the market doesn’t want to be a human being.’’ Indiscipline is related to madness by the willful quality of the mad person’s inappropriate body representation. In stripping himself in the market, the ‘‘child of madness’’ takes off more than his clothing—he removes the garment of civil behavior and shrugs away the tightly woven web of Igbo social relations. Those who see him see the ultimate, undisciplined individual: a being who refuses to be part of society, and an affront to their understanding of how personhood is communally constructed. In Nigeria, ‘‘indiscipline’’ is a specialized English term, denoting every negative public behavior from state-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference level corruption to urination on the streetcorners in plain view of passersby. Madness is perceived as indiscipline, as selfishness and crudity, and as a completely personal response to the extremes of human suffering. Shedding clothing is directly, as well as metaphorically, connected with shedding relations in southeastern Nigeria, since most people’s clothing is given to them by someone else, representing an elaborate network of reciprocal relations. Men supply cloth for their wives’ ‘‘attires’’; women choose cloth for their husbands’ outfits or buy them ready-to-wear shirts and trousers in the marketplace; mothers procure cloth and sew outfits for their children, sometimes cutting up their own attire to make that worn by their offspring; sisters lend lengths of expensive wrapper cloth to their brothers for important events; patrons give their clients cloth with their own names, symbols, or likenesses printed on it as a form of publicity for their alliance. Wealthier neighbors share their old clothes with poorer neighbors or with more distant relatives. People are known abroad by their clothing, and that clothing is scrutinized for signs of its social provenance. Willfully discarding all one’s clothing is tantamount to discarding one’s social identity; it is necessarily the work of a madman, since only the mad lack an interest in human connections. Not all those who are undressed in contemporary Igbo are mad, however. A certain level of oto is appropriate and expected for children. Infants are often allowed to crawl about with minimal clothing on their bodies. Diapers are now common, although some more rural Igbo continue to allow the smallest children to go without them, the adults disposing quietly of any ‘‘by-products’’ left in their progeny’s wake. When children attend public functions, they usually are dressed in miniature versions of the clothing favored by adults: wrappers and blouses or frocks for the girls, wrappers or t-shirts and shorts for boys. If wearing adult-style clothing, children are also expected to wear at least minimal undergarments, and their parents will give them accessories like hats, bags, or jewelry to make their attires ‘‘complete.’’ Undress, then, among Igbo children is now associated with playtime and the intimate surroundings of home. Children can be oto in a compound, and they can be minimally dressed throughout the daytime before they begin their official schooling. Even after school begins, children evade clothing restrictions, although part of the discipline enforced by Nigerian schools is a requirement to keep their uniforms in decent repair and shoes or sandals on their feet throughout the school day.4 The latter discipline is most often flouted, as both Igbo children and adults delight in slipping off their foot coverings. Some female Igbo elders even make a point of sitting at ceremonial events barefoot, with their shoes displayed on the ground next to them. Only the truly elite habitually wear shoes, and even they enjoy putting up their uncovered feet on ottomans or tables within the confines of their homes.5 Releasing parts of the body from restricting clothing thus speaks to a perceived intimacy of environment for adults, and hearkens back to those moments when they were young and relative oto was the norm.
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The Naked and the Nude Certain ritual activities require otherwise well-clothed adults to become oto or semi-undressed, as well; notably initiation ceremonies, healing rituals, and parts of funerals. Ritual specialists like ndi dibia (healers/diviners) may be required to strip down to a loincloth during divinations or prayers to particular deities, demonstrating their openness to spiritual forces. Regular people who attempt to communicate with these forces—or who are in a liminal state during life crises—strip in order to be marked out as ‘‘other’’ for the period of the ritual performance as well as to be prepared for re-clothing in new and socially significant garments. Young women and men who perform in ‘‘cultural’’ dance troops based on historical egwu (song/dance) performances may also be partially undressed. For young women in such troops, the common dress is a brief wrapper, worn without a blouse, and a plain black or decorated brassiere. Young men strip down to the loincloth that was once rural men’s everyday dress, maintaining their caps and adding face and body paint.6 Both genders wear jewelry or jangling adornment, adding to the rhythmic quality of the performance. Few ritual performers are fully oto, however. Although ritual activity requires them to be set apart from ordinary, clothed folk, performers maintain sartorial connections to social life through the use of charms, items of personal jewelry, or body painting.7 It is nonetheless important to hint at nudity in these instances in order to make the performances more effective. A young woman’s breasts bounce in her brassiere, suggesting the burgeoning fertility that her dancing and singing is supposed to demonstrate. Young men’s muscles gleam and flex during their athletic dance posturing, suggesting the same thing, although in a masculine register. Ritual participants are often hung with enough adornment and religious paraphernalia that the bareness of their bodies is moot. Such hints of oto are not perceived as transgressive; they are powerful, emotive signs of openness, incompleteness, and the creative ambiguity of body boundaries within ritual contexts.8 Social nudity is therefore quite different from that displayed by the madman in the marketplace: although socially approved oto is as purposeful as the anti-social undress of the insane, it never descends into complete, nihilistic individualism. Connections still can be made with the ‘‘body agent’’ in her brassiere or his loincloth; the communally constructed identity of a person is not surrendered in favor of naked self-involvement. Rather, social nakedness is meant to be a public, communal act—displaying the body in order to demonstrate a desire to join with others. A child or an initiand may be oto in a more public space because he is very much in process, and his nakedness is a sign of the liminality of his being. One might even suggest that, for Igbo, childhood and initiation are times of socially limited and controlled insanity, of not being a true person but moving in the direction of becoming one.9 The madman is permanently liminal, ‘‘betwixt and between’’ in Victor Turner’s (1967) famous phrase. Others, who appear to be almost as naked as he is, maintain a ‘‘social skin’’ (Turner 1980) that covers them more than adequately for viewers who share the same cultural conventions. In the next section of the chapter, we
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference will consider the historical background of these present-day understandings of undress.
‘‘Little Concerned with Dress’’: Oto in the Colonial Period Covering Girls and Unclothing Women On the eastern side [of the River Niger] it is the custom for girls to go entirely naked up to (and sometimes after) marriage. In places like Onitsha and Asaba the girls now refuse to comply with the injunctions against the use of dress, and, as the country is opened up, they will become obsolete altogether. In certain parts the women, old and young, rich and poor, married and single, pass their whole lives in a state of nudity. On reaching the age of puberty a piece of fine cotton string is worn loosely around the loins to indicate the fact, and this is later discarded for a more permanent circlet of spring-coiled brass wire (called anwa-idide, i.e. brass worm). After marriage a shred of cloth is added and this completes the outfit. (Basden [1921] 1966: 90–91)
George Basden describes, matter-of-factly, the general state of Igbo women’s undress in the early twentieth century. One of the most tolerant of the missionaries in this area—partially because he had lived among Igbospeaking peoples since 1900 and partially because he harbored an interest in cultivating the ‘‘objective’’ tone of scientific ethnography—Basden is also notable for his photographs of Igbo women and men in their ordinary states of oto. These photographs were published as plates in two books that he wrote about northern Igbo social life during the 1920s and ’30s. Such photographs, according to Fabian (2000: 236), enabled ethnographic literature in the early years of the twentieth century to ‘‘become a major provider of soft pornography’’—that is, made the reading and viewing of even the most serious ethnographic text into an exercise in sexual titillation. But were these Igbo women and men undressed by their own standards, as they posed for colonial photographs—or were these representations of people who would not have imagined themselves sexually exploited because they did not imagine themselves naked? More often than not, the Igbo ‘‘sitters’’ in colonial-era texts pose proudly in their finery, without the appearance of selfconsciousness. See, for example, Basden’s photograph of three youthful and recently affianced Igbo women (p. 42). Since they are as yet unmarried, each of the three women displays one or both of her breasts, and one of the trio is bare below the waist except for her elaborate brass anklets. One supposes that Basden himself posed these figures; certainly someone took pains to drape a cloth strip deliberately across the breast and pubic area of the young woman to the right. However, the girl to the left of the photographed group has bound her civet skin above her breasts and her two cloth sashes to the sides of her hips, emphasizing, rather than disguising, her genitals. She also holds
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The Naked and the Nude what appears to be a wood-and-brass-bound, European-style walking stick in her right hand, not emulating the middle figure, who is posed to appeal to European notions of modesty with the assistance of a cutlass ornamented by a brass bell. Unclothed by the standards of Basden’s audience, these ‘‘prospective brides of chiefs’’ would have thought of themselves as excessively well dressed and not at all oto. Each woman is wearing elaborate headgear, several pieces of imported or locally produced cloth, and jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles, and two of them are carrying objects (walking stick and cutlass) associated with masculine authority. Although it is not easily detectable in a blackand-white photograph of this vintage, all three are also likely smeared with camwood powder and oil—cosmetics that were used by both women and men to accentuate their youthful beauty by giving their skin the color (red) and other desirable qualities (gleaming smoothness) of fertility.10 Basden tells us that the walking stick, cutlass, leopard-tooth necklaces, and ivory bracelets adorning the youthful trio are on loan from the women’s affianced husbands and are not their own property. The same is probably true of the civet skin worn by the young girl to the left, since such skins were, and still are, signs of chiefly spiritual authority in this region. Rather than being undressed, the trio are clothed in their prospective husbands’ wealth and status. They represent, through their bodily presentation in the photograph, not only their own value as marriageable, fertile women but the value and trust of the men whose compounds they will soon join as wives. This was the opposite of nudity; it was wearing an appropriate and telling form of ‘‘social skin,’’ one that expressed—through the juxtaposition of masculine objects and recognizably fertile, feminine bodies—important social relations among lineages as well as marital relations between particular people. A rather different image of proper dress for Igbo women is projected for colonial consumption in one of the plates found in Sylvia Leith-Ross’s descriptive ethnography African Women ([1939] 1978: facing page 129). In this 1934 photograph, Leith-Ross has posed ‘‘a schoolgirl’’ in front of a compound wall. The young woman is in profile, has braids neatly bundled into a bun at the back of her head, and is wearing a sleeveless, light-colored cotton ‘‘frock,’’ without jewelry. The schoolgirl’s garment appears to be ill fitting, but it covers her body in a way that the Christian missions considered modest. Her scoop neck is open just past her collarbone, and the back of the frock is closed. While one cannot see the dress’s hem in the photograph, it apparently rests well below the knee. A contemporary European reading of this image would probably be that this was a colonized girl who was well behaved and certainly less sexually provocative than the affianced brides pictured by Basden over a decade before. Yet an Igbo reading of the same period would be quite different. Not only were Igbo-speaking people concerned with the awkwardness attendant on adopting Western dress aesthetics,11 but they perceived the full-body
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference
Early-twentieth-century photograph of recently affianced Igbo women, originally captioned ‘‘A Proud Trio.’’ From George T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (1921; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1966), facing page 96.
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The Naked and the Nude covering favored by the missions and would-be ‘‘moderns’’ as a form of resistance to proper relations between the indigenous generations and potentially an expression of immoral, sexual behavior. Already older than Basden’s young brides, Leith-Ross’s schoolgirl type tended to remain unmarried longer, playing a pivotal part in the changing marital landscape of Igboland during the period. Bridewealth for such a rare creature was high—often including the cost of her education as well as the standard amount expected for marrying into lineages wealthy or missionized enough to consider sending their daughters to school. In consequence, as one of Leith-Ross’s male informants noted, It has become the rule rather than the exception to demand a higher dowry on a girl who has been to school. The amount usually demanded sometimes frightens prospective suitors away, and what is more dreadful about it is that in many cases what one receives in exchange for a higher dowry is a delicate and over-indulged sort of wife, rather more expensive to maintain but less able to perform those duties which circumstances impose upon African womanhood. (Leith-Ross [1939] 1978: 204)
In practical terms, this increased bridewealth also meant that older, wealthier men were more likely to be successful suitors for these young female Christians. However, such men were also more likely to have other wives, hence to be less acceptable to their intended brides. When older men put away their former ‘‘bush’’ wives in order to marry Christian girls in church—a practice that became fashionable in urban areas throughout the southeast during the early decades of the twentieth century—older women were scandalized and many were impoverished, being rendered unmarriageable or forced into leviratic unions before widowhood (cf. Leith-Ross [1939] 1978: 154). Christian girls and the wealthy, urbanized men who wanted to marry them were subsequently looked at askance by more senior women. Missionized women’s fashions—including an insistence on costly European bridal garments, ‘‘frocks,’’ shoes, stockings, hats, and handbags—were considered a sure sign of junior women’s perfidy. This generational displeasure in colonized women’s dress should be put into the context of proper attire for youthful women in the immediate precolonial and early colonial periods. Rural Igbo girls were, before missionization, generally unclothed, and even adult women tended, except on unusual occasions, to mark their status as wives and mothers by wrapping only a small piece of cloth around their loins. Girls close to marriage age adorned themselves with impressive, helmet-like constructions of hair, sometimes wigs, stretched over frames and held in place with palm oil as well as red or mica-flaked mud. They also painted uli (a natural vegetable pigment) designs on their bodies, scarified their bellies, breasts, backs, and upper thighs, and rubbed camwood or chalk into their skin to enhance its appearance (Cole and Aniakor 1984: 34–46). Once past puberty, young women might tie a string or a rope of beads about
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference their waist, and perhaps hang brass ornaments from it, and northern Igbo girls frequently put on heavy brass anklets (ogba) that encircled their lower legs from foot to knee. Fully adorned and painted, Igbo girls were considered to embody a proper moral state. Their breasts and stomachs were readily observable by the senior women who were their guardians, and any physical signs of pregnancy before marriage were noted and acted upon by these female elders. Young women’s desire for cloth and ‘‘modern’’ fashions after missionization therefore became an important representation of their concomitant desire to change the generational status quo among women. The cloth that missionaries and some colonial men approved to cover young women’s problematic nakedness and help them to develop a proper, Christian sense of shame (Bastian 2000) thus also offered younger women ‘‘cover’’ against the prying eyes and fingers of their female elders. Elder women’s outrage at young women’s seduction by Western commodities—and, perhaps, their equally commercial seduction of newly urban, newly salaried men—was most notably expressed during the great southeastern Nigerian women’s resistance movements of the 1920s, the Nwaobiala of 1925 and the Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women’s War) of 1929. There is no room here to unpack the demands of the thousands of Igbo and other southeastern women who marched against masculine authorities during this decade (cf. Bastian 2001b and 2002). However, one particular, relevant demand remained constant from the mid- to the late 1920s, and that was that ‘‘no girls or young married women should wear cloth until they were with first child, but go naked as in old days’’ (M. P. 62/1925, Nigerian National Archives). During the Nwaobiala ‘‘disturbances’’ of 1925, senior women stripped their juniors in marketplaces all around the southeast, taking away their clothes publicly and requiring them once again to demonstrate their moral qualities through bodily display. Christian girls complained bitterly about such treatment, but their calls went largely unheeded by the colonial administration. Indeed, many of the administrators who heard the mission girls’ complaints were of the same mind as the young women’s older female relatives. That is, male colonialists believed that ‘‘the clothes had been taken away by their mothers who knew that the clothes were the price of their daughter’s profligacy’’ (D. O. Kenneth Cochrane, in M. P. 1538/128/1925, Nigerian National Archives). Such improper dress continued throughout the decade to be perceived as both the symptom and the cause of young women’s engagement with sex work in the growing cities, to the point that some respectable Igbo matrons informed Sylvia Leith-Ross ([1939] 1978: 520) that they ‘‘used the word ‘civilized’ as synonymous for ‘immoral’ . . . [because] when a girl was civilized, that is to say, educated, she very nearly automatically became immoral.’’ As one of the standard elements of Igbo mission girls’ school curriculum was learning to cut and sew ‘‘frocks’’—along with how to construct and wear undergarments, braid or pull back their hair in unobtrusive styles, and wear shoes—it is no wonder that such educated immorality was connected to draping oneself in
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The Naked and the Nude the new fashions. What parents and fiancés would not procure for the young women coming out of mission schools could be bought with cash accepted from ‘‘boyfriends’’ or more casual sexual customers. Young women’s clothing thus became, at the moment of transition into high colonialism, a much more provocative gesture than appearing with breasts and buttocks bare. Wearing a ‘‘frock’’ spoke to a set of gendered and generational contestations, notably between older women who adhered to the indigenous religion and their historical rights to surveil and control their juniors and more youthful women who demanded Western education, monogamous marriage, and individual self-determination. Colonial observers of the Igbo scene were somewhat confused by these struggles. Missionaries found themselves on the side of their young converts, although concerned about the seeds of consumerism being sown alongside modesty. Colonial administrators were vexed by what was, for most of them, a problem of urban sanitation and control: the growing numbers of professional and casual sex workers in the larger urban areas of the region. Administrators therefore tended to be sympathetic to senior women’s wish to maintain surveillance over their daughters and to depress bridewealth costs, enabling girls to be married at an earlier and more malleable age. At least this was the case until those senior women took their demands into the streets and markets of Aba and other, smaller towns during November of 1929. It was during this period of gendered social foment, known as the Women’s War, that colonial officials learned that older women could creatively use their bared bodies to resist colonial incursions into everyday life. During the Women’s War of 1929, large crowds of women marched to administrative headquarters, courthouses, and European factories. On arriving at their colonized destination, the women ‘‘made demonstration’’ by singing, dancing, and destroying the offending buildings with their bare hands. The demonstrations were bad enough, from the point of view of the colonialists, but were made more intimidating by the fact that many of the marchers wore little, if anything, on their persons. Palm fronds were bound around some women’s foreheads and waists, while others carried fronds or sticks from their gardens. But the most militant of the women warriors (oha nd’inyom, ‘‘women of all towns’’; see Bastian 2002) arrived in a state of oto, in direct contradiction to senior women’s ordinary practice. These women taunted the men they targeted for attention by asking them if they would like to look at their mothers’ genitals, a profound insult among southeastern Nigerian women to the present day. African men at the time understood this to be a threat and generally moved out of the women’s way; colonial officials recorded the insult as part of their rationale for ‘‘pacifying’’ the crowds with bayonets and Maxim guns. During the war, elder women used undress as a weapon against both the colonial regime and its indigenous male backers. Disrobing as a group was a potent example of social nudity, especially when the oto display was combined with a well-understood women’s sanction, genital cursing. Genital cursing has some currency in the anthropological literature for West and Central Africa
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference (e.g., Ardener 1973; MacGaffey 2000: 66 and 242; Bastian 2002) but has not yet been fully explicated for Igbo-speaking peoples. There are several stages of genital cursing for Igbo women, moving from a verbal suggestion (‘‘Do you want to see where you came from?’’), to an expressive movement (untying the waistcloth in a public and ceremonious gesture), to the actual removal of lower garments and display of the genitals. In those instances of genital cursing I witnessed while in the field, the verbal curse was often enough to cause even the most angry and aggressive of men to back down, particularly if he was arguing with his mother or another senior female relative. In only one incident out of several did a woman move to open her wrapper as part of the curse, and this gesture proved highly effective in forcing her son to agree to her desires. Asking people about the full use of the curse led me to believe that the display of genitals rarely takes place, but that the curse is (and was) based on the potency of women’s fertility, fear of senior women’s sexuality, and prohibitions against incest, particularly among members of uterine households. The mass suggested display of older women’s genitals to colonial officials and African men was clearly meant as a gesture of contempt, based on older women’s role as mothers of the land. Denuding themselves was also an allusion on the part of the warring women to the perceived negative transformation of the land under colonialism. Women were willing to give up their personal identities and become part of an undifferentiated, female, reproductive mass, representing, in a graphic manner, the wrath of the earth goddess herself—including the deity’s power to destroy those who would pollute her. Such communal oto was an extreme instance of social nudity, turning the women into avatars of the feminine principle, moving them beyond gendered norms of complementarity and into a frighteningly solidary gender position, one meant both to transgress and to transform the cosmos. Such a powerful inversion of women’s everyday powers in southeastern Nigeria may have been beyond the comprehension of the colonial authorities while the war was taking place, but it nonetheless made a lasting impression. During the Aba Commission of Inquiry in 1930, as evidence was gathered by colonial administrators and some of their most trusted colonial subjects, the question of the women’s undress was raised constantly: THE CHAIRMAN: How were they dressed? WITNESS [Aboba, a member of a Native Court and no supporter of the war]: Their clothes were tight and short. THE CHAIRMAN: Was that the usual dress? WITNESS: No, Sir; it was not their usual dress. THE CHAIRMAN: What did the change indicate? WITNESS: That they were prepared to do bad things. THE CHAIRMAN: Was there anything unusual about their dress? WITNESS: They were dressed in an unusual manner. They never dressed like that before, even before the advent of Government. (Aba Commission 1930: 161)
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The Naked and the Nude Although the chairman of the commission attempted to elicit further information about the cause of the women’s ‘‘tight and short’’ dress, Chief Aboba was not forthcoming. He did suggest that the women’s transgressive dress (or undress) had meaning, and he expressed that meaning in a largely negative manner: ‘‘they were prepared to do bad things.’’ Certainly what they proceeded to do was bad for him: they went to his compound, dressed in the offending un-fashion, danced, sang, and demanded the cap he had been given by the colonial administration as a marker of his warrant chief status. When Aboba and some of his men managed to chase the women away, threatening them with guns, they promptly moved to the compounds of his patrikin and destroyed buildings (Aba Commission 1930: 161). In places where the women’s egwu and oto were respected, chiefs were themselves denuded of their regalia and forced to feed the women warriors, both sanctions speaking of a reduction in the men’s status. The authority of women’s undress and reproductivity seemed to trump that given by the colonial administration. When, as in the case of Aboba, women’s authority as representatives of the earth deity was not recognized or respected, ‘‘bad things’’ ensued. Older women’s oto in 1929 was therefore both a sign and a practice, a curse and a weapon. Men, including those colonialists against whom it was directed, could not mistake this nudity for anything pornographic. As the Itsekiri women who threatened to display their own nakedness against Nigerian ChevronTexaco in 2002 noted, this was no ‘‘blue film’’ for the erotic titillation of an external, male audience; it was a snapshot of abomination, what the world looked like when turned upside down. Singlet-Mindedness among Colonized Boys and Men [T]here is an intangible something which has penetrated far beyond the actual range of church and school, all the more remarkable when one remembers the enormous population [of southeastern Nigeria] and the little direct influence the Mission can exert. After searching in vain for a definition of this minute alteration I found myself describing it as ‘‘singlet-minded.’’ A singlet, the cheap white vest of English make one finds in every market where a few European goods are sold, is the Ibo’s first step towards civilization. Schoolboys or lads or grown men, they ‘‘go buy singlet.’’ But even those who have not got a singlet nor would even think of buying one, are yet psychologically on the way to wearing one. (Leith-Ross [1939] 1978: 131)
When British and other European mercantilists arrived in the interior of southeastern Nigeria during the 1850s and ’60s, most of the men they met were farmers, fishermen, or traders engaged in exchanging slaves as well as nonhuman commodities, notably palm oil (Dike 1956; Okonta and Douglas 2001). Some traders had been in business with Europeans since the days of the Portuguese and bore the sartorial marks of this familiarity, wearing hats and woolen or velvet fabrics and carrying walking sticks or umbrellas. The basic chiefly uniform of southeastern Nigeria—a long shirt made of luxurious fabric,
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference sometimes embroidered and often buttoned, over an expensive bottom wrapper, a Western man’s hat or local cap (usually red), a stick, cane, or staff, and heavy necklaces of ivory, coral, glass beads, or gold—was already solidifying when the British began to move up the River Niger during the latter half of the nineteenth century.12 Such difficult-to-obtain apparel, however, was never meant for ordinary men and was rarely offered to boys, even to the youthful heirs of indigenous merchant princes. Men of substance displayed their wealth and their global commodity connections through this elaborate body covering, and kept it jealously for themselves. Most southern Nigerian men during the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth tended to be barechested and wore some variation on a loincloth, tied at the waist and tucked in between their legs. Mercantile and colonial officials showed little interest in Nigerian men’s clothing, or lack thereof; male nudity is barely commented upon in colonial ethnographies. Basden ([1921] 1966: 59) may have waxed indignant over the fact that Igbo infants were unswaddled, considering this a cause of early childhood mortality, but once these infants grew into young boys, he saw little to interest his audience in the fact that boys did not wear even the minimal adornment of girls. He does, however, note that young men of the ‘‘Ikolopia’’ class (which he translates as ‘‘young bloods’’)—warriors and newly marriageable men—took some pains with their appearance, including smearing their bodies with camwood and oil, wearing dyed loincloths and ivory armbands, and plaiting their hair ‘‘in tails’’ (Basden [1921] 1966: 72). The only completely negative representations of Igbo male nudity to be found in the published colonial record are in sensationalist accounts of colonial prowess, like the following description of early-twentieth-century ‘‘cannibals’’ engaged in what the author characterizes as human sacrifice: Just before emerging [into a clearing that housed a shrine] I took in the scene, which I could see clearly by the light of the big fire, and it will always remain photographed in my brain. There were numerous brown legs in rapid motion, moving round and round to the rhythm of several tom-toms beaten by stark-naked natives, whose bodies glistened in the firelight from the sweat caused by their exertion. (Hives [1930] 1940: 28)
However, even in this instance, the colonial officer saved his greater distaste for the clothed (masked) figure in charge of the sacrifice: Under the shelter of this roof sat the most appallingly hideous figure I had ever seen. Its face was invisible, being covered by the upper portion of a tightly-fitting costume made of native-woven rope fibre. The ends of this costume at the wrists and ankles were fringed with small bells, while the dress itself was painted black and yellow stripes, giving a tigerish appearance. . . . But the horrible appearance of this creature was in his eyes and mouth, which could be seen through the openings cut in the face covering.
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The Naked and the Nude They were lurid-looking eyes that flashed red in the firelight like those of some savage beast. (Hives [1930] 1940: 29)
These were the well-worn tropes of the imperial, masculinist adventure story, in which the khaki-clad hero found and brought down the savage mastermind who was ‘‘stirring up the natives’’ with his seditious ways. The nakedness of the dancing and drumming men is considered an ordinary part of the scenery; Hives recognizes clearly that clothed men are those with the real power and importance in the society he has come to subdue and ‘‘civilize.’’ Here the African man who wears garments is perceived as sly and subtle—a trickster who not only fools the benighted, naked masses but is also trying to trick his betterdressed, would-be masters with a cloak of occult power. Under the mask, the diviner Kamalu wears only the usual Igbo man’s loincloth—as Hives discovers when he and his soldiers subdue the old man after a chase through the village. Stripping Kamalu of his ritual garments in the town’s public spaces proves to be an effective demonstration of Hives’s and the new British administration’s power, particularly as Hives is outwardly unmoved by the curses he receives and by the masquerade’s formidable reputation. As noted above, Igbo-speaking people during the colonial period reacted strongly to public denudings, understanding that much more than cloth was being taken away when clothing was ripped from the bodies either of upstarts or of elders. This might be the first time that a colonial administrator like Hives would display sartorial power over the bodies of senior Igbo men, but it would hardly be the last. Corporal punishments of various types, from floggings to hangings, would soon be part of the regular administration of ‘‘justice’’ (opposed to ‘‘juju’’ in the title of Hives’s popular memoir) in the protectorate, all of these punishments being accompanied by stripping the accused and exposing his body to public scrutiny. Rural southeastern Nigerian men who cooperated with the British could either wear very little or take on chieftaincy garb, and their attire would go unmentioned in the colonial record. Farmers’ undress was perceived as a form of honorable rural nudity, and such men’s bodies were usually described as muscular or sturdy: positive evaluations in the British lexicon of colonial masculinity. Once married, rural men seemed to see their own bodies more as functional instruments than as objects to be decorated, unless they were attending village festivals or trying to emulate urban styles. An important forum for the public display of some younger men’s bodies was wrestling bouts (mgba), where men coated their exposed skin with oil or clay, both for beauty and to be slippery in the grasp of their opponents. In any town, the title ‘‘husband/owner of wrestling’’ (di mgba) was much sought after. However, older married men with large farms and polygynous households were more keen to be known as ‘‘king of yam cultivation’’ (eze ji), a title that not only connoted success in agriculture but marked one out as a patron of other men
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference and a proper husband to one’s wives.13 The di mgba might rule in the wrestling circle and be seen as an appealing future spouse, but if he could not succeed to the dignities—including the clothing—of the eze ji as he grew older, he would be held of little account among other men. In the cities of southeastern Nigeria, male undress became unfashionable and was frowned upon by indigenous people and colonials alike. Manual laborers might strip down to ragged shorts that echoed the minimal body coverage of country loincloths, but most urban men aspired to clothing modeled on European attire. Khaki shorts and shirts were the style for urban African men after the early 1900s, and these fashions were associated not only with the colonial presence in the country but with mission schoolboy style. The militarized, ‘‘tropical’’ look was a required uniform for most mission schools, although some of the more elite institutions also required students to purchase and wear woolen suits, white shirts, ties, topees (pith helmets), socks, closed leather shoes, and particular types of underwear. A photograph of young male students at the elite Methodist Boys’ High School in Lagos during this period (Azikiwe 1970: facing page 21) demonstrates the high urban men’s style to which many aspired. These boys, including the future president of Nigeria’s First Republic, are wearing a variety of sport coats and suit jackets, bow ties, trousers, and fashionably short haircuts. In a more rural area at roughly the same time, the future Aro chief Edward Kanu Uku still had his body painted and hair plaited by his grandmother, even though he was enrolled in the local mission school (Uku 1993: 41). Although his body was a hybridized mix of precolonial and colonial male norms, Uku was becoming what Leith-Ross calls ‘‘ ‘singlet-minded’ ’’ in the early years of the twentieth century, a state that the elite Lagosian youth at Methodist Boys’ High School had already transcended. An example of this ‘‘singlet mindedness’’ can be seen in the teen-aged Uku’s refusal to marry a young woman found for him by his mother and grandmother on the grounds that ‘‘. . . she will probably never know how to dress like white women.’’ ‘‘Is that so important?’’ [asked his grandmother.] ‘‘Certainly I consider that my future wife ought to be educated. And in that case she will know how to wear English clothes.’’ (Uku 1993: 49)
Not content with covering himself and his grandmother’s uli body painting in the new attire, Uku had conceived a desire for a spouse who would, because of her education, also cover her body. This joint rejection of the bare dress style of their ancestors would thus demarcate the modernity not only of their persons but of the monogamous marriage he clearly envisioned for himself. Sylvia Leith-Ross noted in the early 1930s that young Nigerian men, like Edward Uku, were rapidly embracing European norms of full body coverage. But she worried that West African men’s acceptance of clothing included a fractured understanding of the social meanings of their new dress. She was
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The Naked and the Nude hardly alone in her concern, as we can see in the fictional portrait of ‘‘Mr. Johnson’’ by the former Nigerian district officer Joyce Carey or in other, less well known colonial-era novels like Waldo Fleming’s 1936 Talking Drums: A Boy’s Story of the African Gold Coast. The frontispiece of this lavishly illustrated young adult book about European adventuring in what would later become Ghana gives us a striking representation of this particular colonial anxiety. Philip Baring, the young British hero of the text, stands erect to the right of the illustration, a calm, white figure in topee and pressed tropical khakis with his gun holster prominently displayed at his waist. Philip faces the figure of the Asante ‘‘witch doctor,’’ Jumumu, who is tall, emaciated, hunched over, and almost completely naked, beating on relatives of the drums that confronted Frank Hives so memorably earlier in southeastern Nigeria. Between the two figures, seated on the ground and carefully watching the confrontation, is Utassi—the semi-educated factotum assigned to Philip— whose contested loyalty to Philip (representing the Crown) or to Jumumu (representing older, indigenous ways of life) makes up the emotional center of the novel. Utassi wears a brightly patterned European shirt and patched trousers in this picture; indeed, his clothing throughout the novel serves as a barometer of his wavering wish to be useful to the Europeans as well as his ambivalence toward the colonial project. When at last Utassi teaches Philip the language of the Asante drums, thus enabling his colonial master to finish off the reign of Jumumu with some carefully drummed propaganda, the African boy begins to wear only European shirts and trousers. Utassi, ‘‘rewarded’’ at the end of the novel by Philip’s determination to stay in the Gold Coast and become an ethnographer specializing in the study of Asante drumming, has the last words of the text, expressing a desire that the two of them will, at last, go on a much postponed fishing expedition during which they will ‘‘catch a fish as long as that Governor’s coat tail, maybe longer’n that!’’ (Fleming 1936: 307). Utassi may not know the rationale or history behind the colonial governor’s attire, but he understands very well—as did colonized southeastern Nigerian men—the power and authority that such dressing was meant to express to colonial subordinates. He also can subvert that power through its parody, imaginatively turning the governor’s coattail into a longed-for fish, meant for his own consumption. Being ‘‘singlet-minded,’’ then, was a way for southern Nigerian (and other West African) men to grasp some semblance of the new masculine power in their land and try to turn it to their advantage. In a cosmology where redness and heat were associated with an approved masculine aggression, the overdressed, overheated, colonial male body seems to have taken on positive connotations for those who witnessed the rapid ‘‘pacification’’ of their lands by a handful of these officers.14 Younger men’s undress styles, in the eyes of young men themselves, no longer carried the appropriate qualities of heat and power. Buying and wearing the singlet and a pair of shorts—the bare minimum cloth-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference
Frontispiece of Talking Drums by Waldo Fleming (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1936). Notice the contrast between the young, well-clothed colonial hero and his African foils.
ing of any male colonial administrator or missionary—rather than appearing bare-chested and in the finest loincloth, demonstrated an attachment to these modern, authoritative forms of masculinity. Experimenting with the possibilities offered by the flood of dress commodities suddenly available in southeastern Nigerian markets gave these same young men a chance to play with European sartorial conventions. It was this
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The Naked and the Nude playfulness that annoyed colonials, because it smacked of an intolerable lèse majesté. Yet, as Sylvia Leith-Ross (1943: 23) suggested, such appropriations were part and parcel of the hybridity of urban colonial life: If we can cut up the embroidered gowns of the Hausa man to make cushion covers, and turn women’s cloths into door curtains, is it surprising that the West Coast African wears pyjamas in the streets, and sees nothing odd in thrusting his head into a Balaclava helmet in the tropics?
After all, pyjamas originally entered English vocabulary and style by way of colonial encounters with the Turks and South Asians, and the ‘‘Balaclava helmet’’ was a type of woolen headgear worn by British military men after the Crimean War. West Africans in the early twentieth century were hardly the first people to adapt the garments of outsiders to their own, internal specifications and interests. British men had arrived on the west coast of Africa already garbed in an imperial bricolage of clothing, one that told the story of previous imperial victories and defeats. One of the colonialists’ most significant contributions to southern Nigerian men’s understanding of masculine bodies was a requirement that they be covered at all times and across the generations when seen in public. As Anne Hollander (1994) notes, European and North American men have a long history of being clothed, and their erotic and practical understanding of their bodies is intrinsically, because historically, bound up in wearing layers of cloth and other objects of adornment. Southeastern Nigerian men received this message loud and clear, becoming ‘‘singlet-minded’’ at an early moment in their engagement with their colonial gendered counterparts, while playing with what the coverings should be and how they should be arranged. In consequence, Nigerian male fashion still has one of the most diverse stylistic palettes in the world, going from many different local dress styles (Bastian 1996) to European three-piece business suits, variations on military and police uniforms, and the bag-wigs and robes of British jurisprudence. What is rarely seen, except among the madmen in the marketplace, is public male undress; for most men in this part of the continent, oto has become aberrant.
Some Conclusions: The Weapons of Nakedness I should have known he was mad at first sight. He was lean and wiry, all mad people come that way. Think about it; have you ever seen a stark raving, rag wearing, traffic controlling, and dread locked mad person on the streets with an ounce of spare flesh? Of course it can be argued that not all mad men are on the street, not all are naked and not all are outside the corridors of power but then those kinds of executive crase [pidgin English for ‘‘crazy’’] men and women can be excused for this comparison. (‘‘Another Driving Force,’’ 2002) By the time we knew what was happening we have all been stripped naked and beaten to coma despite all pleas that our hands were clean and I had to
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference tell my driver to find a way of escape as they had machetes and guns on them. (Chief Patrick O. Balonwu, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, describing his ordeal at the hands of a vigilante group in Onitsha, June 2000; in Ebele 2000) [T]hese frustrated mothers in the resources control struggle [between Nigerians living in the Delta and the oil multinationals] were reported to have threaten[ed] to or indeed resorted to stripping naked before their bewildered male POWs, a process which one of their spokesperson[s], Ms. Edworitse, explained to be their ‘‘weapon of nakedness.’’ And as the BBC Africa Service puts it, a fact which any true African must already know much well beyond the pornography of the act, ‘‘the display of nudity by wives, mothers, grandmothers [is] a damning protest and an act of shame [to] all those it is aimed at.’’ As they say in ‘Wafa’ (Warri), see me, see trouble o! (Ikhariale 2002)
In most southeastern Nigerian cultures, oto resonates powerfully. In a negative sense, it can be a sign of intense personal and social disorder. Positively, oto can mean health, youth, and an appropriate, public beauty. As noted above, oto has been a source of contestation and even social foment for southeastern Nigerians since the early colonial period. Bodies are important in this region, and not only because bodies are sexual or even because they enable productive labor. Bodies are also strategic sites of personal and social action, and southern Nigerians are body agents par excellence. They have used the potential for bodies’ covering or uncovering creatively, and for their own purposes, throughout the twentieth century and continue to do so, as the quotations above demonstrate, into the beginning of the twenty-first. There are some significant differences in what covered and uncovered bodies mean to southern Nigerians that remain locally gendered and generational, even after several centuries of contact with the forces of global modernity. Although southern Nigerians now produce soft-core magazine and film pornography (Bastian 2001a) that features photographed, as well as sketched, nudity and sexual poses, the undressed body has not yet been completely commodified or devalued by anyone’s gaze. The social use of oto remains a potent means to gain public attention and can be instrumental in focusing that attention for communal purposes. Several types of purposeful, public nudity continue to matter to southeastern Nigerians: notably, anti-social undress that seeks to make a statement against the community; enforced social undress that seeks to sanction erring community members and bring them back in line with society’s norms and values; and voluntary social undress that seeks to express and redress society’s deepest ruptures. Anti-social undress is the most individuated of the three and is associated in the present day with madness and intense selfishness. Nigerians tend to be repelled by this sort of nakedness and assign to it a status of deviance. The first quotation above, from an opinion column in Tempo Magazine, encapsulates some of this revulsion. A Lagos street madman is portrayed as not only naked,
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The Naked and the Nude but overly lean—a body condition that is associated with dryness and infertility throughout southern Nigeria—and eager to wreak havoc among the denizens of Lagos’s streets and notorious traffic jams. The street madman uses his antisocial undress to parody the ‘‘executive crase men and women,’’ such as the notoriously venal city police force and government administrators who make life intolerable for Nigerians who must live in the urban mess. Such nakedly selfish folk shame, according to the author of this column, not only the city but the entire country with their anti-social antics. One Nigerian communal response to naked self-interest is to shame the otherwise shameless by rendering their moral condition visible to the rest of society—stripping them of the social protection of their clothing, particularly the signs of their personal prosperity. Chief Patrick O. Balonwu, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, complains bitterly about his treatment at the hands of Onitsha vigilantes above, but he gives us little context for the public stripping that so damaged his self-esteem. In the rest of the news article, however, we learn that Chief Balonwu had gone, with several supporters, to see a leader of the Onitsha Traders Association (OTA), Chief Paulinus Ubanozie, to accuse the union of armed robbery. During the late-night confrontation between these powerful men, the OTA leader somehow died. In Igbo society no death is considered natural, and mysterious deaths during ‘‘discussions’’ between two elders are particularly suspect because of the supposed mystical powers of such men. The stripping and beating of the offending group by the dead man’s adherents therefore makes sense. When Chief Ubanozie was found dead in his bedroom, his clients immediately cried sorcery and proceeded to take away the clothing and other objects carried by the potential sorcerers—all of which, in Onitsha, are considered potent and saturated with occult power. Stripping these men naked was tantamount to rendering them less dangerous and less mobile, since no important Igbo man can afford to be seen wandering the streets without garments, like a common madman. This sanction was further enforced when the offended traders bundled the naked and insensible chiefs up in cars and drove them to Ochanja Market, locking them inside a stall there. The chiefs were released only after the busy market was open, forcing them to show their oto—and be shamed—in that most public of Igbo public spaces. The sartorial tokens of their wealth were absorbed back into the community as a fine for perceived anti-social behavior, never to be returned. Stripping, in southeastern Nigeria, is a far cry from being stripped. While being stripped is always considered a sanction against the individual, the social embrace of oto—at least for senior women—can be a sanction against some communal force. The Itsekiri and Ijaw women who protested against ChevronTexaco in July 2002, for instance, informed the world that nakedness was a ‘‘weapon’’ that they meant to use against the oil multinational and its employees in the Niger Delta. Women’s threatened nudity did, indeed, focus the attention of the corporation on them and temporarily gained the attention of an even larger, global audience as well. However, Delta women learned what
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference their foremothers first perceived in 1929: it is difficult to implement a bodybased shaming punishment against an institution that has no body on which to base its modesty, no fertility to be threatened by women’s communal control over reproductivity, and, in the end, no community to feel the force of the institution’s shame. Nakedness in southeastern Nigeria is, above all, a human weapon, wielded by people with the intention of eliciting a human, social response. In a world where naked greed poses as the chaste, nude icon of ‘‘the good life,’’ the locality, specificity, and beauty of oto may be on the verge of being lost. As Masquelier notes in her introduction to this volume, struggles over the undressed body are quintessentially moral struggles. Those who are empowered to categorize others as naked or nude are also empowered to determine the morality of undressed bodies and persons. In the case of people who have experienced colonialism and neocolonialism, this might mean that outsiders can conceptualize and implement their own vision of what is socially as well as sartorially appropriate. In the case of southeastern Nigeria, however, the struggle has never ended in such a clear-cut victory for the external and foreign. By using their undressed bodies against globalizing forces, as well as in tandem with those forces, southeastern Nigerians have managed to maintain an integrity that partakes of outside understandings about body coverage while reserving to themselves the power to remonstrate with foreign body ideals. Southern Nigerian bodies are not easily categorized or controlled—whether that control comes from within their distinct societies or from outside them. NOTES 1. Anne Hollander (1991: 259) has a more subtle reading of the classical, artistic representation of the nude: ‘‘Classical nudity in art . . . shows a desire to refer to human sexual nature directly, to seize undisguisedly on the theme of sex as a serious, perhaps even a sacred, aspect of nature itself.’’ Other critics of Clark’s position include Berger (1972), Nead (1992), and Cavallaro and Warwick (1998: 139). 2. See also Comaroff 1996. 3. Public nudity and insanity have long been associated in Western societies as well. For a comparative discussion of nakedness and extra-linguistic signs among early Quakers, see Bauman 1983: 84–94. I have written more about nakedness, marketplaces, and witchcraft confessions among Igbo-speaking peoples in Bastian 1993. For a discussion of madness and its treatment among colonial-era Nigerians, see Sadowsky 1999. 4. This is a struggle also seen in other African school systems. Stambach (2000: 136–41) has a lively discussion relating to the meaning of socks for delineating body boundaries and enacting school discipline among Chagga in rural Tanzania. 5. See Bastian 1996 for a discussion of the historical importance of shoes within elite southeastern Nigerian society. 6. It is more common to see men wearing a modest ‘‘singlet’’ (sleeveless white t-shirt) with their wrapper, cap, and face paint, however. This appears to be the functional equivalent of the women’s brassieres.
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The Naked and the Nude 7. Igbo body painting requires social connections and speaks directly to social relations. Even if a person paints his own face or extremities, he will ask the advice of ritual partners or lineage mates before displaying his adornment abroad. Often people who are intimate friends or kin will paint one another when rituals or other performances call for it. See Cole and Aniakor 1984: 39–46. 8. Reference to nakedness in these ritual contexts is what Douglas (1966: 64) might call an ‘‘external sign’’—that is, one that frames the ritual performance and helps to coordinate it both for those performing and for those watching the performance. 9. Ottenberg (1989: 297–320) notes that Afikpo Igbo do not consider true maturation to take place even at the end of their lengthy initiation ritual cycle; this continues to be a matter of years and deeds, as the young man demonstrates his social and individual worth to the community at large. 10. Cloth, camwood, and palm oil were important to indigenous commodity trade in the immediate precolonial and early colonial period. Igbo-speaking people bought white as well as dyed, patterned cotton cloths from other parts of the Nigerian southeast, often along with camwood and oil, using local currencies. See Ishichei 1978: 16–17, 77, for discussions of these objects in indigenous long-distance trading. The young woman in the center of this photograph is also wearing even more expensive cotton cloths from European ‘‘factories’’ (warehouses), originally made in South Asia. 11. Many European colonials—for instance, Leith-Ross herself—found the transitional fashions of young, colonized Igbo women to be tasteless and crude. As a sample of this discourse, see Leith-Ross ([1939] 1978: 191–92): ‘‘Naturally a much larger proportion of the population [of Owerri] is clothed, or more fully clothed, than in the bush, either native fashion with cotton cloth or European fashion. Hardly ever do the women and girls, if dressed in European fashion, show the least particle of taste either as regards colour or form, and the habit of wearing ill-fitting shoes spoils the Ibo woman’s greatest asset, her smooth flowing walk. It is particularly among church members that one finds an insistence on ‘frock’ and shoes.’’ 12. As Kenneth Dike (1956: 112) tells us, ‘‘White supercargoes [traders] had managed to convince Africans [in southeastern Nigeria] that articles of clothing such as old soldiers’ jackets and cocked hats bought at little cost at Monmouth Street, were a fair exchange for their raw materials.’’ Such clothing predated even the earliest of British merchants in the area, however. Meek (1937: 6) quotes a late-seventeenthcentury French explorer, Barbot, who meets the king of Bonny, nattily attired in ‘‘an old-fashioned scarlet coat, laced with gold and silver, very rusty, and a fine hat upon his head, but barefooted.’’ For more contemporary examples of the long-lived, hybrid style that came of the coastal trade, see Michelman and Erekosima 1992: 172–73; Eicher and Erekosima 1995: 148, 157–58; Sumberg 1995: 173. 13. The centrality of yam cultivation to the construction of Igbo masculinity in the precolonial period, and throughout most of the colonial period as well, cannot be overemphasized. An excellent representation of this Igbo ethos of masculinity (as well as its demise) can be seen in Phanuel Egejuru’s 1993 novel The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten. 14. The colonial male body was also appraised in a shrewd and negative fashion, as is evidenced by the satirical statues of colonial officials executed by Igbo mbari house artists in the early decades of the twentieth century and by the onye ocha (white person) masquerades still popular in the beginning of the twenty-first. These statues and mas-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference querade characters are always fully dressed, generally wearing not only the ubiquitous khakis but belts, high woolen socks, topees, and large wristwatches. The mbari statues sit stiffly behind desks or stand just as stiffly, ordering people about with batons outstretched. The onye ocha masquerade characters in Onitsha speak in a high, squeaky voice and are prone to flogging passersby. European women also appear as mbari statues and in masquerades, although with less frequency. See Cole 1982: 206–207 for a discussion of the beke (white man) figure in mbari houses, and Cole and Aniakor 1984: 150, fig. 262 for a wonderful photograph of an onye ocha figure, complete with topee and writing in a notebook. This photograph also appeared on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s 1986 volume Writing Culture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aba Commission of Inquiry. 1930. Notes of Evidence Taken by the Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into the Disturbance in the Calabar and Owerri Provinces, December, 1929. London: Waterlow. Agbasiere, Joseph Thérèse. 2000. Women in Igbo Life and Thought. London: Routledge. ‘‘Another Driving Force.’’ 2002. Opinion column. Tempo Magazine. Lagos, Nigeria. http://www.allafrica.com/stories/200203060436.html. Accessed 31 July 2002. Ardener, Shirley. 1973. ‘‘Sexual Insult and Female Militancy.’’ In Perceiving Women, ed. Shirley Ardener, 127–57. Oxford: Berg. Azikiwe, Nnamdi. 1970. My Odyssey: An Autobiography. New York: Praeger. Basden, G. T. [1921] 1966. Among the Ibos of Nigeria: An Account of the Curious & Interesting Habits, Customs & Beliefs of a Little Known African People by One Who Has For Many Years Lived amongst Them on Close & Intimate Terms. Reprint, London: Frank Cass. Bastian, Misty L. 1992. ‘‘The World as Marketplace: Historical, Cosmological, and Popular Constructions of the Onitsha Market System.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. ————. 1993. ‘‘ ‘Bloodhounds Who Have No Friends’: Witchcraft and Locality in the Nigerian Popular Press.’’ In Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, pp. 129–66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ————. 1996. ‘‘Female ‘Alhajis’ and Entrepreneurial Fashions: Flexible Identities in Southeastern Nigerian Clothing Practice.’’ In Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-colonial Africa, ed. Hildi Hendrickson, pp. 97–132. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ————. 2000. ‘‘Young Converts: Christian Missions, Gender, and Youth in Onitsha, Nigeria, 1880–1929.’’ Anthropological Quarterly 73(3): 145–58. ————. 2001a. ‘‘Acadas and Fertilizer Girls: Young Nigerian Women and the Romance of Middle Class Modernity.’’ In Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson, pp. 53–76. New York: St. Martin’s. ————. 2001b. ‘‘Dancing Women and Colonial Men: The Nwaobiala of 1925.’’ In ‘‘Wicked’’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy, pp. 109–29. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. ————. 2002. ‘‘ ‘Vultures of the Marketplace’: Southeastern Nigerian Women and Discourses of the Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women’s War) of 1929.’’ In Women in African
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The Naked and the Nude Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyiki Musisi, pp. 260–81. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bauman, Richard. 1983. Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Cavallaro, Dani, and Alexandra Warwick. 1998. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress, and Body. Oxford: Berg. Clark, Kenneth. [1956] 1972. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cole, Herbert M. 1982. Mbari: Art and Life among the Owerri Igbo. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cole, Herbert M., and Chike C. Aniakor. 1984. Igbo Arts: Community and Chaos. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California. Comaroff, Jean. 1996. ‘‘The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject.’’ In Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, ed. David Howes, pp. 19–38. New York: Routledge. Dike, Kenneth. 1956. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ebele, Cyprian. 2000. ‘‘SAN, Four Others Stripped Naked.’’ Post Express Wired. Lagos, Nigeria. http://www.postexpresswired.com/. Accessed 31 July 2000. Egejuru, Phanuel. 1993. The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten. Ibadan, Nigeria: Heinemann Nigeria. Eicher, Joanne B., and Tonye V. Erekosima. 1995. ‘‘Why Do They Call It Kalabari? Cultural Authentification and the Demarcation of Ethnic Identity.’’ In Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time, ed. Joanne B. Eicher, pp. 139–64. Oxford: Berg. Fabian, Johannes. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fleming, Waldo. 1936. Talking Drums: A Boy’s Story of the African Gold Coast. New York: Doubleday, Doran. Granville, Reginald K., and Felix N. Roth. 1899. ‘‘Notes on the Jekris, Sobos and Ijos of the Warri District of the Niger Coast Protectorate.’’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 28(1–2): 104–26. Hives, Frank. [1930] 1940. Juju and Justice in the Jungle. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hollander, Anne. 1975. Seeing through Clothes. New York: Avon. ————. 1991. Moving Pictures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ————. 1994. Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. New York: Knopf. Ikhariale, Mike. 2002. ‘‘The Niger-Delta Struggle and the ‘Weapon Nakedness.’ ’’ Editorial. http://www.gamji.com/NEWS1526.htm. Accessed 9 October 2004. Isichei, Elizabeth. 1978. Igbo Worlds: An Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical Descriptions. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Leith-Ross, Sylvia. [1939] 1978. African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria. Reprint, New York: AMS Press.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ————. 1943. African Conversation Piece. London: Hutchinson. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 2000. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Meek, C. K. 1937. Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe: A Study in Indirect Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michelman, Susan O., and Tonye Erekosima. 1992. ‘‘Kalabari Dress in Nigeria: Visual Analysis and Visual Implications.’’ In Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, ed. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher, pp. 164–82. Oxford: Berg. Nead, Lynda. 1992. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. New York: Routledge. Okonta, Ike, and Oronto Douglas. 2001. Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Ottenberg, Simon. 1989. Boyhood Rituals in an African Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sadowsky, Jonathan. 1999. Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stambach, Amy. 2000. Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, Community, and Gender in East Africa. New York: Routledge. Sumberg, Barbara. 1995. ‘‘Dress and Ethnic Differentiation in the Niger Delta.’’ In Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time, ed. Joanne B. Eicher, pp. 165–81. Oxford: Berg. Talbot, P. Amaury. [1923] 1967. Life in Southern Nigeria: The Magic, Beliefs and Customs of the Ibibio Tribe. Reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble. Turner, Terence. 1980. ‘‘The Social Skin.’’ In Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, pp. 112– 40. London: Temple Smith. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Uku, Edward Kanu. 1993. Seeds in the Palm of Your Hand. Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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two
Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter Margaret Wiener
In 1933, a travel book offered the following alluring description of the island of Bali: ‘‘A modest woman has nothing to hide,’’ is the theory of Bali. The first days you are on the island, your eyes nearly pop out at the sight of so many ‘‘Eves,’’—but after a few days of seeing these bronzed natives, busy about their living, entirely unconscious of their bared beautiful breasts, you no longer notice them. Their dark skin seems like a garment. (Yates 1933: 76–77)
Fast forward to 2002, when a tourist planning a trip to Bali could find the following on the World Wide Web: The Balinese remain conservative and traditional. . . . When not on the beach or at the pool, please wear shorts or a swimsuit cover-up. Swimsuits, a swimtop and sarong, etc., are not acceptable attire on any street. . . . Nude bathing is illegal and impolite. (Island Dreams Tours 2001)
Reading these two descriptions, one can only marvel that they purport to describe the same place. Strikingly, both texts were written for the same pur-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference pose: to stimulate tourism to the island of Bali, the most internationally famous province in the Republic of Indonesia. These two quotations raise a host of analytical issues. Clearly, Balinese styles of dress have undergone a dramatic change. What happened between 1933 and 2002 and what role did tourism itself play in changing Balinese practices and values? Moreover, precisely who counts as undressed or potentially improperly dressed also has changed: the appealing sight of bared Balinese breasts has given way to the appalling prospect of nude tourist sunbathers. Two distinct, yet ultimately connected, modernist desires appear here at odds with one another: if the 1930s offered the promise of paradisiacal primitivism (from the tourist’s point of view), the allure of a paradisiacal modernity played a prime role in the making of contemporary Indonesians. To what extent did such fantasies mutually influence one another?1 Changes in dress and in the meaning of a bare upper body, from the 1920s to the present, raise questions about the different ways that style can signify socially. As a means of asserting identity and enacting subjectivity, dress articulates one juncture of historically produced social constraints, cultural meanings, and individual desires (see Schulte Nordholt 1997). Dress is both a form of self-expression and a statement to others, a complicated message within what are increasingly, in the globalized twenty-first century, layered cultural codes. Dress creates identities in part by asserting affiliations and in part by producing differences of the most material kind. What is dress to some people is, however, undress to others. All societies recognize states of undress as potentially significant. Moreover, what counts as being undressed depends more on context—on who, where, when, and what— than on absolute measures. People may be judged undressed not only when naked, but for exposing certain body parts, for leaving the body undecorated, or even for wearing clothing ‘‘inappropriate’’ to a particular situation. Undress is also a relative concept, socially produced and, like all social significations, a product of contests for power among various groups. For Euro-Americans in different time periods and in different social positions, for instance, undress has variously, and sometimes simultaneously, signaled sexuality, poverty, vulnerability, aggression, immorality, innocence, health, and leisure. Since the 1920s undress has figured in Bali’s construction as a tourist paradise. Exposed body parts—especially bared breasts—crafted key desires informing and produced by tourism in Bali. Two discourses of culture meet in the chatter around undress: the anthropological culture of everyday practice, and the self-conscious and explicit culture that forms an object of discussion by Balinese intellectuals, Indonesian officials, and promoters of tourism. Following the publication of a volume containing numerous photographs of Balinese women with bare upper torsos as well as photographs of women bathing, the bare-breasted Balinese woman quickly became a staple of Western images of Bali. It served, among other things, as a marketing device for an American lingerie company through the 1940s. By the time developers tar-
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter geted tourism as a major source of foreign exchange in the 1970s and 1980s, however, Balinese dress codes had altered. Balinese women no longer exposed their breasts. Now it was Europeans, Americans, and Australians romping nude on Balinese beaches who inspired comment and fantasy, for Balinese and other Indonesians. I begin by examining the role that Balinese (un)dress played in producing fantasies about the island for foreign visitors in the 1920s and 1930s. Such fantasies emerged from mythic formations centered on the naked body, paradise, and nature that developed new relevance in revaluations of European civilization following World War I. But a ‘‘tourist gaze’’ focused on uncovered breasts generated discomfort among a new class of Balinese intent on pursuing the paradise promised by European modernity. Educated in colonial schools, this class internalized notions of dress and undress forged originally through Christian piety, bourgeois respectability, and historicist narratives of progress and translated these for local consumption. Finally, I turn to the era of mass tourism that began in the 1970s, when Indonesian and Balinese authorities disconcertingly found themselves faced with increasing undress on the part of tourists.
Bare Breasts and the Tourist Gaze Images associating Bali with unclothed maidens can be traced to a particular source: a two-volume work on Bali published in Germany in 1920. Its author, Gregor Krause, was a German national who had served as a medical doctor in the Netherlands East Indies army. For 18 months in 1912–14, he belonged to an occupying force stationed on the island following the conquest or voluntary submission of Bali’s remaining independent kingdoms to the Dutch colonial state (Mabbett 1988). In Bali, Krause believed that he had discovered Eden. He begins his book with a section entitled ‘‘Nature,’’ extolling the island’s tropical beauty and the accord that prevailed between humans and beasts under the benevolent eye of invisible gods (even snakebites, he claims, were rare). According to Krause, the social life of Balinese villages and the cooperative cultivation of rice proved equally harmonious. After a brief historical detour on ‘‘Princes’’ and ‘‘Hinduism,’’ Krause turns to the presumptively female domestic sphere, to expound on one of Bali’s main attractions: Balinese women are beautiful, as beautiful as one can imagine, with a physiologically simple and dignified beauty, full of Eastern nobility and natural chastity. Their shoulders are almost of the same breadth as their hips. Carrying every burden on their heads with raised arms develops their shoulders and their muscular system, and the always powerful great chest muscles provide the most favorable foundation for beautifully formed breasts. . . . Their clothing cannot enhance this beauty but it has the merit of not
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference diminishing it. A rectangular piece of cloth, usually dark blue cotton, reaches from the navel to the feet. A shorter piece mostly of flowered material of the same shape constitutes the under-garment. The two overlap on opposite sides and are held in place by a thicker yellow, green or red cloth or piece of silk, wrapped around several times and serving as a belt. The upper part of the body is bare—though only a pure woman may appear thus; wearing a jacket is the sign of a prostitute.
The rectangular cloth Krause describes Balinese call a kamben (in high Balinese, wastra). Techniques of draping mark gender: men tie their kamben to fall to the knees. While dark blue cotton may have been in vogue when Krause lived on Bali, color and fabric fluctuate, indexing not only style but class and occasion. At that time men as well as women left their chests uncovered, at least for everyday routines. Krause concludes his account of women’s dress as follows: A narrow white (or more rarely black) veil with an open weave hangs from one shoulder and is used to cover the bosom when this is necessary, as from awe when entering a temple or palace or a house where Europeans live— though this latter is not out of awe but from the same feeling of shame that Adam and Eve felt when they realised that they were naked. ([1920] 1988: 55)
Here it is important to distinguish Krause’s observations—that different rules of dress mark certain places—from his explanations (awe). To expand on the observations: not only women but also men covered their chests in temples and palaces (leaving aside for the moment European residences). They did so as well when visiting priests or healers. It is no longer possible to be certain what such practices meant, although Balinese say that the clothing now worn on such occasions indicates respect (in Indonesian, hormat ). In Krause’s book we see key elements of the ‘‘tourist gaze’’ in Bali, especially its interwar version, under construction. I borrow the idea of ‘‘the tourist gaze’’ as a critical element of the analysis of tourism from Urry, who derives it from Foucault’s discussion of clinical medicine. For Urry, tourism as a historical phenomenon involved the formation of its own distinct gaze—or gazes. Indeed, Urry comments that ‘‘[t]here is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society, by social group and by historical period’’ (1990: 1). Nonetheless, all tourist gazes share certain features. They are, for one, constructed in terms of difference, especially difference from the tourist’s ordinary routines, particularly those of work. To understand the particulars of a specific tourist gaze one must analyze the specific practices and signifiers that shape it, including the mundane experiences that form its primary points of contrast. Places become subject to the tourist gaze by evoking pleasurable ‘‘daydreams and fantasies’’ and by generating experiences that differ from those of every day. Such daydreams and fantasies arise from representations, which both ‘‘construct and reinforce’’ the gaze; photography is a notable element in this process (Urry 1990: 3, 140).
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter Krause’s book forms a bridge between precolonial and interwar tourist images of Bali. Prior to its conquest, Bali was not a place amenable to casual travel.2 European visitors mostly consisted of emissaries of the Dutch East India Company or—from the 1820s—the Dutch colonial state in Batavia, who sought to gather intelligence, establish diplomatic and trade relations, punish intransigent princes, conduct scientific studies, or carry out medical missions. Their reports represent Balinese as bellicose and bold, often contrasting their brashness (admiringly) with Javanese groveling. Although some comment appreciatively on female figures, they hardly present Balinese women as paragons of beauty. Indeed, several describe them as coarse, even dirty, an effect of hard physical labor that bore comparison with the laziness of Balinese men. All of this forms a striking contrast to accounts of Bali in the 1920s and 1930s.3 Since Krause had been posted to Bali by the colonial state, his account may be read as one of the many descriptions of the island produced by men on official business. Yet its content marks a fundamental break: not only did his book literally change the way Bali was seen, but it also attracted radically different visitors, with no direct connection to the work of empire and with novel interests and concerns. Krause offers insight into some of the practices and signifiers in relation to which a tourist gaze centered on Bali—and particularly on Balinese women— became elaborated. While he was hardly the first to comment on Balinese forms of dress, Krause’s portrayal of the island, the timing of his work, and his photographs all contributed to his book’s impact.4 Passages such as the ones quoted above present Bali as a Rousseauian Eden—where women form the entry point to paradise, rather than the reason for its loss. As in Eden, they go uncovered because they still possess the chastity of innocence. For Krause, the snake enters this garden in the guise of Europeans, who, themselves fallen (because possessed of the knowledge of good and evil), threaten to bring the same fate to those with whom they come into contact. Such images placed Bali in dialogue with tropes familiar from European images of non-Europeans. Undress among the latter long marked a heathen, savage, or primitive ‘‘otherness.’’ According to Baudet (1965), two impulses had marked responses to and representations of non-Europeans since the time of the Greeks, and in fact contributed to Europe’s production as an imaginary. In interactions with non-Europeans, Europeans typically assumed a position of superiority. At the same time, accounts of non-European ways of life frequently served as a source of explicit critique of dominant values and practices. Undress seems to partake of both poles, sometimes simultaneously. Certainly Christian (and later bourgeois) assumptions about propriety, sexuality, and self-control shaped responses to ‘‘naked savages’’ in voyages of discovery and civilizing projects. Yet some regarded nakedness positively. Whether as innocents still living in a state of grace in a paradise where sin was not yet known, or
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference as natural beings free from the constraints and restraints of bourgeois selfsurveillance and discipline, people whose dress revealed more of the body than European ruling classes deemed appropriate became objects of romantic fantasy. So Gauguin expressed his vision of the South Seas in Noa-Noa and his art. Bali participated in such reveries: there tourists could experience a mystical Asian civilization laced with the volcanic island, tropical fruit, and barebreasted eroticism of the Pacific.5 Clearly, for Europeans undress remains rich in significance, both positive and negative. Cultural meanings elaborated at specific historical moments still resonate strongly in later ones, so that multiple and contradictory associations co-exist. On the one hand, the association of certain body parts—the breasts and the genitalia—with sexuality ineluctably subjected exposure of such surfaces to moral and political regimes. Authorities often treated such exposures as occasions of sin or social disorder—tempting fornication outside of sanctioned relationships. Yet at the same time, European societies produced an aesthetic tradition centered on nudes that drew on admiration for the nonChristian body culture of classical Greece. As Krause’s rhetoric suggests, Genesis offered a productive framework in which to both condemn and praise the naked body. For those steeped in Christian traditions, nakedness could serve as evidence of the depravity and savagery of the people they encountered. But it also generated more positive assessments. European intellectuals had long attempted to pinpoint Eden’s terrestrial location, and encounters with unclothed peoples unperturbed by the sight of each other’s bodies expanded the geographic scope of such speculations (Baudet 1965). In short, undress could be judged negatively as an indication of rampant sexual indulgence, or taken as evidence of the blissful innocence and ignorance that preceded the Fall. Judgments about unclothed bodies grew more complex as discursive formations centered on nature emerged to supplement and compete with biblical narratives. Unclothed savages also came to represent man in the state of nature, prior to the corrupting or uplifting influence of civilization. By the late nineteenth century Euro-Americans not only theorized such forms of life— which perhaps still prevailed among ‘‘primitives’’ (literally ‘‘natural men,’’ in Germanic languages)—but mobilized new practices to create that happy state in the midst of culture. Hence going nude out of doors came to form the basis of a utopian countercultural movement.6 Given his theme, Krause could hardly have picked a better time to publish his work than the early 1920s. The old imaginary in which the non-West could serve as an arena to project dissatisfactions with the West by offering tantalizing promises of an alternative and better existence again sprang to life in the aftermath of the First World War. Bali appeared even more of a peaceful paradise by contrast with the hellish wartime experiences of the author and many of his readers; ironically, since Krause came to Bali with a conquering
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter army. Indeed, he continually juxtaposes admiring commentary about Balinese culture and society with brief allusions to the war. These dialogic reminders of the temporal context of the book’s publication formed an important element in Bali’s appeal. As Fussell notes (1980), the Great War dealt a major blow to faith in the superiority of European civilization, a faith essential to justifications of colonial rule. Much changed in metropolitan culture in the 1920s. In some circles, this became a time to rebel against the constraints of bourgeois society and to seek new dreams and inspirations, in part through travel. Flappers in short dresses and bobbed hair, aficionados of jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, and avant-garde artists (such as the surrealists, Dadaists, and Brecht) whose paintings, performances, and literature challenged naturalized norms of perception exemplify postwar developments. Skepticism about civilization popularized Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and the repression of sexual impulses: reason became suspect, attention to the body a sign of health. No doubt this contributed to the growth of primitivism in the European metropoles. It also produced a market for an anthropology that based its authority on face-to-face encounters with authentic primitives, especially those living on exotic islands where people wore little in the way of coverings.7 Such interwar movements included new practices of bodily exposure and transformation. Partly or fully uncovered bodies symbolized liberation—nature’s triumph over culture. As hemlines moved above the knees, both sexes began to expose their bodies on sunny southern beaches, exchanging the pallor that once signified gentility for a ‘‘healthy’’ bronzing that intimated leisure and thus wealth (Turner and Ash 1976: 75–82). Krause’s vision of Bali was hardly limited to a German readership. Krause had a passion for photography: the first edition of his work contained 400 photographs, a mere tenth of the 4,000 he took during his sojourn on the island (Mabbett 1988). Even subsequent editions, which cut the number in half, provided more than ample suggestion of the delights awaiting visitors. Unlike earlier studio photographs of Balinese, Krause’s provided candid, even clandestine, glimpses into everyday life. In particular, he includes copious shots of people bathing, an activity that for Balinese can be public because of an understanding that men and women will not look each other’s way. Page after page reveals beautiful young women, in partial and complete undress. Nor did Krause only focus on females; images of young men and boys sluicing their bodies in rivers abound as well. The photographs of bathers insert Balinese into another European representational tradition: that of the nude. For in not only taking but also publishing such pictures, Krause turns the cooling pleasure of water on bare skin into an image to be consumed by a (implicitly male) spectator. As John Berger notes, objecting to glorifications of the nude by art historians such as Kenneth Clarke, nudity differs from nakedness:
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (1972: 54)
Thus Bali’s colonial-era tourist gaze involved the dominating voyeurism of white male spectatorship. While many of Krause’s photographs of women in ordinary daily attire clearly were taken with the subject’s permission, they invite a similar positioning of observer to observed. It is hardly surprising, under the circumstances, that all who reproduced that gaze later insisted on the virtue and modesty of those they represented. Krause’s work created a minor sensation. Almost immediately, the publisher issued a second (shorter and less expensive) edition, and then a third. Nearly a century later, it remains in print—currently in an English edition published by a Thai press. In part due to Krause, women’s bare breasts became a selling point, encouraging tourists to visit Bali and attempt to indulge their fantasies about paradise or easy sex (to the extent the two were distinguishable). It is important to note, however, that Bali’s emergence as a plausible locale for the construction of a tourist gaze depended not only on desires stimulated by representations such as Krause’s or on contemporary utopian yearnings but also on the development of a tourist infrastructure in the Dutch East Indies. Shortly after Bali’s full incorporation into the imperial state in 1908, a conglomeration of private enterprises, assisted by the colonial government, opened a tourist bureau, which initially focused on Java. Efforts to extend tourism to the rest of the archipelago, in particular to Bali, began in 1914, after Dutch occupying forces finally withdrew from the island. These efforts finally bore fruit in 1924, when the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM), the government steamship company with a monopoly on interisland shipping, began weekly service to Bali from various ports on Java and the Celebes (Picard 1996: 23).8 Tourism proved increasingly lucrative for the KPM, which previously had transported copra, cattle, coffee, and pigs from Bali (Hanna 1976: 105). Tourists entered at the northern port of Buléléng and the residency capital of Singaraja, to be whisked via automobile to accommodations in the south—especially, after 1928, to KPM’s new Bali Hotel in Denpasar. Inspired by the success of these government enterprises, private entrepreneurs soon appeared on the scene, including agents for American Express and Thomas Cook and builders of more adventurous accommodations (such as two bungalow-style hotels on Kuta Beach). New forms of transport—cruise ships, private yachts, and even airplanes (three flights a week to an airport near Denpasar by 1938)—soon followed (Picard 1996: 23–25). Most visitors stayed less than a week, although a number of individuals, with artistic interests, settled in indefinitely. These expatriates proved instrumental in the continuing manufacture of images of Bali.9 But even the visual and written representations produced by more casual visitors never failed to
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter call attention to Balinese breasts, drawing simultaneously upon sexual innuendo and Edenic impressions. Consider, for instance, the opening of a book appropriately entitled The Last Paradise: The belles of Bali, where were they? I had seen men leer, and nudge, saying; ‘‘They don’t wear any shirts.’’ Men’s voices had grown deeper and their eyes dim, as they spoke of chaste dryads in a tropic Arcady.
Initially disappointed on landing in Buléléng (‘‘Well, here they were, in their sarongs and tight-waisted, long-sleeved, sloppy bajus. I might as well have been in Sourabaya, port of Java, whence I had sailed last night’’), the author finds his expectations fulfilled just over the mountains, as he makes his way south: As we descended, the air softened to a balmy warmth that kept the freshness of the mountains. Then appeared a solitary female figure, swinging toward us up the road. The sun shone russet on an earthen pot above her head, matched to the stripes of a bold sarong trailing easily from waist to feet. A scarf fell carelessly from a shoulder, and the bronze bowls of maiden breasts projected angular, living shadows. She walked majestically, with slowly swinging arms, with never a glance for staring eyes. (Powell 1930: 4–6)
Nor did only white men find occasion for reflection and reverie in bared female chests. For Ardaser Wadia, a middle-class Parsi from Bombay, they evoke the cult of healthy bodies promoted by the naturist and physical culture movements, and a rejection of industrial capitalism. Wadia begins his own travel book by quoting a letter by a factory hand that he had read in a Manchester newspaper while engaged in a study of manufacturing. Its author described a life that, while not devoid of material comforts, led him to reflect that ‘‘he was not free and at liberty to do what he liked with himself, being tied hand and foot to an iron system of mass production which virtually made a slave of him for the six days of the week, and let him loose on the seventh, with the sole object, it seemed, of letting his exhausted energies recuperate sufficiently to make him grind once again in its iron service for a further period of six days’’ (1936: 3–4). Falling asleep in the midst of such thoughts one Sunday, the worker dreamed of a verdant tropical island, filled with rice fields, palm trees, and ‘‘semi-nude native women, beautifully rounded and chubby-faced, striding up and down the straggling highways’’ (1936: 4). The factory hand wondered if this place really existed; the book is Wadia’s answer. A more categorical confirmation of Urry’s insight about the role of dreams and fantasies in the tourist gaze would be hard to find. It was not until some twenty years after reading the mill hand’s letter that Wadia discovered Bali, on a cruise in 1936.10 The sight of ‘‘semi-nude, beautifully moulded, brown-skinned native women, carrying on their well-poised heads baskets plentifully loaded with odds and ends of their marketing’’ (1936: 18) assured him that he had finally located the island about which he too had
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference come to dream. There he ‘‘came in living contact with the world-famous, happy-go-lucky, nature clad Balinese maiden and made copious mental notes on her quaint ways and feminine charms’’ (1936: 30). Like other visitors, he supplemented his observations with photographs. An encounter with the living embodiment of Wadia’s female fantasy, whom he dubs the ‘‘Belle of Bali,’’ forms the climax of the book. She inspires pages of reflection on the virtues of nature over artifice, beginning with a complaint about the tense body evident in most studio photographs, which he compares to his own photos of the ‘‘Belle’’ (‘‘Note again how relaxed are her arms! How naturally they drop from the shoulder-blades, displaying not the slightest tension anywhere from the top of the blade down to the very tips of her fingers’’ [1936: 44]). Even naturism’s cult of the healthy body falls short compared to everyday life in Bali: In Bali . . . [s]un-bathing is indulged . . . all day long in all its golden glory, not sun-burning in all its disfiguring browning as in the popular bathingresorts of Europe. . . . All my life I have been a staunch upholder of Naturism and have practised Nudism and Sun-bathing on my lonely rambles up the hills on Sundays. . . . [But] nudists and bathers betray . . . a consciousness as of doing something wrong, or rather of something that is ‘‘not done.’’ (1936: 47–48)
Wadia puts his observations to pedagogic use, aimed especially at metropolitan models of femininity. He commends female readers to ‘‘note carefully every single detail of that embodiment of perfect womanly carriage[: ] . . . [the] rhythmic swing of the hands, the gentle, almost imperceptible turn of the hips, the easy unimpeding forward action of the left foot, and the perfect poise of the head and shoulders’’ (1936: 31). Not surprisingly, he rejects as artificial the use of cosmetics, soaps, and garments that supposedly enhance sex appeal. Wadia was not the only one to see in Balinese beauty something instructive for the modern woman. Eva Yates, whose words opened this chapter, clearly could not avoid commenting on the loveliness of Balinese women with uncovered breasts. Ultimately, female tourists saw themselves through the gaze that men focused on Balinese breasts—and that gaze could follow them home. Consider, for instance, the strange tale of the Bali Bra. At the time of Bali’s discovery by tourism, the brassiere was a relatively new invention, in which Americans had played the central role. Despite the French-sounding name, the term was first used in the American magazine Vogue in 1907; not long after, an American socialite improvised many features of the garment itself, including the uncovered midriff and the separation of the breasts (Ewing 1978: 115). In European capitals, the garment became associated with American modernism. Americans formed a high proportion of visitors to Bali in the interwar period (Picard 1996). Given the fame of Balinese breasts, perhaps it should not
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter be surprising that a bra company made use of Bali’s name and aura. A couple who started making bras in 1927 chose ‘‘Bali’’ as the name of their first product and, later, of their corporation.11 Into the 1940s, their advertisements highlighted the images through which Bali had become famous. A drawing of a bare-breasted Balinese woman in a sarong, supporting a basket on her head, served as the company’s logo. Many ads from the 1930s feature a woman posing in a Bali bra whose posture strongly resembles that of women in some of Krause’s photographs. Indeed Krause’s description of how ‘‘[c]arrying every burden on their heads with raised arms develops their shoulders and their muscular system’’ ([1920] 1988: 55) could almost be ad copy, except, of course, that the straps and support of new fabrics rather than exertion formed the ‘‘foundation for beautifully formed breasts’’ for modern American matrons. As a 1937 ad noted, ‘‘A beautiful bust-line is the heritage of the women of Bali. . . . the modern woman achieves the same lovely contours—youthfully rounded, definitely separated—in perfect comfort.’’ (As if anything could be more comfortable than no bra at all!) Other ads elaborate on Bali’s erotic allure. Copy in a 1938 ad proclaims, ‘‘Returning tourists . . . do they rave about the flora and fauna of BALI? Or its temples, volcanoes and lagoons? . . . Well, maybe—but mostly they tell of the contours of the native maidens. ‘‘PERFECT!’’ they say. (And we clever moderns attain the same graceful upward-outward curves with these ingeniously designed BALI brassieres).’’ In a similar vein, the ‘‘clever modern’’ in the ad reproduced here declares, ‘‘A little pagan in BALI taught me a thing or two!’’ Three drawn panels follow: in the first, a male and female tourist look at a row of five seated dancers, posed against a mountain and a pagoda (indexing a Balinese temple). The caption reads, ‘‘BALI is called an ‘Island Paradise’ and it certainly is worth going half way round the world to see. . . .’’ In the second, a Balinese woman with bare breasts and sarong stands against a mountain and a palm tree as our modern woman comments, ‘‘But the loveliest thing we saw there was a native girl whose figure would have started a stampede in the stag line back home!’’ Finally, admiring herself in her Bali Bra, the modern woman proclaims, ‘‘She taught me that naturally beautiful contours are more glamorous than the prettiest face in the world . . . and when I got home I bought a BALI Bow Bra to give me those same perfect contours!’’ Culture, in the form of the Bali Bra, ‘‘achieves Nature’s own conception of a perfect bustline.’’ The bra serves as the modern version of the exhausting exertions of Balinese women. Like other technological innovations, the bra liberates modern women from the drudgery of the physically laborious work marking archaic ways of life. The bra’s association with the place waned in the 1940s, with Japan’s incursions into Asia (especially those colonized areas now known for the first time as ‘‘Southeast Asia’’). An ad following the war notes, ‘‘There’s Nothing in the World like the new Bali Hi,’’ the real island having been replaced in American imaginations by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.12
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference
A romantic shot by Krause of a young woman arranging her hair. ∫ G. Krause.
Making National Modernity—and Tradition And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.—Genesis 3.7
At the very moment when visitors extolled the beauty of Balinese bodies, rumors began to circulate that one of Bali’s main attractions already was becoming extinct. The perpetual tourist concern with arriving too late to experience the specific and authentic charms of a place, the worry that prior tourism already had done its destructive work, focused special attention on whether Balinese breasts remained visible. Thus in 1937 Miguel Covarrubias could write, ‘‘ ‘Isn’t Bali spoiled?’ is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler from Bali—meaning, is the island overrun by tourists and are the Balinese all wearing shirts?’’ (1937: 391). Nearly twenty years later, under vastly different conditions, Jef Last notes that one of the first questions people
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter
Bali as imagined by the Bali Bra Company
in Amsterdam asked when he began to speak of Bali was ‘‘Is it true that they nowadays compel all women there to wear a jacket?’’ (1955: 61). In fact, breasts began to disappear from view, at least in certain places and among certain classes, even before the tourists arrived. In important ways, this process was connected to the emerging desire on the part of new social groups to be ‘‘modern,’’ to participate fully in forms of life associated with their colo-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference nial rulers. Not only their exposure to European ideas and values through colonial schools, but also the reaction of tourists to uncovered breasts convinced members of these classes that such styles should be abandoned. Ultimately such views prevailed; bared breasts no longer formed elements of ordinary dress but instead came to count as undress. In trying to account for transformations in Balinese women’s dress, we touch on practices particularly recalcitrant to historical analysis. For we are dealing here with everyday life and the dynamic ‘‘structures of feeling’’ that imbue it, with matters such as a sense of propriety, attractiveness, modesty, and sexuality (Williams 1977). Invariably reflecting and shaping moral and aesthetic values, indeed crucial to impressing such values on individual consciousness, changes in dress must inevitably involve relations of power. But exactly what are these? Where should we look for explanations for changes in meaning and practice? That such structures of feeling also permeate discussions of such matters adds to the difficulty. Precisely because bared breasts signify ‘‘undress’’ to both Euro-Americans and Indonesians, and have become associated with desire and pleasure, changes in the dress of Balinese women often have been treated in a less than scholarly manner, even in scholarly work. Published sources typically include few or no citations, making it difficult to track changes in practice, let alone conflicts over their significance. While numerous commentators mention bared breasts or their concealment, they do so with almost visible winks and nudges. Fleeting references never lose the aura of titillating gossip exhibited in travelers’ tales. Without access to variously situated Balinese who changed their mode of dress or remember such changes, it is difficult to reconstruct the politics of the ‘‘cover-up.’’ A further difficulty lies in the fact that while many accounts—both at the time and more recently—note that power played an important role in instituting the covering of breasts, they implicitly understand its operation in terms of simple models of domination. In the references to the covering up of women’s breasts scattered through both travel reports and scholarly analyses, commentators often treat this process as ‘‘political’’ in the most simplistic sense: as the consequence of a decree, promulgated by government authorities, either colonial or national. Assessing such claims, however, leads to murkier terrain. Even leaving aside the dearth of evidence—including references to specific decrees —changes in women’s dress cannot be explained so unequivocally, either empirically or conceptually. Take, for instance, the empirical problems. At least two white interwar residents of Bali assert that the Dutch government required women in north Bali to wear shirts to protect the morals of Dutch soldiers (and adolescent sons), though they offer different dates: Covarrubias claims in 1937 that this occurred a half-century before, or around the time that Bali became a residency (11), while Powell in 1930 locates it after the turn of the century, presumably following south Bali’s final pacification (6). Both also note that
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter similar laws had recently been passed for Denpasar, though the Dutch made little effort to implement them (Powell 1930: 274). A Balinese source around the same time also mentions in passing some semi-enforced Dutch efforts to cover women’s breasts (‘‘Bali sebagai Museum Barang Kuno’’ 1927).13 That some officials may have found such a policy salutary is certainly possible.14 Yet while there is little reason to doubt that accounts from the late 1920s and early 1930s accurately report current events, a colonial effort to cover Denpasar breasts seems to contradict recent analyses of colonial ‘‘cultural policy’’ in Bali. These address Dutch efforts at about the same time to prevent the spread of nationalist movements east from Java to Bali and beyond by supporting Balinese ‘‘traditions’’ (see especially Robinson 1995). Noting an early association between nationalist movements and Islam, some officials argued that either encouraging Christian missionization or strengthening Balinese ‘‘Hinduism’’ (which they saw as undergirding much of social life) would minimize nationalism’s appeal. Others argued that Balinese civilization was sui generis worth preserving (Robinson 1995: 38); it is worth recalling Ranger’s observation that after World War I colonial interests in Africa also showed a marked interest in ‘‘tradition’’ (Ranger 1983: 251–52). Certainly Dutch society in the Indies became increasingly starchy in the 1920s, as efforts to differentiate native from European in everyday habits, including styles of dress, replaced an older mixed Indies culture. By the end of the decade—following the rise of labor and Communist movements on Java, as well as agitation by some Balinese in favor of ‘‘modernization’’—the regime installed members of precolonial ruling families as regents. At the same time, according to Robinson, they introduced a policy of ‘‘Balinization’’ (Baliseering; 1995: 48).15 This entailed active support of ‘‘traditional’’ expressive culture—performance genres, speaking and literary practices, and architecture—as well as forms of dress. ‘‘According to the Dutch authorities,’’ writes Robinson, ‘‘Balinese ought to wear ‘Balinese’ clothes.’’ He adds, ‘‘In the context of the state-sponsored ‘renaissance’ of Balinese culture, the wearing of pants by men or the kebaya (Javanese blouse) by women became a subversive act’’ (1995: 49). Balinization seems hard to reconcile with colonial efforts to conceal women’s breasts. Apart from such matters of fact, however, the very idea that women might have altered their dress in obedience to orders (issued, note, by men, though not always, as we will see, foreign men) grossly oversimplifies relations of power and ignores the agency of women. Robinson’s tantalizing but unelaborated claim that wearing a shirt potentially made a political statement moves us closer to an analysis, but only nuances relations of power slightly by adding the possibility of nationalist resistance. Thinking through either Foucault or Gramsci would require us to account for the ways in which women became subjects through discourses concerned with dress, and to consider the inducements that persuaded women to consent to new hegemonies of propriety. With such caveats in mind, I nonetheless note that published accounts indicate two related pressures that may have induced some women to cover
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference their breasts. First, as indicated, sources claim that Dutch officials found indigenous women’s dress immoral and made sporadic efforts to alter it, albeit not so radically that Balinese would dress Dutch. Second, an emerging class of Balinese formed by and in reaction to colonial rule began to weigh in against bared breasts. For this group, which finally achieved dominance in independent Indonesia, change in dress constituted part of a program to modernize Balinese values and mores.16 Colonial rule certainly affected Balinese sartorial practices, but the effect was indirect and delayed. Any explicit attempts authorities may have made to alter women’s dress obviously had limited success, since dramatic changes mainly followed decolonization. However, colonial policies resulted in the formation of unintended subjectivities in subjugated populations, which were eventually reflected in new notions of appropriate dress. In particular, educational opportunities associated with performing the work of empire led to the formation of a new class of Balinese, including a small number of women. As in most colonial states, the Dutch needed native civil servants to administer their possessions, to serve as regents, judges, village and district heads, clerks, and policemen. These needed, minimally, to be able to read and write Malay, the language of empire. Thus the Dutch afforded a small number of Balinese—mainly male members of the aristocratic, priestly, and wealthy families who made up Bali’s existing ruling classes—the opportunity to attend government schools. Some left Bali to pursue higher education in Java or even the Netherlands, where they mingled with intellectuals from elsewhere in the archipelago. In addition to joining the civil service, graduates created a burgeoning class of teachers, doctors, and other professionals. Tourism and a growing expatriate population also increased opportunities for many Balinese to participate in a non-agrarian economy and come into frequent contact with whites. Their novel social, political, and economic experiences prompted members of this educated elite to rethink their identities, habits, and life goals, and, in fact, to conceive of themselves as Balinese for the first time (Picard 1999). But similar educational experiences did not lead to uniform conclusions. Widely varying opinions were aired publicly in media of the 1920s and 1930s. To vastly oversimplify, while some argued the value of practices they now defined as ‘‘traditional,’’ others advocated chucking everything out of step with the times, energetically embracing the ‘‘modern’’ with its claims to moral and epistemological progress. Many found a middle ground as members of groups —such as the Theosophical Society, or the Taman Siswa movement, which developed its own nongovernment schools—that combined notions of progress with reinterpretations of ‘‘Indonesian’’ (typically, elite Javanese) tradition. They also differed in their assessments of colonial rule, some arguing for specific reforms while others advocated a range of nationalist alternatives. As part of this process of rethinking identities and goals, members of this class began to alter their sartorial practice. Many began to wear garments
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter requiring sewing and tailoring, especially jackets and shirts modeled on European military and civilian styles, which covered their chests even in contexts where this had not been previously prescribed. The popularity of such attire even moved one defender of tradition to describe (in Dutch) ‘‘genuine Balinese dress’’ for the benefit of future generations (Soekawati 1926). Civil servants usually combined elements of formal Bali wear with signs of office: a kamben and a headcloth, with a tight military jacket and a step-in (and -out) shoe. Such fusions long marked the dress of Javanese civil servants, who could even purchase them ready-to-wear (see Pemberton 1994). Balinese working for foreigners or in the tourist sector adopted similar styles.17 Most modernists, however, eschewed such hybridity, opting for the trousers and shoes that Dutch men wore (van Dijk 1997). Such dress both contrasted with prior styles, now marked as ‘‘old-fashioned’’ and ‘‘ignorant,’’ and made a political statement. By wearing European attire Balinese, like other modernist Indonesians, not only impersonated those in power but refused the difference that under colonialism always implied inferiority (Todorov 1984). This refusal included Balinization: modernists rejected efforts by colonial authorities to protect and promote an authentic Balinese culture. Nor were officials the only Europeans invested in such visions of Bali. The bohemian expatriate community, and casual tourists, bemoaned signs of encroaching modernity—the very evil they came to Bali to escape. Where possible, they intervened. An American woman who opened one of the first hotels on Kuta Beach forbade her ‘‘boys’’ to wear anything but ‘‘Balinese’’ dress in the hotel, though they wanted to dress European—and did on days off (Koke 1987). Such attitudes clearly frustrated modernizing Balinese. One Balinese reformer passionately denounced the tourists who wanted Bali to remain a ‘‘museum of antique or old-fashioned objects.’’ Although tourists preferred the ‘‘spectacle’’ of the quaint, he exhorted Balinese to change with the times, arguing that tourism offered little of value (‘‘Bali sebagai Museum Barang Kuno’’ 1927).18 Clearly some found the dependence of the tourist gaze on difference intensely frustrating. But more literal gazes triggered greater discomfort. For one, colonialism instituted inherent asymmetries, empowering visitors rather than Balinese with the right to look and comment. Before the establishment of Dutch rule, European traders and envoys found disconcerting the boldness with which Balinese stared at, laughed at, and touched them. No such incidents appear in the myriad travel books of the 1920s and 1930s. Balinese presumably continued to gape at, and to comment on, Europeans. (They certainly do in postindependence Bali, where caustic representations of tourists also abound in painting and performance.) But however forthright Balinese remained in their dealings with whites, colonialism undermined the ability of Balinese to determine who could go where and what they could look at. Above all, some objected to the preoccupation of foreigners with bared breasts. This issue particularly incensed educated Balinese women, especially members of an organization of women teachers in the late 1930s. One wrote,
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ‘‘only see how tourists look at us,’’ remarking on the omnipresence of photographs of ‘‘naked’’ women, many of whom posed in exchange for cash. Blaming the situation in part on the backwardness and ignorance of Balinese women, she aims her impassioned remarks at both female and male readers. Another article addresses Balinese women explicitly, asking them not to let themselves become ‘‘objects of ridicule’’ or to lower the prestige of Balinese women by letting themselves be photographed with bare breasts (Putra 2003: 33–36). The issue soon enlisted the attention of male reformers. In 1938, young male student members of the organization Bali Darma Laksana urged the colonial regime to ban the sale and publication of such photographs (Putra 2003: 33–36). In conferences held in Bali in 1939 and 1940, Balinese representatives of the Indies-wide political party Parinda raised the issue again, asking the government to forbid the printing of books insulting to Balinese, such as those with pictures of naked people, and to prohibit foreign tourists from photographing women without shirts (Team Penyusun 1976: 12). While no doubt these male reformers in part sought to express their solidarity with women activists (as Putra 2003 argues), their interest probably also derived in part from the fact that Balinese themselves could find bare breasts erotic. Balinese call beautiful breasts ‘‘twin yellow coconuts’’ (nyuh gading kembar), and at least one nineteenth-century North Balinese artist portrayed a god caressing his consort’s breasts during love play. Still, breasts never formed a focus of Balinese sexuality in the way they do for Europeans. As one modernist commented, recalling the 1930s in an interview fifty years later, ‘‘ ‘But I can tell you—to a Balinese man bare breasts are nothing! They are only thirty percent! Erotic she is when completely nude! But for the Western man bare breasts already are a paradise’’ (Pollmann 1990: 18). It was awareness of what breasts meant to Europeans—and the knowledge that Europeans associated such dress with ‘‘primitives’’—that aroused ire. In short, the preoccupation of European visitors with Balinese breasts as a sign of a paradisiacal primitivism made covering these same body parts significant as a movement toward equality with Europeans. If nationalists and modernists promoted metropolitan fashion, however, women who covered their breasts rarely adopted dresses and blouses. Only the small group of educated women wore such attire (Suryakusuma 2001: 71). Most donned a garment called a kebaya. Kebaya are sewn garments, variously described as blouses or jackets, and typically (at that time) closed with pins. As well as breasts, they also cover arms and shoulders. The Eurasian wives and daughters of merchants employed by the Dutch East India Company invented this garment in the colonial capital of Batavia (now Jakarta, located in West Java) early in the nineteenth century (Taylor 1997). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, long after the Dutch state took over the assets of the bankrupt company, when Europeans came to Java in increasing numbers, women adopted the kebaya, worn with a sarong, for comfort at home. This fashion, in fact, ended only shortly be-
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter fore tourists began to flock to Bali. Travelers familiar with the Indies prior to World War I report this change from hybrid to metropolitan habits in the 1920s. Although originally worn by women identified as culturally European, by the time Balinese adopted the kebaya it was associated with Java. Javanese women themselves may well have gone bare-chested prior to the spread of Islam. However, accounts by Europeans—who arrived in port cities in the sixteenth century and in the interior in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after Islam was well established—describe both sexes as wearing ‘‘breast cloths.’’ When Javanese borrowed the kebaya from peranakan Chinese and Eurasian women (that is, those of mixed ethnic origins, with some Indonesian ancestry) in the nineteenth century, each social group used distinct fabrics and cuts. The appropriation of the kebaya by Balinese women might be explained by the fact that Java lay directly to Bali’s west, shipping between Javanese and Balinese ports occurred on a regular basis, and cultural connections between the two islands run deep (many Balinese consider themselves descendants of pre-Islamic Javanese rulers and priests; in turn, many Indonesians living in Batavia were descended from Balinese slaves). Certainly other imports from Java proved attractive to fashionable Balinese: interwar travel books reveal a rage for kamben made of Javanese batik.19 The kebaya fostered a different project of modernization than did the attire of educated men. At the very least, it divided progressive females by age: skirts and dresses may have been appropriate for schoolgirls, but throughout Indonesia adults rarely embraced such styles until well after independence (Suryakusuma 2001; Taylor 1997). More to the point, the kebaya heralds the rise of a nationalist modernity that selectively reworks elements of ‘‘tradition’’ to assert difference from the West. As we will see, the kebaya not only became a sign of both the national and the ethnic, but continues to be a site of cultural innovation. Significantly, many of the agents mentioned thus far are male. Some scholars suggest that modernizing men made explicit efforts to control women’s behavior, or at least tell them what to do, in the making of a Bali discursively constructed as progressive. Clearly, the tiny group of educated women played their part too. As their exhortations suggest, however, transformations in women’s dress cannot be understood as the result of coercion. Ultimately, differently situated women had to respond as individuals to increasingly hegemonic pressures for changes to occur. In short, only the production of new ideas, emotions, and desires among Balinese women can explain why they no longer dress as they once did. At the very least, these include matters such as identification, status, shame, and fashion. What ordinary women thought of bared or covered breasts, however, is difficult to recover from the available sources. Men, whether Balinese nationalists or European travelers, produced most of the representations of Bali, and their works often project male fantasies.20 Still, some clues exist, even in
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference such sources. Consider the Balinese woman character in a Dutch novel who speculates on why European women hide their breasts: She was keen on knowing why white women covered their bosom. Did they fear . . . to acknowledge openly that they were only women and thus properly would have to work, serve, and take care of children? Even for bathing they still put on clothes, Karti had heard; there appeared to her to be something behind it. (Fabricius 1948: 70–71)
Notably, Karti’s attempts to make sense of covered breasts focus not on sexual vulnerability but on power: covering their breasts allows white women to escape the hard work she regards as women’s lot. Karti is based on a real person, Belgian painter Le Mayeur’s Balinese wife Ni Polok; possibly the novelist heard this speculation from her or from another Balinese woman. Even more pertinent, recall Krause’s observation that women covered their breasts ‘‘when entering . . . a house where Europeans live . . . from the same feeling of shame that Adam and Eve felt when they realised that they were naked.’’ Ignoring the biblical associations, we might ponder the feeling of ‘‘shame’’ that comes from an awareness of how one is seen, that emanates from being subject to a gaze that sexualizes the breast and invades privacy. Did Balinese women who frequently interacted with Europeans begin to experience their bodies in a different way in the presence of that gaze: in Berger’s terms, as nude rather than naked? So suggests a remark by an elderly woman who recalled that her mother, operator of an art shop at the Bali Hotel in the 1930s, started to wear a kebaya ‘‘because she was embarrassed’’ (karena malu).21 It is hard to know whether she actually felt this or whether her daughter was either projecting such feelings back into the past or responding to what she assumes would be the reaction of a white female interlocutor. Consider, however, a nineteenth-century poem (authored by a man) that imagines a woman’s reaction when a stranger in a crowd touches her (pregnant!) body in a familiar fashion: to her mother-in-law’s advice not to make a fuss, she retorts that she is not a cow or horse to be ridden by whoever takes a fancy (Vickers 1991: 122–23). Available evidence certainly suggests that Balinese women needed to find ways to make clear to European onlookers that visual access (or physical proximity) did not constitute an invitation to intimacy. Apart from these tantalizing hints of changing subjectivities, what can be surmised more readily from available sources is the where, when, and who of changes in practice. Geographically, wearing kebaya began in north Bali, in Singaraja. Conquered in 1849 and long under Dutch control, it served as the residency capital from 1882 and would have been the place targeted by any colonial decrees concerned with women’s dress. Proximity to a busy port with a cosmopolitan, multicultural population afforded Singaraja women access to new styles, although it took some time before wearing kebaya became widespread: as late as 1912, Krause claimed that only prostitutes covered their
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter breasts.22 By the 1920s, however, kebaya were ubiquitous in the north (at least in public) and the fashion had begun to spread southward. As for whom, women from aristocratic families probably were among the first to don kebaya, especially those whose husbands served as regents or lesser civil servants. They likely initially wore them on occasions when they might come into contact with European officials. More broadly, women whose lives brought them into frequent contact with Europeans adopted kebaya, including those working in European homes or in hotels. Similarly, the wives (and perhaps sisters) of men who attended European schools almost certainly wore them as well. Relatively few Balinese women fit these categories, however. Neither conservative administrators nor modernist Balinese of either gender made much headway in altering everyday dress in the colonial period, although women did increasingly adopt the kebaya for ritual occasions in place of the chest cloth they had previously worn, which left arms and shoulders bare. Only after Bali became part of the new Republic of Indonesia following a bitter war for independence in 1945–50 did modes of dress undergo major revision.23 Again, precisely what led to this alteration remains difficult to specify. Some Balinese retrospectively hold Islam responsible for changing mores— either through explicit orders from (Islamic) Indonesian officials or, less directly, by fears of what Islamic Indonesians might say and do about Hindu Balinese. A contemporary source suggests that the ‘‘puritanical zeal’’ of the (now victorious) young modernizers and nationalists played a role. More concretely, John Coast, an Englishman who had fought for the Indonesian revolution and lived in Bali in the early 1950s, mentions a regulation that penalized both tourists who photographed breasts (with a fine and loss of their camera) and women who posed for them (with a penalty of 200 rupiahs, a considerable sum). This, of course, resembles the law sought in 1939. Coast adds that to those benefiting from a ‘‘modern education’’ ‘‘bare breasts seem primitive’’ (1954: 66). But the question remains how such perceptions led to changes in everyday practice. According to Adrian Vickers (1989: 162), one Balinese nationalist in particular succeeded in getting women to cover their breasts (at least in public): Anak Agung Suteja, appointed by Sukarno first as regional head (in 1950) and then as governor of the province of Bali (in 1958), a position he held until the 1965 coup. Vickers leaves unspecified, however, precisely how Suteja accomplished this feat. Rather than orders and ordinances, one might consider the impact of access to new national institutions. Through schools and the civil service in particular, bared breasts began to be restricted to specific classes, ages, and spaces. As they did under colonial rule, these two institutions provided key arenas shaping a new habitus. Moreover, they mutually reinforced one another: schooling was a requirement for coveted civil service positions, which were a major form of employment, and numerous practices linking the culture
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference of schools with the culture of national service already had been forged in Taman Siswa schools during the colonial period (see, e.g., Shiraishi 1997). Young educated women considered wearing a kamben with bared breasts absurdly old-fashioned (kolot ). As such attitudes percolated through society, more and more women began to confine bared upper bodies to their own homes, replacing older distinctions between sacred and mundane spaces (temples versus markets) with a new division between public and private. By the 1960s, wearing skirts and dresses rather than kamben and kebaya to conduct one’s daily business had become common, especially for those aspiring to middle-class status. The kebaya, however, hardly disappeared from Balinese life. Instead, it became an anchor of pakaian adat, ‘‘traditional clothes,’’ an Indonesian phrase for garments marked as distinctly national or ethnic. The phrase pakaian adat literally means ‘‘clothing associated with adat ’’—a term with its own complex history, often translated as ‘‘customary’’ but also connoting ‘‘good manners’’ or ‘‘proper behavior.’’24 In practice, Indonesians wear pakaian adat at national ceremonies and religious rites, and on a variety of adat occasions. Despite the claim to tradition, Balinese pakaian adat for women covers not only breasts (as in precolonial style) but also arms and shoulders. The chest coverings visible in Krause’s album have been discarded as mere habit, not valorized as adat. Still, wearing kamben and kebaya in any but ritual contexts (or to work, for Balinese in the tourist sector) continues to evolve as a marker of being embarrassingly old-fashioned, especially as such dress becomes associated with the elderly. Such developments are subtly communicated in television programs and advertisements, where only humorous characters, hicks, and old women appear in ‘‘traditional’’ clothing.
The Naked Tourist Although tourism to Bali never entirely disappeared—indeed, some singularly important elements of current practices took shape in the 1950s and 1960s (Vickers 2002)—it suffered a precipitous decline in the first decades of independence. Its resurrection in the 1970s took place within a radically changed global political economy, and entailed an industry involving millions of arrivals annually.25 With advice and aid from the World Bank, Indonesian president Suharto promoted tourism as a source of the foreign exchange needed to fund modernization programs and realize his vision of development (Picard 1996). Bali’s former fame made it an eminently suitable focus for such efforts. In the liberal investment climate of the late 1980s and 1990s, entrepreneurs (from Bali and elsewhere) steadily converted rice fields into hotels, homestays, restaurants, and ‘‘artshops.’’ The possibility of ogling women’s breasts, however, could no longer provide a lure. Sun, sand, and surf, on the one hand, and high culture, on the other, formed the foundations for mass
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter tourism’s fantasy machine. While images of Balinese women continue to adorn promotional materials, enticing smiles no longer are paired with bare breasts. Instead, they adorn poised faces accustomed to dancing before appreciative audiences or engaged in colorful ritual, both situations in which breasts traditionally had been covered. Under Suharto’s New Order, national pride rested not only on the transformation of the economy to conform more closely to the model proffered by the World Bank, but also on the reform of the everyday practices of those who were ‘‘still stupid’’ (masih bodoh) and the elaboration of decorously modernized traditions. In short, the New Order tempered its emphasis on ‘‘progress’’ (measured in ways familiar to international developers) with attempts to foster specific cultural values, especially respect (sopan santun), orderliness, neatness, and the primacy of community over individual desires or rights. Dress figured in these reformations. Both schoolchildren and civil servants wore uniforms, a practice that spread to those working in the tourist sector, though here modeled on pakaian adat. Other modes of uniformity proliferated too. No Balinese would have dared to go to an office without shoes, or in the flip-flops many wore at home. Few would have felt ‘‘dressed’’ wearing sarongs or kamben rather than trousers, skirts, or dresses in any venue involving contact with officials. Such garments, worn with a t-shirt, now belonged strictly at home—with the exception of the expensive versions designated for adat occasions. As dress became a symbol of development in modernizing Indonesia, the attire of visitors to Bali began to arouse attention. As it happened, implementation of Indonesia’s master plan for tourism coincided with a new era of disenchantment with ‘‘Establishment’’ values—and dress codes—among EuroAmericans, involving a revived interest in nature, the primitive, and Eastern religion. Planners envisioned visitors on short group tours, who would stay in expensive hotels in Sanur (pioneered by the Bali Beach Hotel built by Sukarno in the 1950s) and Nusa Dua. But Bali also attracted younger, more rebellious, and less well-heeled travelers. These flocked to the beaches of Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak, to sunbathe in partial or complete undress, while Balinese women carrying baskets filled with oils and wearing hats to shade them from the sun, faded batik kamben, and long-sleeved rugby shirts strolled the sands offering massages. If the ways tourists dressed had bothered Balinese in the 1920s and 1930s, relations of power made it impossible to do anything about it. One can imagine that Balinese initially might have been amazed by women’s bathing suits, since Balinese modesty involved covering lower rather than upper bodies. Such a sight would have been rare, however, since at that time few tourists stayed at beaches (in the 1950s, photos of actress-swimmer Esther Williams became all the rage among young men; Coast 1954: 66). Nor did questions ordinarily arise under colonial rule about proper dress for tourists visiting temples or attending rituals (which provided occasions to observe perfor-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference mances). Louise Koke (1987) describes one such rare occasion, when a sign on a Denpasar temple warning that no one would be admitted who was not in traditional Balinese dress led her to try to garb her guests in something approximating temple attire, over their regular clothes. On another occasion, an invitation to a royal ceremony stipulated that musicologist Colin McPhee not wear shorts ([1944] 1979: 155). Generally, under the Dutch Balinese learned to give to whites marks of deference (in dress, gesture, and language) once due only to priests and aristocrats, and to ignore breaches in the behavior that merited such deference. Dutch administrators proved less tolerant, objecting mightily to whites who came to see them garbed in sarongs (Fabricius 1948; Lindsey 1997). Still, the legs bared by shorts, sundresses, and swimsuits in interwar tourism would have seemed modest compared to the body-revealing bikinis, tank tops, and other garb worn by vacationers since the 1970s. Euro-American norms of respectability have undergone drastic revision. For one, countercultural movements, from hippiedom to women’s liberation, continued to mark their rejection of bourgeois values by uncovering the body. In turn, dominant culture incorporated these styles, rendering them routine (Hebdige 1979). What once would have been seen as scandalous undress now marks the leisure that contrasts with, and rewards, labor. Indeed, the manufacture of scanty leisure-wear has become a bustling form of capital production. Thus Europeans, Australians, and Americans in Bali dress in skimpy clothes—and seek a range of corporeal pleasures, from sunbathing to spas to sexual adventures—because they are on vacation, in a tropical paradise. But since one person’s vacationland is another’s home and workplace, it makes equal sense that local officials seek to control what tourists wear. For Bali’s ruling classes, propriety must be maintained to safeguard relations with invisible agents, Bali’s reputation among Muslim and Christian Indonesians, and modernity and decency within particular imaginaries of national culture. Because of their growing unease with tourist mores, Balinese and Indonesian officials try to impose upon travelers local standards of dress that link morality to bodily coverage, much like those of visitors’ own bourgeois ancestors—from which the tourists now wish to escape. Thus while enriching the state and some segments of Balinese society, mass tourism simultaneously engendered concerns about negative Western influences. Like his Malaysian and Singaporean counterparts who promoted ‘‘Asian values,’’ Suharto followed colonial-era nationalist thinkers in treating individualism as both Western and a threat. In addition, national and religious authorities also regard Western societies as highly promiscuous, as evidenced by media and women’s dress. Taking the position that unbridled sexuality undermines family structure (and supposedly traditional male control), bureaucrats represent undress as culturally dangerous.26 For colonizers, undress was a sign of the inferior, primitive, or innocent. For contemporary Indonesian officials, it is a sign of the hazardous immorality of the West, risky because such
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter lifestyles and fashions spread across the globe, appealing especially to the young—as they did during colonial rule. Ironically, undress now has become an attribute of the powerful. In three sites in particular, tourist (un)dress generates comment and reaction, and alarms Balinese and Indonesian authorities and public figures.27 The first is government offices. For most visitors, this means Immigration, the only place where many foreigners—especially those operating businesses, working on development, or engaged in educational programs—commonly come into contact with the Indonesian state apparatus. The non-Balinese Indonesian bureaucrats who until recently staffed immigration offices, and did not look kindly on either Bali’s popularity or tourist undress, made efforts to mandate conformity to national norms. Posters illustrated proper and improper attire: no flip-flops, shorts, or bathing suits, but shirts with buttons, skirts or long pants, and closed shoes. The second is temple rituals. In a sense, concern with ritual decorum is truly traditional, since Balinese have always had special dress codes for temples. In the 1980s efforts concentrated on minimal forms of compliance: tourists could rent ‘‘temple scarves’’ (cerik) to tie around their waists, often on top of badly tied ‘‘sarongs,’’ short lengths of cloth sold in tourist areas for beach coverups and never of the type a Balinese might use as kamben. More recently, as Balinese strive to outdo one another in making each grand ritual grander than the last, signs posted outside of temples in which major rituals are being held— especially in areas heavily trafficked by tour buses—display what and what not to wear inside. Both genders now are expected to gird themselves in full pakaian adat. The third is beaches, especially the down-market ones in Kuta and Legian. In the 1980s the government officially prohibited—albeit with mixed results— the nude sunbathing and wet t-shirt contests so pervasive there, though it continued to allow public massage (Mabbett 1987). These beaches attract Balinese and Indonesian gigolos, known in the expatriate community as ‘‘Kuta Cowboys,’’ and the frequent marriages between tourists and Balinese suggest that tourist undress—and apparent wealth—provides ample stimulus for fantasy. These areas also attract domestic tourists from elsewhere in Indonesia, especially Javanese students, who flock to Kuta and Legian to gawk at the tourists and marvel first-hand at a cosmopolitan culture. An article in Latitudes, an English-language magazine, noted that Indonesian teenagers come to Kuta to see and photograph half-naked Western couples, familiar from TV. One teen enthused, ‘‘The great thing about Bali is that it looks just like a foreign country. . . . There’s lots of foreigners, fancy buildings, and luxury cars. It’s modern, just like in the movies.’’ The authors wryly comment, Whereas Balinese want to attract visitors with the island’s ancient culture, Indonesians are lured by Bali’s modern facade. Where Balinese pride themselves on their local uniqueness, Indonesians perceive Bali in a completely
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Sign at the Government Tourist Office in the early years of mass tourism. Photograph by Jean-Claude Picard.
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter different light, as an international, cosmopolitan crossroads of global cultures. And where Balinese souvenir stands sell postcard portraits of beautiful dancers, green rice fields and lavish religious ceremonies, Indonesian tourists are taking their own pictures of, well, other tourists. (Arsana and Sari 2001: 28)
Not all Balinese respond with distaste, however. Consider a letter to the editor of the Bali Post, Bali’s major (Indonesian-language) daily newspaper, by a Balinese resident of Kuta (Wena 2000). Reacting to a characterization of Australian tourists as ‘‘undisciplined’’ by Bali’s governor, the writer concedes that because many are lower middle class they behave contrary to ‘‘polite behavior.’’ They are noisy and boisterous, and wear shorts and singlets; the men often doff their shirts entirely as soon as they leave the airport. But, he argues, they are hardly undisciplined; it is precisely the regimentation of their lives in Australia that explains their dislike of regulation on vacation. Such tourists like to go off the beaten track, among other things by visiting local markets, surely a positive outcome for residents of Kuta and Legian. This is remarkable evidence of the reversals at issue. Now Balinese may position themselves as culturally superior, in order to analyze sympathetically the plight of working-class Australians (who do, after all, contribute to local economies).
Concluding Remarks This chapter has examined undress through the evanescent politics of decorum and desire, a politics that is never purely local. If what counts as undress in Bali has changed radically since the 1920s, those changes have everything to do with efforts—by Balinese and others—to insert a form of life into new networks and lines of force. Only by recognizing Balinese sartorial practices as constantly metamorphosing in dialogue with developments elsewhere can openings appear for making new histories. In turn, a Bali experienced through existing imaginaries provides fodder for cultural production elsewhere, as shown by the Bali Bra. Rules of respectability differed at the time of Bali’s conquest from those prevailing in bourgeois Europe. Balinese women covered their legs rather than their breasts, but in special circumstances bound upper bodies too (though not arms or shoulders). Euro-Americans could hardly imagine a circumstance in which breasts might be exposed in public. After the First World War, Euro-American women began to reveal their legs and arms, gradually opening ever more of the body’s surface to inspection. Meanwhile, Balinese headed in the reverse direction. In the 1950s and 1960s some made skirts and dresses part of their wardrobe, exposing lower legs. Simultaneously, however, uncovered bosoms became uncommon sights in communal life. Respect further meant no shorts, no short skirts, and no sleeveless tops: covered shoulders, upper arms, and knees. And for occasions requiring pakaian adat, a kamben and kebaya.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Thinking with Berger’s distinction between nakedness, an unselfconscious unclothed body, and nudity, that same body as the object of surveillance, it seems evident that in Bali what once was merely naked now is nude. Specific configurations of power—involving colonial rule, tourism, a European civilization universalized as ‘‘modern,’’ the rise of new social classes to dominance—all converged on the breast. Conversely, some segments of EuroAmerican middle classes began to insist that their bared bodies could be naked rather than nude (as in naturist or feminist movements), while others began to enjoy experiencing themselves as partly or totally nude, envisioning the gaze directed their way as admiring, desirous, and perhaps envious. Differently located in global configurations, the same uncovered surfaces of the skin produce different effects on Balinese and Europeans at different moments in time. In either instance, women make themselves as subjects through choices of what to wear, choices that simultaneously distinguish spaces and times, mark categories of person, and promote and transgress standards of propriety. Maneuvering within community standards of dress and undress, they virtuously conform to dominant norms (however depraved those norms may appear to other communities), or risk smaller or larger transgressions of familiar practice. Let me end with some final comments about breasts and bras. As they globalize, bras remain the emblems of the modern that they were at their invention, but with notably different effects. Initially, they not only freed EuroAmerican women from less comfortable undergarments but seemed daringly revealing, breaking with the prudery of the past. As they became part of the wardrobe of the modern Balinese women, however, they entailed new norms of respectability and uncomfortable restraint. Ironically, by then some Americans had discarded the bra—a garment with elastic bands and wires that often cut into flesh and collect perspiration—in the name of liberation; ‘‘bra-burning’’ even became shorthand for feminism. Nowadays in Bali only elderly or rural women go without bras; they may even go without shirts, though only in the privacy of their own homes. Bras and their complex relationship to what is and is not considered revealing are also relevant to recent developments in pakaian adat, the archetype of proper dress. Like haute couture, what counts as chic templewear in Bali constantly mutates. Friends roll their eyes when I put on garments stylish in the early 1990s—a kebaya in outmoded fabric and pattern over a sabuk, a long length of cloth about four inches wide wrapped tightly from the hips to just under the breasts—and urge me to update my wardrobe with a new kebaya and spandex corset.28 In the late 1990s, as Suharto’s thirty-year rule unraveled, stylish women began to wear to rituals kebayas made of lace, which revealed the bra underneath. More recently yet, the bra of choice became a colored tube top or a straples long torso, a strapless undergarment that—like my old sabuk—reaches from breast to hips and serves as both bra and corset. Onto this
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter is sewn a piece of satin in the palette of the accompanying tight-fitting kebaya, itself made of sheer, almost transparent silk or chiffon.29 The effect evokes pre-kebaya temple dress, in leaving arms and shoulders visible and revealing the body’s shape. Decidedly sexy, it seems an appropriate style for the transgressive era of ‘‘Reformation’’ supposedly ushered in with Suharto’s fall. Ironically, some of Bali’s most prominent temples refuse entry to women dressed this way, calling it disrespectful. Apparently, the gods find the hint of lingerie offensive. Is what offends the breasts, doubly covered in fabric, or the inviting sight of bared shoulders and arms? Even gods, it seems, are subject to historical development—or at least the men who speak in their name, whose attitudes reflect the moral structures of Indonesian nation-building. Ranajit Guha recently has called for a new kind of history-writing, inspired by an Indian aesthetic of ‘‘the mood of wonder,’’ that would ‘‘illuminate what is unusual about the usual in everyday life’’ (2002: 68). The reactions of Euro-Americans to Balinese and of Balinese and Indonesians to Euro-Americans lend themselves to such an enterprise. Undress forms part of a globally intertwined history of everyday experience. Those once treated as primitive because they appeared undressed to Europeans now find themselves offended by descendants of former colonizers who seek to escape the same restrictions their ancestors imposed everywhere in the world. The heirs to those who saw it as their mission to clothe the ‘‘savages’’ now want to lie naked on the beach. Reports of the ‘‘island of bare breasts’’ once inspired Euro-Americans to dream of paradise regained; now Indonesian tourists come to gaze in wonder as they witness for themselves scantily clad Euro-Americans, just like in the movies. NOTES My thanks to colleagues who provided invaluable information, especially Geoff Robinson and Michel Picard. Special thanks to Rucina Ballinger for speaking to Balinese friends concerning past and present fashion trends. Marisol De La Cadena, Eugenia Lean, Yasmin Saikia, and Patricia Sawin offered invaluable feedback, advice, and encouragement. 1. While dress never has been a focus of my research, my experiences in Bali as a participant-observer during many field trips inform my discussion of the past twenty years. Through excavations in colonial archives, I also am conversant in colonial representations up to the early 1920s. For the 1920s–80s, however, I was restricted to published materials, mainly written by Europeans. These include travel accounts and secondary sources, including work by fellow students of Balinese history and society. I hope eventually to consult journals and newspapers from the 1920s–30s and 1950s– 60s—only available in Bali—which colleagues assure me are invaluable. More pertinent, I also plan to speak to a wide range of Balinese women. 2. Precolonially, Bali was divided into numerous principalities with complex relationships. The Netherlands Indies conquered the northern part of the island in 1849 and three kingdoms in the south in 1906–1908; other regions voluntarily submitted to Dutch rule. 3. For a detailed discussion of encounters between Dutch emissaries and the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ruling classes in Bali’s most important kingdom, see Wiener 1995. For changes in European perceptions of Bali and its inhabitants, see Vickers 1989, although he says little specifically about gender. 4. Vickers calls Julius Jacobs, another doctor employed by the colonial state, ‘‘the man who discovered the Balinese breast’’ (1989: 86). Jacobs’s account of a visit to south Balinese courts in the 1880s certainly articulates the voyeurism that informed latenineteenth-century European art and science, but his description of Balinese women and their breasts differs notably from Krause’s and those that followed. While he praises Balinese physiques with classical allusions and references to specific works of art, after inviting the reader to step into the Balinese ‘‘boudoir’’ with him in his privileged position as doctor he offers more clinical assessments of women’s bodies, and calls for measuring instruments to settle points of scientific interest (Jacobs 1883: 73–74). Neither attitude resembles Krause’s moony postwar yearnings. 5. Picard (1996) and Vickers (1989) both argue that Bali’s appeal in part stemmed from its ability to combine both Orientalist and Pacific fantasies. Travelers in the 1920s and 1930s came by sea, often over long distances via other Pacific and Asian ports of call. 6. In Germany, Krause’s homeland, with its long tradition of romanticism and interest in the ‘‘folk,’’ a ‘‘life reform’’ movement with a back-to-nature theme developed in the 1880s, later segueing into the first nudist and naturist movements. Many involved were also theosophists and advocated equal rights for women. Naturists promoted not only nudity but also fitness, extolling the virtues of exercise and vegetarianism and frowning on artificial stimulants in order to achieve a spiritual bond with nature. 7. Among the famous works published in the 1920s were Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages and Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Torgovnick (1990: 250 n. 4) notes that interest in primitivism (which can in part be measured by the publication and republication of books on the topic) ran especially high in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. 8. Even in 1908, just after Bali’s final conquest, officials entertained thoughts of possible tourist interest in the island. But it took the KPM’s involvement to make this interest a reality. 9. Lindsey (1997) offers a good analysis of this community and its activities, noting that despite their desire to ‘‘get away from it all,’’ all of these expatriates depended on tourism to support themselves on the island. Walter Spies, a German painter and musician, served as a key figure. Spies co-authored a book on Balinese performance, helped to make films, painted romantic canvases, and made his home and expertise available to numerous visitors, including anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who conducted fieldwork on the island in the 1930s. In short, Spies became a major culture broker. Significantly, Krause’s photographs first drew him to Bali (Lindsey 1997: 77); they also attracted Mexican artist and amateur anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias (1937: vii), another figure who manufactured enduring representations of the island. 10. This anti-industrial theme is hardly unique to Wadia. For another instance, see Belfrage (1937), a British traveler who refers to himself as an ‘‘escapologist.’’ 11. The following information comes from the website of Sara Lee Intimate Apparel, owner of the Bali brand, at http://www.balinet.com/. 12. They based their play, produced in 1949, on a book by James Michener about Polynesia that reflected the recent experiences of many American men in the Pacific theater. 13. I did not see any documents supporting such claims in colonial archives in
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter The Hague. However, by the time Powell and Covarrubias lived in Bali, colonial administration had been decentralized. As a result, residency decisions no longer had to be reported to the governor-general and would rarely find their way to Europe. Residency archives apparently were destroyed during the Japanese occupation and the war for independence. Possibly, a report of such decrees made its way to Batavia, and is now somewhere in Indonesia’s National Archives. 14. It is, however, unlikely that they actually adopted it to protect military morality. Although ‘‘barracks-concubinage’’ emerged as a topic of intense debate from the turn of the century to the First World War, in the Indies European men commonly engaged in interracial liaisons—ranging from prostitution to cohabitation. By 1915 colonial society no longer sanctioned such relationships (especially for those of high status), but the army high command continued to argue that efforts to reform morals by encouraging marriage in place of other arrangements would be far too costly (Ming 1983). Hanna (1976: 104) suggests more plausible grounds for such a policy: namely, that bared breasts offended some European sensibilities or appealed too much to tourists, but, as is typical of his book, he provides no support for his claims. 15. Robinson’s source for this term and policy seems to be Balinese nationalist veterans he interviewed in the 1980s. These more or less belonged to the group of modernist intellectuals described below, though some would have been quite young in the period in question. See also Pollmann 1990. 16. Significantly, missionaries played no role. While administrators debated the potential benefits of allowing missions on Bali, in the end the contingent that opposed evangelization (on the grounds that it would disturb the peace) won. Bali never became a mission field and efforts instead focused on shoring up the authority of those persons and institutions understood to speak for ‘‘Balinese religion,’’ at least where these did not conflict with other administrative concerns. While some Balinese did convert to Christianity, they did not shape emergent discourses about ‘‘Bali’’ and ‘‘modernity.’’ Thus transformations in Balinese dress implicated in the making of the present cannot be traced, as in the Pacific, Africa, and other colonized areas, to missionary positions (see, e.g., Bastian, this volume). 17. For changing male styles in late colonial Indonesia, see Mrázek 2002. 18. I thank Michel Picard for making this article available to me. 19. The Indonesian archipelago, critically situated on sea-lanes between India and China, participated in world trade long before the Dutch arrived in the sixteenth century or conquered the remaining independent kingdoms in the early twentieth. As Schulte Nordholt emphasizes (1997), much of this trade centered on cloth, especially from India, used for dress and exchange and to mark status. Indonesian women often found inspiration in exotic patterns for their own woven products. When agents of the Dutch East India Company sought merchandise to exchange for spices, they had to imitate Asian traders and import cloth from India (Andaya 1989). 20. Clearly, one could seek and undoubtedly find important differences in the ways that Euro-American women and Euro-American and Balinese men represented Balinese bodies. But in neither case do they provide much insight into the experiences of Balinese women. 21. Rucina Ballinger, personal communication. The woman told Ballinger that her mother was made to dress in this way (diharuskan), but when asked for clarification —(‘‘made by whom?’’)—she responded by speaking about her mother’s feelings. 22. Krause does not specify whether he is speaking about Bangli, where he was
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference stationed, or Singaraja. However, it seems far more likely that prostitution would abound in a port city than in landlocked, mountainous Bangli. In any event, as a physician employed by the colonial state, Krause would have been responsible for inspecting prostitutes for venereal diseases. 23. Little has been written about everyday life in Indonesia in the 1940s–60s (see also Schulte Nordholt 1997). Momentous events—the Japanese occupation, the fight for national independence and sovereignty that followed Japan’s surrender, political conflicts within the new nation, and shifting international relations in the new era of the Three Worlds with its emerging discourse on development—certainly put an end to the earlier tourist idyll on Bali, as well as opening new fields for contestation. The relative dearth of foreign visitors means fewer photographs and narratives that might clarify the impact of such events on the ways Balinese made themselves, as manifested in mundane practices such as dress. 24. The word adat comes from the Arabic. The concept of adat became a key element of colonial scholarship and administration. In particular, Dutch rule made extensive use of ‘‘customary law’’ (adatrecht ). The codification of unwritten adat in various regions, as well as its analysis, constituted the special task of a cadre of specialists with legal and ethnological interests. Designating practices as adat led to the carving out of distinctions between adat and ‘‘religion,’’ as well as between those customs that should (in some way) be perpetuated and those that could be considered mere habit and thus subject to change. For more on adat, see Kipp 1993. 25. Officials anticipated 7,000,000 arrivals annually by the end of 1999 (Picard 1996: 56). The goal has not been achieved, due to a series of political and economic crises—especially the bombings in Kuta in 2002. Discussions since that event make evident just how substantial a role tourism plays in Bali’s—and Indonesia’s— economy. 26. Under the New Order, this threat took highly specific forms, insofar as state mythology associated expressions of female sexuality with political subversion, especially Communism. 27. These sites show up in websites offering advice to tourists, which invariably include a section on ‘‘what to wear.’’ Apart from general exhortations to dress neatly and modestly, several recommend appropriate dress for specific occasions, focusing on the two most fraught sites of contact, offices and temple ceremonies. 28. My old kamben, of commercial batik and handwoven Balinese cloth (endek), receive similar reactions. Women only wear batik now for less formal ceremonial occasions (e.g., work parties to manufacture offerings for a rite of passage or a local temple ceremony). Even endek no longer looks au courant. For special occasions, no one (who can afford it) would be caught dead without expensive handwoven silk with gold threads. 29. My thanks to Rucina Ballinger for up-to-date information.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Andaya, Barbara Watson. 1989. ‘‘The Cloth Trade in Jambi and Palembang during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.’’ Indonesia 48: 26–46. Arsana, Bodrek, and Godeliva D. Sari. 2001. ‘‘To Be a Tourist, to See a Tourist.’’ Latitudes 4: 26–29.
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Breasts, (Un)Dress, and Modernist Desires in the Balinese-Tourist Encounter ‘‘Bali sebagai Museum Barang Kuno’’ (Bali as a museum of out-of-date objects). 1927. Surya Kanta 3–4: 29–30. Baudet, Henri. 1965. Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of NonEuropean Man. Trans. Elizabeth Wentholt. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Belfrage, Cedric. 1937. Away from It All: An Escapologist’s Notebook. New York: Literary Guild of America. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin. Coast, John. 1954. Dancing out of Bali. London: Faber & Faber. Covarrubias, Miguel. 1937. Island of Bali. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cunnington, C. Willett, and Phillis Cunnington. [1951] 1981. The History of Underclothes. Reprint, London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Ewing, Elizabeth. 1978. Dress and Undress: A History of Women’s Underwear. New York: Drama Book Specialists. Fabricius, Johan. 1948. Eiland der Demonen: Roman over Bali (Island of demons: A novel about Bali). Amsterdam: De Muiderkring. Fussell, Paul. 1980. Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Gorer, Geoffrey. [1936] 1986. Bali and Angkor: A 1930s Pleasure Trip Looking at Life and Death. Reprint, Singapore: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit. 2002. History at the Limit of World-History. New York: Columbia University Press. Hanna, Willard. 1976. Bali Profile: People, Events, Circumstances, 1001–1976. New York: American Universities Field Staff. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge. Island Dreams Tours. 2001. ‘‘Bali, Indonesia—Info and Travel Tips.’’ http://www .spa-tour.com/balitips.htm. Accessed 9 October 2004. Jacobs, Julius. 1883. Eenigen tijd onder de Baliërs (Some time among the Balinese). Batavia: G. Kolff. Kipp, Rita Smith. 1993. Dissociated Identities: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in an Indonesian Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Koke, Louise G. 1987. Our Hotel in Bali. Wellington, New Zealand: January. Krause, Gregor. [1920] 1988. Bali 1912. Reprint, Wellington, New Zealand: January. Langenberg, Michael van. 1986. ‘‘Analysing Indonesia’s New Order State: A Keywords Approach.’’ Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 20(2): 1–47. Last, Jef. 1955. Bali in de kentering (Bali in transition). Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Lindsey, Timothy. 1997. The Romance of K’tut Tantri and Indonesia: Texts and Scripts, History and Identity. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Mabbett, Hugh. 1987. In Praise of Kuta: From Slave Port to Fishing Village to the Most Popular Resort in Bali. Wellington, New Zealand: January. ————. 1988. Introduction to Bali. Wellington, New Zealand: January. McPhee, Colin. [1944] 1979. A House in Bali. Reprint, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Ming, Hanneke. 1983. ‘‘Barracks-Concubinage in the Indies, 1887–1920.’’ Indonesia 35: 65–93.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Mrázek, Rudolf. 2002. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pemberton, John. 1994. On the Subject of ‘‘Java.’’ Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Picard, Michel. 1984. ‘‘ ‘Tourisme culturel’ et ‘culture touristique’: Rite et divertissement dans les arts du spectacle à Bali.’’ Ph.D. diss., École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. ————. 1996. Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture. Singapore: Archipelago. ————. 1999. ‘‘The Discourse of Kebalian: Transcultural Constructions of Balinese Identity.’’ In Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century, ed. Raechelle Rubinstein and Linda H. Connor, pp. 15–50. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Pollmann, Tessel. 1990. ‘‘Margaret Mead’s Balinese: The Fitting Symbols of the American Dream.’’ Indonesia 49: 1–36. Powell, Hickman. 1930. The Last Paradise. New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. Putra, I Nyoman Darma. 2003. Wanita Bali Tempo Doeloe: Perspektif Masa Kini (Balinese women in the old days: From the perspective of the present). Gianyar, Bali: Yayasan Bali Jani. Ranger, Terence. 1983. ‘‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.’’ In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, pp. 211–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Geoffrey. 1995. The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Sawitri, Cok. 2001. ‘‘Is Sex a Secret in Bali?’’ Latitudes 5: 43–45. Schulte Nordholt, Henk. 1997. Introduction to Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt, pp. 1–38. Leiden: KITLV Press. Shiraishi, Saya S. 1997. Young Heroes: The Indonesian Family in Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University. Soekawati, Tjokorde Gde Rake. 1926. Hoe de Balier zich kleedt (How the Balinese dresses). Oeboed, Bali: n.p. Suryakusuma, Julia I. 2001. ‘‘The Kebaya: As Identity, Expression, and Oppression.’’ Latitudes 3: 71–73. Taylor, Jean Gelman. 1997. ‘‘Costume and Gender in Colonial Java, 1800–1940.’’ In Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt, pp. 85–117. Leiden: KITLV Press. Team Penyusun. 1976. Monografi Daerah Bali (Monograph about the region of Bali). Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row. Torgovnick, Marianna. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Louis, and John Ash. 1976. The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery. New York: St. Martin’s. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Van Dijk, Kees. 1997. ‘‘Sarong, Jubbah, and Trousers: Appearance as a Means of
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three Body Talk
Revelations of Self and Body in Contemporary Strip Clubs Katherine Frank
I spend a lot of time preparing before I go onstage at a strip club, which seems almost counterintuitive—spending all day getting ready to take off your clothes. Preparation is ongoing, of course—most dancers have regular salon appointments for manicures, pedicures, facials, body scrubs, waxing, highlights or coloring, or hair extensions. Many dancers also spend a lot of time in the gym. But a work day has its own routine, at least for me. Early in the day, I go running, usually only two miles since I’ll get lots of exercise later on. I eat one large meal mid-day (so that I won’t be too full later but also won’t get too hungry), and start drinking my eight glasses of water. I go to a tanning booth for a short session, and then do my floor exercises—450 stomach crunches, push-ups, and stretches. When it gets closer to my shift I wash and condition my hair and exfoliate my skin in the shower. I don’t have to shave because I always wax instead—that way you don’t grow any nasty stubble or razor bumps around your bikini area. After showering I apply self-tanner, let it soak in for fifteen minutes, and then apply scented body lotion and let that dry as well
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Body Talk while I check for chips in my nail or toenail polish. I check for stray hairs along my pubic line, ankles, eyebrows. I dry my hair and set it in large rollers. Then, still undressed, I apply stage make-up to my body —covering bruises, blemishes, ingrown hairs, or discolorations. I follow this with an all-over bronzer—it would be easier and less messy if I could just bake in the tanning bed for longer, but I’m trying to minimize the skin damage from years of dancing. While the body make-up sets, I apply perfume on my pulse points and then begin putting on my facial make-up. A bit of concealer, M.A.C. stage powder, eyebrow pencil, eyeshadow in several colors, white eyeliner, dark eyeliner, mascara, tinted powder on my cheeks, lip liner, lipstick. I wait to apply glitter to my body until after I do my face—it is nearly impossible to get off your hands. I don’t always use glitter, but on nights that I do I apply it to my chest, stomach, and butt, and lightly on my arms and legs. I usually use glitter with a gold tone, which looks warm under the black lights. After the glitter, I wash my hands and take out the rollers (it’s okay if the remaining glitter gets in my hair). Using a hand-held mirror and the full-length one, I do a 360-degree check of my body, looking for anything I might have missed. Then I drive to the club, where I’ll have time for a touch-up before having to take the stage for my shift—a bit more lotion, perfume, or vanilla-scented body oil, lipstick—and another 360-degree body check. The lights, of course, will perfect the work that I’ve already done. I select a costume from the choices in my locker—long gowns, two-piece bikinis, a schoolgirl outfit with a ridiculously short skirt, cocktail dresses in black, white, and red. The dress, of course, I’ll be taking off. But the accessories I choose will remain, as they are an important part of being nude, part of the costume. Our removable g-strings come in a variety of glow-in-the-dark colors, some with beading or glitter. Jewelry, including belly chains and ankle bracelets, always looks good under the lights. High heels, sexy leather boots, elbow-length gloves, boas, thigh-highs, garters . . . And, of course, a nice, small purse that matches my outfit for storing the cash. Over the course of the night, I return every so often to the dressing room to make touch-ups and change outfits. Dressing, undressing, dressing, undressing—for an eight-hour shift. At the end of the shift, I change once more—into sweatpants— and head home to count my money, shower, and climb into bed . . . naked. Nudity, it has been argued, lies in the eye of the beholder and not simply in the exposure of the body’s surface, and what constitutes nakedness is generally seen by anthropologists as varying by context and culture. The implication
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference of this variation, and in the need for a ‘‘witness,’’ real or imagined, is that nudity is not just a state of being, but is, rather, a social process. Strip clubs, as venues in which nudity is commodified, standardized, and regulated and where bodily revelations are sought and purchased, provide a dynamic illustration of the production of nudity and its meanings. Drawing on ethnographic research in U.S. strip clubs, this chapter explores the ways that nudity is produced, controlled, and made profitable by the state, the clubs, and the dancers. The focus here is on strip clubs that feature female dancers and cater to primarily heterosexual male audiences, though these are not the only kind of clubs in existence. In addition, I examine some of the dynamics of concealment and revelation in interactions between exotic dancers and their customers, especially as these are shaped by gender and social class. Some recent writers on striptease have taken an almost celebratory view of the performances given by strippers, arguing that they challenge gender roles and can liberate participants from existing systems of inequality or from normalizing or moralizing discourses. For instance, Dahlia Schweitzer writes that ‘‘[s]trip joints provide one of the few outlets in which women exercise unchallenged command over their bodies. Women freely express their sexuality in an environment that upholds their authority over it’’ (2001: 72). Similarly, Frederick Schiff argues that ‘‘nude dancing in commercial public places seems to represent the most widespread and direct challenge to puritan proprieties’’ (1999: 16). While I agree that stripping can feel liberating to the dancers and to the patrons who visit strip clubs to watch them, I do not see striptease as it currently exists as an unproblematic challenge either to puritan morality or to existing social systems of privilege. In fact, striptease becomes meaningful precisely because of the fact that it can be figured by participants as a site for the expression of freedom from social controls at the same time as it is regulated, sanitized, and controlled in the interest of profitability. Now, granted, the sex industry is indeed a potential site for challenging social norms and assumptions about gender, sexuality, desire, and relationships. For many women who have worked as dancers, including myself, strip clubs have led to increased comfort with their own sexuality and with female bodies, and to new understandings of female virtue and freedom (Frank 1998, 2002b; Funari 1997; Johnson 1999; Mattson 1995; Queen 1997; Reed 1997). As Margaret Dragu, a former stripper, and A. S. A. Harrison write, stripping can be ‘‘surprisingly conservative,’’ yet ‘‘in spite of its conformist ideas about itself and sexuality, it has always been able to make room for visionaries’’ (1988: 20). Dancing is also a significant source of income for many women, attracting young women wishing to rebel against middle-class norms of femininity, college students and single mothers who want a flexible work schedule and decent pay, drug addicts, writers, artists, and professionals. Because of their marginalized status, strip clubs and other adult entertainment venues attract customers who are sex radicals and outcasts (Califia 1994) as well as more conservative men (such as
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Body Talk men who categorize all women as Madonnas or whores, for example). As Masquelier notes in the introduction, and as some of the contributors to this volume expand upon, bodily surfaces are at times used to transgress embodied conventions and contest the existing moral order of a community. Yet at the same time, it is important to recognize the many ways that social inequalities of gender, class, and race, as well as extremely conservative ideologies about nudity and sexuality in the U.S., influence both the production and consumption of exotic dance. In this way, nudity is not necessarily or unproblematically a vehicle of social contestation, but can also provide a means of reinscribing the very categories upon which the status quo rests. I began researching strip clubs in 1995 and worked as an exotic dancer off and on for six years during this time; thus, this chapter is drawn from a much larger project on the meanings and uses of commodified sexualized services. In 1997–98, I conducted fieldwork in five strip clubs in a fairly large southeastern city which I call Laurelton, working over a period of fourteen months as a nude entertainer. As strip clubs are highly stratified in terms of ‘‘classiness,’’ I selected sites that ranged from the most prestigious clubs in the city (offering valet parking, luxurious atmospheres, expensive lighting and sound systems, dozens of dancers on multiple stages, etc.) to lower-tier ‘‘dive’’ bars (clubs that are dimly lit, sparsely furnished, and located in red-light districts or simply known as smaller neighborhood venues).1 Though the degree of nudity varies in strip clubs around the country, Laurelton laws allowed the dancers to strip completely (though these performances were regulated, as will be discussed). Dancers were each required to give stage performances for tips; they were also, however, expected to circulate amongst the customers to sell ‘‘private’’ table dances for $10 a song. Depending on the rules and layout of the club, the dancer might disrobe on a customer’s table so that he could view her from below, on the floor between his legs while he was seated, or in front of his chair on a slightly raised platform. A club might have between one and four stages with dancers on each, and any number of nude women might be performing amongst the audience at any given time. The largest club also staged a mandatory spectacle each evening where every dancer in the club was required to disrobe simultaneously, regardless of whether or not she was being paid. The clubs in Laurelton that allowed full nudity prohibited any contact between dancers and customers during their dances and these rules were usually strictly enforced. Significantly, the prohibition of contact was also important to many of the customers that I interviewed and interacted with, as these men generally realized that other venues existed that would allow contact and had consciously avoided those sites. At each of the selected clubs, I went through the application, audition, and training process as would any new entertainer and worked a variety of shifts to gain access to a range of different customers, employees, and experiences. Actually working as an entertainer meant that I was subject to the same rules and regulations as the other dancers, facing the possibility of either
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference acceptance or rejection by the customers each shift and learning the bodily disciplines and techniques specific to the work. My employment allowed me access not only to the customers but also to all of the spaces of the club, and I was able to speak with other dancers, managers, floormen, DJs, advertisers, and club owners as well as the patrons. I also conducted thirty multiple, indepth interviews with regular male customers of the strip clubs in which I worked, asking questions about sexuality and gender, work and money, family, intimate relationships, and their use of the sex industry. This chapter obviously cannot do justice to the variety of experiences and motivations expressed by the interviewees, and that is not my intention. Rather, I focus here on the production and meanings of nudity in these particular venues, especially in an interactive context.
Regulating and Producing Nudity Contextualizing Nudity in Strip Clubs It is a focus on bodily exposure that distinguishes strip clubs from other kinds of bars and nightclubs (though this boundary may be disappearing with some of the increasingly risqué fashions for women) and the focus on sexualized looking in a public atmosphere that differentiates the strip club from many other forms of adult entertainment such as pornography, prostitution, and oral or manual release in a massage parlor. Yet the desire to visit strip clubs is more than just a desire to passively see women’s bodies, even for the most voyeuristic of customers. There are many ways to potentially ‘‘see’’ naked women—peeping, viewing pornography, reading medical texts, or developing intimate relationships with them, for example. These visits, then, must also be seen as expressing a desire to have a particular kind of experience rooted in the complex network of relationships between ‘‘home,’’ ‘‘work,’’ and ‘‘away,’’ an experience that I have elsewhere analyzed as ‘‘touristic’’ (Frank 2002a). Touristic practices, according to sociologist John Urry, ‘‘involve the notion of ‘departure,’ of a limited breaking with established routines and practices of everyday life and allowing one’s senses to engage with a set of stimuli that contrasts with the everyday and the mundane’’ (1990: 2). The sights that are gazed upon are chosen because they offer ‘‘distinctive contrasts’’ with work and home and also because ‘‘there is an anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered’’ (1990: 3). The behavioral structures of everyday life are indeed inverted for many customers inside the clubs; for example, women do the approaching rather than the men and thus face the possibility of rejection; women ‘‘ask’’ to be looked at naked (‘‘Would you like to buy a table dance?’’); and usually private performances of sexual desire or sexualized display of the nude body are suddenly made public. Further, while intimate relationships between individuals may be covertly facilitated with
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Body Talk money in everyday realms, inside the clubs this facilitation is blatant, immediate, and far less apologetic (though no less complicated in its various enactments). Nudity serves as a visual reminder of these social inversions—a sign of the difference of the setting from work and home as well as the difference of the women and the behavioral codes that govern the exchanges. Though a strip club may be touristic for the male customers, and even for the regulars in particular patterned ways, it is, first and foremost, a workplace for the dancers. Granted, stripping may be a means of rebellion for young women in addition to being a lucrative job, especially for those in the middle classes (Frank 2002b; Johnson 1999). On the other hand, the fact remains that the parties to the transactions are coming to the encounters with different purposes—the men for leisure, the women for labor. These different purposes and meanings are not rooted in essential gender differences; rather, they are informed by labor relations as well as social positions (including, but not limited to, gender). Certainly these categories of worker and leisure seeker are not absolute: customers may conduct business activities at strip clubs, for example, and most customers are also workers in other arenas. Likewise, there may be some dancers for whom stripping feels more like leisure than work, at least on certain days, and a large component of the job involves engaging in practices associated with leisure—drinking alcohol, dining, conversing, flirting, having fun (or at least appearing to), and, especially, being undressed. Yet in the immediacy of the encounter, the money nearly always flows in one direction only—from the customer to the dancer (until later, when the dancer is asked to pay the establishment a cut of her earnings). Further, even though a man may be conducting a form of business on the premises, it is usually precisely because this space is inherently ‘‘not work’’ for him that it has been chosen. Thus, while one or both of the participants to any transaction may be ‘‘playing’’ at any given time, this play is firmly situated within a larger framework of cultural and economic relations. It is within this framework that the dancers’ bodily revelations become meaningful, and hence profitable, for themselves and for the clubs. Nudity, of course, has an assortment of sometimes conflicting meanings in the contemporary U.S. and can at different times (and to different observers) signify a variety of things, including but not limited to innocence, naturalness, authenticity, vulnerability, sexual power, truth, revelation of one’s inner self, humiliation, degradation, a lack of self-respect, immorality, sexual accessibility, and a prelude to sexual activity. To see someone without clothes, especially in a public setting, can thus be confusing (even if expected) and requires interpretation by the participants involved. Anne Hollander argues that humans have invented both the notion of the ‘‘naturalness of nudity’’ and that of the ‘‘wickedness of nudity’’ (1975), and these kinds of interpretations reemerge in many elements of strip club exchanges and in the debates that erupt about their existence. Similarly, art historian Mario Perniola points out that a paradox
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference emerges in opposition between clothing and nudity due to the fact that Western culture has both Hellenistic and Hebraic roots. As Dennis Hall quotes Perniola to explain, In Western thought’s Hellenistic roots, on the one hand, we have a reverence for nudity based upon the ability to see the ‘‘naked truth,’’ ‘‘the metaphysical ability to see beyond all robes, veils, and coverings to the thing itself in its exact particulars.’’ . . . Getting to ‘‘the naked truth’’ is a process of getting undressed, getting free of clothing. From this perspective, being clothed is a privation. In Western thought’s Hebraic roots, on the other hand, we also have a reverence for the condition of being clothed as a mark of humanity. ‘‘Clothing prevails as an absolute,’’ Perniola suggests, ‘‘whenever or wherever the human figure is assumed to be essentially dressed, when there is the belief that human beings are human, that is distinct from animals, by virtue of the fact that they wear clothes.’’ . . . Getting to the truth is a process of getting dressed, putting on clothing. From this perspective, being naked is a privation. (Hall 2001: 70)
Public nudity is embedded in a host of additional symbolic and emotional meanings, again often ambivalent and frequently revolving around issues of power and control. Stripping an individual of his or her clothes as a form of military action, a punitive measure, or a means of humiliation is widely understood as a means of exercising power. At the same time, people who willingly or purposefully shed their clothes in public are often criminalized or stigmatized and seen as dangerous (powerful?) or pathological—‘‘trenchcoaters,’’ streakers, nudists, strippers. Prohibitions on nudity have long been seen as part of society’s repression of natural sexuality and the body, both in academic theories and in folk understandings; thus, nudity can appear as transgressive, even dangerous to the civilized order. Patrons, being subjects to and of the same discourses as other individuals, also bring ideas about nudity as transgressive, dangerous, and liberating to their visits to strip clubs and their encounters with dancers. The notion that strip clubs were somehow an expression of a transcultural, transhistorical, ‘‘natural’’ male sexuality that was repressed in everyday life was important to many of the customers (despite the fact that there are many men who do not find the clubs appealing). Similarly, the idea that strip clubs were places in which one was at risk for physical or moral contamination was also motivating and eroticized for the regular customers. Men who disliked strip clubs, on the other hand, often claimed to see them as boring, commercialized, or contrived. Customers sometimes described themselves as ‘‘adventurers,’’ dancers as ‘‘brave’’ and ‘‘wild,’’ and strip clubs themselves as places ‘‘outside of the law’’ (Frank 2002a). In strip clubs, customers also bring their own sexual histories to the transactions, as well as their beliefs about gender, sexuality, and consumption. Despite many individual differences, I did find patterns among the regular customers, those men for whom visits to strip clubs were a significant sexualized practice. Though few of the men claimed to be religious, and they
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Body Talk overwhelmingly expressed support for the dancers’ right to disrobe and the ‘‘naturalness’’ of such an act, their enthusiasm usually quickly waned when I asked about how they would feel if it was a wife or daughter onstage. Many of the regular customers claimed to be married to very conservative women who had more extreme views about nudity and sexuality than they did. There were some customers, for example, who stated that they were never allowed to look at the bodies of their wives or partners, even during sex—in these cases, nudity might be fascinating, awe-inspiring, or even upsetting. Even for those men who did have access to private revelations of the female body, the fact that they were paying for live, public performances meant that there were additional emotional layers enwrapping their interpretations of their encounters—mixtures of shame, anxiety, excitement, and desire. If it is true that ‘‘there is no apprehension of the body of the other without a corresponding (re)vision of one’s own’’ (Phelan 1993: 171), some of the pleasure in these commodified encounters arises from complicated, and concurrent, fantasies of security (rooted in the ritualized performances of sexual difference that unfold in the clubs) and fantasies of rupture or transgression (rooted in the feelings of degradation, vulnerability, and freedom that many of the customers felt would accompany their own public nudity) (see Frank 2002a). The relationship of nudity to forms of power and control has long been bolstered by the regulation of bodily exposure by state and local governments in the U.S., as well as by the ways that those regulations are proposed, implemented, and debated in public forums. Though I do not have space here to detail the development of modern exotic dance out of other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, and cabaret shows, it is important to realize that the history of striptease is thoroughly shaped by the history of regulation and the conflicts that surround sexualized displays and behaviors in American public culture. The distinctions made between art and obscenity, lewd or acceptable behavior, and moral or immoral forms or representations of sexuality can be seen as ongoing arguments that are carried out in legal forums, academic treatises, public culture and the media, and living rooms around the country. Frequently what is indecent in one decade is commonplace in the next (think of the scandal over the bodily exposure of famous burlesque star Lydia Thompson in the late nineteenth century—she wore tights and made them visible to an audience) (Allen 1991), yet that does not mean that the transgressions of the day are perceived any less seriously by their participants or treated less harshly. Regulations against striptease have often been justified in the name of social control and public safety. Anti-burlesque campaigns, for example, surfaced almost immediately after the entertainment form arrived in America from Europe during the late 1800s, and continued to escalate throughout the 1930s.2 While early protests against sexualized entertainment often focused on the sexual depravity or suspected prostitution of the female performers, later campaigns against burlesque, according to historian Andrea Friedman, began
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference to focus on the supposedly dangerous and aggressive sexuality of working-class males, especially when exposed to female nudity or immorality. Such campaigns, she argues, ‘‘offered an opportunity to articulate deep-seated concerns about male sexual orderliness in a profoundly disorderly world,’’ and such fears of the out-of-control or aggressively sexual male would surface again in the 1950s and 1970s anti-pornography movements (1996: 237), and, arguably, have gained force in current debates about striptease. Such campaigns can also be seen as reflecting a class bias, with working-class or lower-tier forms of entertainment being penalized more harshly than those designated ‘‘art’’ and enjoyed by relatively privileged audiences (Foley 2002; Hanna 1999). Despite attempts in every era to regulate theaters that featured different forms of striptease, however, it has continued to thrive and evolve as an entertainment form. This process of upscaling in strip clubs escalated in the 1980s, and upper-tier ‘‘gentleman’s clubs’’ now exist in addition to neighborhood bars and run-down, red-light-district venues. The number of strip clubs in the United States has been growing rapidly; there were around 3,000 venues across the nation in 1998 (Hanna 1998). This growth has not occurred without the eruption of either national or local conflicts, however, and efforts to distance strip clubs from their illicit associations have become increasingly important to the club owners given the opposition that has arisen in a number of communities. Striptease is seen as dangerous and socially disruptive by conservative segments of the population and thousands of taxpayer and private dollars are spent in attempts to eradicate strip clubs in communities across the nation. Because of their lingering working-class associations, and the persistent, often erroneous belief that they are indelibly linked to prostitution, crime, and other ‘‘negative secondary effects,’’ strip clubs have already been subject to more severe regulations than other kinds of entertainment, and some municipalities have attempted to use restrictive regulations to close down adult businesses altogether: requiring extremely bright lighting, prohibiting tipping, requiring bikinis or cocktail dresses at all times, stipulating that excessive distance be maintained between the entertainers and the customers, etc. (Hanna 1999).3 In 2000, despite a lack of sound evidence that strip clubs cause negative secondary effects, the Supreme Court upheld legislation regulating exotic dance in the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, ruling that ‘‘nude public dancing itself is immoral’’ (Foley 2002: 3). Immediately after the ruling, clips from a video taken at a nude club played repeatedly on the evening news, with only small digitized blurs over the dancers’ breasts and pubic area— symbolic of the pasties and g-strings that the dancers would now be wearing. Instead of being something that individuals would need to consciously seek out, such images were broadcast into living rooms across the country as a sign of the ‘‘dangerous,’’ but ever fascinating, exposed female body. In Laurelton, the combination of full nudity and alcohol was regularly under fire from this kind of restrictive regulation, and there have been numerous legal challenges to the clubs there.
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Body Talk The intricacies of the many battles that were fought in locales across the country throughout the twentieth century would be impossible to detail here, as would the complexities of the justifications that continue to be given for regulating, harassing, shutting down, or allowing venues that offer the display of sexualized female bodies to their patrons. Instead, it is important to realize that regulation and scandal does not just repress unruly ‘‘natural’’ desires in the name of civilization and order, but actually helps to create and shape those desires (Foucault 1978). Producing Nudity: Regulations and Manipulations by the State and the Clubs In strip clubs, after all, nudity is in many ways sanitized and controlled— through local regulations, by the managers, and by the dancers—and behavioral boundaries are enforced by legal and social codes. Legal regulations, for example, may stipulate which kinds of movements by the dancers are allowed and provide detailed prescriptions for the presentation of the body. Police surveillance, uniformed and plainclothed, is not uncommon in the clubs, presumably to maintain order and ensure that the laws are not broken. Dancers can be ticketed or arrested for infractions. In Laurelton, dancers were prohibited from touching their own breasts or genitals during their dances and from touching the genital area of their customers, were supposed to maintain a one-foot distance between their body and the customer, were not allowed to bend or move in ways that exposed the interior of the vagina, and were required to keep moving at all times when unclothed.4 Dancers were also required to have at least a one-inch strip of pubic hair. If a dancer accidentally removed too much hair during her bikini wax or while shaving, she was asked to shade it in with eyebrow pencil. Though the clubs that I studied allowed full nudity, other municipalities around the country may require g-strings, bikinis, or pasties to cover the nipples, which range from clear Band-Aid-type strips to sequined tassels. In Laurelton, shoes were required at all times by the Health Department since many of the clubs served food, a law that many of the dancers found fairly amusing. When new regulations are proposed, club owners and dancers frequently argue that they will lose business. Although this is indeed the case in the short term, and there are clubs that do not make it through the transition period, it is also true that the customer base rejuvenates itself over time, sometimes with a different composition. Laurelton, for example, allowed only topless dancing for many years. After the laws were rewritten in the 1980s to allow full nudity, dancers working at the time told me that many regular customers actually refused to visit the revamped clubs. (It is not just tighter restrictions that can cause clubs to lose business.) It was not long, however, before men who enjoyed fully nude dancing began to frequent the clubs. Stricter regulations are threatened quite frequently and occasionally do drive clubs out of business or force dancers to relocate. Sometimes the laws also backfire, reducing con-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference trol of customer behavior—bikini clubs, for example, may not be subject to the same rules against customer/dancer contact that topless or nude clubs may be. Likewise, clubs that serve alcohol may have tighter restrictions on performer and customer behavior. However, there are enough customers who desire regulations to allow for any number of viable businesses—one can find nocontact, topless bars that are packed with customers every night in Colorado and North Carolina as well as fully nude lap dancing clubs in California. What may really hurt business, in the end, is the permissiveness of people toward bodily exposure more generally. What Brian McNair has called ‘‘striptease culture’’ (2002) may be creating a younger generation that is less titillated by bodily revelation—after all, one can see a lot of skin on a college campus or on MTV—but seeking different kinds of prohibited contact or other kinds of transgression. In addition to laws and regulations set nationally or locally, the clubs themselves also regulate and produce nude bodies, in the name of profit as well as control. Clubs have a need to remain within the boundaries of the law, but may also want to control behavior and manage bodies in order to create an upscale atmosphere, as ‘‘classiness’’ certainly includes an element of moral superiority even in the realm of sexuality. Clubs which installed poles on their stages encouraged more acrobatic dancing and more explicit views of the nude body, for example. Upscale clubs in Laurelton, on the other hand, featured runways instead of poles and had rules about how far a dancer could bend over to accept tips or allow customers to see between her legs and which dance moves could be done (sometimes even stricter than the local prohibitions against lewd dancing). Runway stages encouraged a strut, and dancers tended to move more like fashion models than pornographic ones. Upscale clubs may require floor-length gowns, at least one accessory, or even frequent costume changes. Most clubs, however, do require high heels at all times; in Laurelton the rule was four- to five-inch heels. One upscale club in which I worked had a mandatory toenail polish rule for dancers who wore open-toed shoes because the manager thought it was more elegant. Clubs also had rules about the removal of clothing, sometimes formalized and sometimes informal. One club in Laurelton, for example, required that dancers be clothed for their first song during stage sets, topless on the second song, and fully nude on the third and final song of their set. Another club, however, required that dancers go nude onstage as soon as they made ten dollars (the cost of a private table dance), and if they did not make that amount they were asked to remain clothed, even if other dancers on the stage were not, to encourage tipping. The more upscale the strip club believes itself to be, the more the dancers are chosen for their conformity to traditional gender stereotypes of demeanor, comportment, conversational style, and appearance—the images of class being sold are often directly tied to the appearance and behavior of the dancers. Particular working-class signs can be used to exclude women from the upscale clubs—tattoos, piercings, a less standard body size and shape, too much make-
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Body Talk up or hair spray, or certain ways of speaking and moving. Large scars or bad teeth, imperfections that are often corrected by women with the economic resources to do so, are generally seen only at the lower-tier clubs, at least in the larger cities. Clubs could produce bodies in other ways as well—through their internal geographies, staging and seating arrangements, mirroring, lighting systems, décor, and special effects like fans set in the stage floors, smoke, and strobe lights. My body at the upper-tier Panther Club looked extremely different than it did at the lower-tier Pony Lounge, for example. At the Panther, the height of the stages perfected the breast line of the dancers, as the customers were always positioned such that they had to look up at the nude bodies of the women. The lighting was exquisite, making one’s skin look tanned and flawless and disguising cellulite, scars, and discolorations. At the Pony Lounge, however, the lighting was harsher and the smoke was released from a visible pipe over the head of the dancer on the main stage, instead of misting from the floor the way it did at some of the upper-tier clubs. Some clubs have installed extensive video camera systems, ostensibly to monitor the behavior of the customers, but certainly also to make sure that dancers do not bend the rules or lie about the tips they have collected (Egan 2003). Finally, dancers also regulated their own bodies and nude performances in order to be profitable as well as for reasons of status or to maintain personal boundaries of morality or self, as discussed in the next sections. One might suggest that customers also regulate the dancers’ bodies and performances through their patronage and their tipping practices, yet though customer stereotypes and expectations clearly have an extraordinary influence on the club’s rules and the dancers’ presentations, it is also the case that dancers exercise quite a bit of agency in deciding upon precisely what will draw them the most profit or make them the most comfortable with the work. Manipulating Revelation: Nudity as Costume The naked body, as should be evident from my field notes at the beginning of the chapter, can be conceptualized as a kind of palette and was so conceptualized, consciously or not, by the dancers. As Paul Ableman writes, true nakedness is rare if we mean ‘‘the nakedness of people whose body surface is both unadorned (with clothing or ornamentation) and unmodified (by tattooing, painting, or scarification)’’ (1982: 15). Similarly, Terence Turner discusses the Kayapo of the Amazon, who exhibit an elaborate code of bodily adornment despite the fact that they do not wear clothing (lip plugs, penis sheaths, beads, body painting, plucked eyebrows, head shaving, etc.) and writes, ‘‘the apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman’’ (1980: 115). Dancers, in the sense that Turner is referring to, are probably less naked than the rest of us under our clothes. One of the first things that a new dancer learns is how to adorn, present,
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference and move her body in ways that are legal, profitable, and comfortable. Dancers continually modified their skin through grooming (cleansing, hair removal, texturizing of the skin), make-up, scents, and tanning. Some dancers sported an all-over tan (leading customers to continually ask where they sunbathed), others wore bathing suits even in tanning beds in order to have a distinct line between white and brown skin; some created tan lines with makeup or chose not to tan at all. Body make-up could be used in different ways in addition to creating the highly desirable tan—to highlight and contour the breasts or to cover blemishes or tattoos, for example. Skin was the absolute boundary in Laurelton and thus a particular object of fascination. Though a customer might have contact with a dancer’s clothing (she could wrap a boa or a dress around his neck, for example), he was officially not allowed to touch her skin during a dance. Though contact might surreptitiously be made by the dancer (holding the customer’s hands, brushing his skin with her hair, etc.) or customer (welcome or unwelcome), bouncers patrolled the clubs and such unsanctioned behavior was rare. Hair has deeply symbolic meanings in many cultural systems (see, for instance, Obeyesekere 1981; Rooks 1996; Turner 1980) and may become meaningful in different times and places through color, length, style, and so forth. The hair on the head, as well as the hair elsewhere on the body, is connected to gender systems in the U.S.: women are expected to remove hair on their legs, armpits, bikini line, and face, for example, yet long hair on the head is generally associated with femininity. Dancers almost always conformed to this expectation of hair removal on their own, were asked to by the management, or were penalized for not doing so by the customers.5 In addition to the hair on their legs and under their arms, in the nude clubs many dancers also removed all of the pubic hair from the labia, leaving only a small strip in the very front (sometimes now called a ‘‘Brazilian’’ wax by salons as the popularity of the style grows among the general public). Most women in the clubs, though certainly not all, wear their hair relatively long to meet customer and management expectations of a feminine style. Hair extensions are increasingly common and are replacing wigs because they look more natural and will not become dislodged during a dance. Longer hair has the advantage of being able to highlight particular body parts—it can be pulled in front to hide and then reveal the breasts; in a rear-view pose it can brush the top of the buttocks; it can conceal or emphasize the eyes. Hair color may also be used to send signals to customers and be associated with particular looks and personalities—the bubbly or sexy blonde, the exotic brunette, the feisty redhead. Though wilder styles and colors were found at the lower-tier clubs, particularly among younger dancers, the upper-tier clubs tended to be more standardized. Accessorizing the body did not stop at the skin or the hair, of course, and numerous kinds of plastic surgeries are undergone by dancers perfecting their look: breast implants, breast lifts or reductions, lip injections, nose jobs, liposuction, tummy tucks, labia standardization, etc. Other kinds of body modi-
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Body Talk fications included tattoos and piercings, especially tongue and clitoral piercings, and were increasingly common in the younger dancers (something that many of the older male customers commented on as marking a difference from their generation). While breast augmentations and other kinds of standardizing surgeries usually served to enhance a woman’s value in the industry, tattoos and piercings did not necessarily do so. Dancers also modified their bodies for the job through dieting and physical training such as working out and body-building. Though nudity itself has been referred to as the ‘‘primal costume’’ (Lewin 1984), there are few, if any, dancers who do not continue to fashion their nude bodies through accessories like high heels, boots, boas, jewelry, make-up, or other specialized or theme costuming options. Performance theorist Katherine Liepe-Levinson writes that, for strippers, ‘‘[c]ostumes are environments for bodies, and like the interior design of theatres, they not only frame those bodies, but also engage the wearers and viewers in environmental reciprocities with cultural symbols of gender and desire’’ (1998: 37). Costumes help shape customer perceptions of dancers as they mingle with the audience, and thus sometimes influence which customers a dancer will interact with on a given night. Further, even as a dancer undresses, her body may retain traces of her outfit and garner complex valuations of classy or ‘‘trashy’’ associated with particular kinds of adornment and the way that she wears them. Dancers often appropriated standard cultural fantasies in their selfpresentations and often self-consciously mixed behavioral patterns with symbolic fashion choices. Some women based their approach to customers on the ‘‘bimbo’’ stereotype—bubbly, giggly, and light-hearted—and might wear bikinis, brightly colored clingy gowns, or theme costumes, depending on the rules of the club. Similarly, some dancers presented themselves as the ‘‘girl next door’’—as students, friends, or even possible lovers (though only in fantasy), and might wear cut-off shorts and tank tops, sundresses, or ‘‘tasteful’’ gowns. Others took up the position of ‘‘bad girl’’—dressing in black and leather, talking dirty, promising dominance or adventure. Still others, like myself, switched approaches depending on mood, type of customer, and what the other dancers were doing that evening. One would rarely find a whole club of dominatrixes because the customer base usually would not support it; on the other hand, one might find any number of plaid-skirted schoolgirls circulating amongst the audience. Sometimes costumes were chosen to fit body types—a smallbreasted woman, for example, might have a more difficult time pulling off the ‘‘sexy secretary’’ than one who was literally spilling out of her business suit. Although the schoolgirl look was profitable for dancers with a wide range of body types for different reasons, a very flat-chested or young-looking dancer might be advised to try out the look. Many dancers also avoided particular looks that they found physically or morally uncomfortable. Some did not like little-girl looks, for example, while others would not wear items associated with S&M. An aesthetics of feminine excess (Waggoner 1997) works well in the sex
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference industry, as everything can be overdone as a means of generating attention: necklines can plunge, skirt lengths can rise. Make-up can be exaggerated. Fetish boots might have platform heels and rise eight inches from the floor. Again, valuations may be associated with particular kinds of costuming. Dancers may employ signs of wealth and glamour, and costumes can be extravagantly accessorized in a manner far too opulent (or trashy) for the average middle-class woman. How these signs are read by the customers varies, but is often patterned by the setting. In everyday life, of course, attracting too much attention can be risky or annoying for women and the clubs could thus offer a safe place in which to try out forbidden looks or movements (Frank 2002b; Johnson 1999). Many of the costumes worn in the clubs would be completely inappropriate in other spheres and at other times (which is part of the fun of being a dancer and part of the reason that at Halloween so many women suddenly become strippers, prostitutes, ‘‘sexy teachers,’’ or cats in skintight catsuits). Perniola writes that in the figurative arts, ‘‘eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity.’’ That is, eroticism is ‘‘conditional on the possibility of movement—transit—from one state to the other’’ (1989: 237). This is so in a strip club as well—though perhaps a few customers would still be titillated if the dancers took the stage already nude—but with an added, gendered transit as dancers also move between categories and potentialities, performing as ‘‘fantasy girls’’ who may be simultaneously, or alternately, virgins and whores (Egan 2003). Though costumes are variable, there are certainly two themes that continue to reappear in dancers’ self-presentations and adornments: sexual availability/knowledge and innocence/untouchability. These themes emerge in a paradoxical relationship to each other—no dancer is actually sexually available within the confines of the club (or we are no longer talking about stripping) and no dancer is innocent in all social circles when her transgressions (disrobing in public and for money) become known.
The Dynamics of Concealment and Revelation Revelations of the body are an important part of a dancer’s job, and we have explored the way that the state, the clubs, and the dancers themselves regulate and manipulate these revelations, though from different perspectives and with different interests in mind. Another kind of revelation, glimpses of the other’s subjectivity, also becomes commodified in the interactions between dancers and their customers and is implicated in understanding nudity as a social process rather than a state of being. In the West, distinctions are sometimes made between the terms ‘‘naked’’ and ‘‘nude,’’ often to ‘‘discriminate between a certain kind of stylized and usually idealized representation of the body and a merely naked body’’ (Ableman 1982: 49). The nude, then, is traditionally seen as a refined state of being:
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Body Talk To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body reformed. (Clark 1956: 3)
Similar distinctions between representations have been made in the debates about the boundaries of art, erotica, and pornography. As art historian Lynda Nead argues, the female nude must be ‘‘recognized as a particularly significant motif within western art and aesthetics,’’ as it ‘‘symbolizes the transformation of the base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture and the spirit.’’ Non-art, or obscenity, she argues, is seen as ‘‘representation that moves and arouses the viewer rather than bringing about stillness and wholeness’’ (1992: 2). Adult entertainment, of course, with its purpose of arousing and/or satiating sexual desire, is obviously most often associated with the pornographic and the obscene (whether it be print pornography, film or video, or live stripping) than recognized as art. Arguing that striptease is a form of expression and a legitimate cultural art form like other kinds of dance, however, has been one strategy that strip clubs and their supporters have taken to combat restrictive regulation (see Hanna 1998). The terms naked and nude are also used synonymously, of course, and both derive from the same common root in Sanskrit, nagnag, which had connotations of shame (Ableman 1982: 49). Dancers in the clubs I worked in did not distinguish between being naked and nude linguistically, either with customers or with themselves. Naked, as a more informal term, was often used in conversations between dancers and customers and by the DJ in my experience: ‘‘Sarah needs ten more dollars before she gets naked!’’ or ‘‘Would you like to see me naked?’’ On the other hand, that there were differences between states of undress was a given—some dancers would not be seen without their wig or hairpiece; others refused to take the stage without a certain set of high heels, etc. Most women that I worked with also had ritualistic routines that preceded a shift, either short and simple (applying mascara or putting on their heels) or more elaborate. Further, even if it was not explicitly stated, many dancers did seem to feel a difference between nudity as a form of dress and nakedness as an exposure of the inner self. And so did the customers. Going to strip clubs obviously presents the opportunity to look at scantily clothed, naked, or semi-naked women. Though many outsiders recognize that stripping involves bodily exposure on the part of the dancers, fewer realize that over the last few decades strip clubs have become ever more interactive and derive a great deal of their erotic charge from the promise of highly personalized encounters through table or lap dances. Unlike the burlesque shows of earlier years (Allen 1991), the highly choreographed Parisian striptease written about by Roland Barthes (1972), and the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference spectacular topless revues found in tourist locations such as Las Vegas, contemporary gentleman’s clubs have ‘‘house’’6 dancers who usually mingle with the audience members individually, possibly spending more time conversing or dancing at a single customer’s table than disrobing on stage. This is certainly the case in Laurelton, especially on slower nights. This increased interpersonal interaction requires new strategies on the part of the dancers for generating and maintaining customer interest, often involving performances of authenticity (‘‘You’re different from the other customers, I’ll tell you my real name’’) and revelations of self (‘‘Let’s get to know each other’’) (see Frank 1998). Perniola writes, In our century, the erotics of dressing and the erotics of undressing appear in porno theaters and striptease acts, but only very rarely do they achieve an effective erotic transit. This happens in striptease when, through an intense look at her audience, the stripper succeeds in inverting a relationship that is usually one-way. From the moment the spectator feels himself watched, it is as if the stripper’s nudity functions like a mirror: he has to confront himself and his own potential nudity. (1989: 259)
His point is quite apt—part of what the customers were also seeking was some sort of revelation of subjectivity, as most dancers will admit. Dancers understood this element of the men’s desire and carefully crafted strategies by which they could ‘‘expose’’ themselves in ways that would be satisfying to their customers. For regular customers, after all, nudity eventually becomes almost commonplace, and the men repeatedly told me that they returned again and again to the clubs because of the interactive component of the encounters. Many of the regulars expressed a desire to ‘‘get to know the dancers,’’ asking questions about their family life, goals and dreams, and hobbies. Even those who did not necessarily want to move the interactions to this level often sought further revelations—those moments when they might be privy to something more than the other customers were getting (increased value), more than was legally allowed, or even more than the dancers wanted to reveal at a given moment. Revelations through Interaction In a piece on Parisian striptease, Barthes writes that striptease is based on the fundamental contradiction that Woman is ‘‘desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked’’ (1972: 84). The classic props used in striptease, he argues, ensure that the nakedness that follows the woman’s act is ‘‘no longer a part of a further, genuine undressing.’’ Instead, it ‘‘remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object’’ (1972: 85). The dance routine is also a barrier to the true erotic for Barthes, because through a series of ritualistic gestures it hides the very nakedness that it is supposed to reveal. He writes that professional stripteasers can ‘‘wrap themselves in the
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Body Talk miraculous ease which constantly clothes them, makes them remote, gives them the icy indifference of skillful practitioners, haughtily taking refuge in the sureness of their technique’’ (1972: 86). He notes, however, that eroticism resurfaces in the amateur contest, where beginners undress ‘‘without resorting or resorting very clumsily to magic, which unquestionably restores to the spectacle its erotic power.’’ With ‘‘no feathers or furs’’ and ‘‘few disguises as a starting point—gauche steps, unsatisfactory dancing, girls constantly threatened by immobility, and above all by a ‘technical’ awkwardness (the resistance of briefs, dress, or bra),’’ amateurs are denied ‘‘the alibi of art and the refuge of being an object,’’ which gives their disrobing an ‘‘unexpected importance’’ (1972: 86). Barthes, of course, is discussing striptease that took the form of elaborate costuming and lengthy stage shows which included little ‘‘private’’ or individualized contact between the stripper and the members of the audience, a type of performance which is quite rare in contemporary strip clubs but which is sometimes talked about nostalgically by both dancers and customers. Nevertheless, the popularity of amateur contests in contemporary strip clubs, the allure of ‘‘new girls,’’ and the customers’ confessed dislike of professionalism all support Barthes’s contentions, at least in part. What Barthes perhaps did not realize, or what has perhaps changed since he wrote, is that some dancers have themselves become mythologists of sorts— self-consciously fashioning ways to produce an illusion of further unveiling in a room where any number of women may simultaneously be nude. Such a strategy, of course, does not work for every woman; nor does every woman need or want to use it—there are some customers, after all, for whom nudity itself is thrilling enough to compel financial generosity or who enjoy the spectacular rather than the individualized parts of the experience. Yet such ‘‘intentional’’ unveilings could indeed be profitable and dancers used a number of strategies to produce such intimate exposures—telling stories about their personal lives, feigning or summoning up attraction for the customer or embarrassment about being undressed in front of him, or providing customers with real names or cell phone numbers, for example (Frank 1998).7 Dancers also sometimes crafted mistakes in their performance or attire to appear inexperienced or new. The lack of ‘‘professionalism’’ exhibited by dancers new to the business implied to some men that they would not be as skilled at manipulating men out of their money. To others, it seemed to provide a tension between purity and defilement, a kind of revelation that was particularly exciting. On the other hand, there were certainly interactions that made dancers feel uncomfortably exposed, emotionally or physically, though the particularities varied for different women and boundaries were maintained in a variety of ways. Though I did not meet many women like this while working, there are indeed a few dancers who struggle with their public nudity and use drugs or alcohol to overcome their discomfort. More often I encountered dancers for whom some situations created an uncomfortable feeling of being revealed. Some dancers
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference found regulars too emotionally draining to deal with, for example, and instead sought out quick encounters with men that they did not intend to see again. Customers sometimes used financial lures to attempt to get dancers to cross their boundaries of propriety or privacy. Though dancers who could do so avoided such customers, those women with the most financial need would find themselves in more difficult positions. Revelations through Social Positionings: Gender and Class This tension between purity and defilement also played out through customer talk about beauty. One justification frequently given by men for their visits to strip clubs is that ‘‘all men like to look at beautiful women,’’ or that ‘‘women’s bodies are works of art.’’ The appreciation of female beauty, then, was sometimes given as a justification for visiting the upper-tier clubs where the dancers were supposedly ‘‘prettier.’’ Men who were traveling or visiting with business associates would also often choose the upscale clubs because of their reputations for beautiful women (reputations earned through vigorous marketing and timely photo spreads in magazines like Playboy’s Guide to Men’s Clubs) and because these clubs were seen as providing the most opportunity to impress friends or clients. ‘‘You don’t take clients to [lower-tier clubs],’’ one businessman told me. ‘‘You want them to be in the company of ladies who are a step above all that.’’ When I asked him to explain, he linked lower-tier clubs to prostitution and said they had dancers who were ‘‘overweight, tattooed, not very bright.’’ Dancers at the lower-tier clubs were sometimes referred to in a derogatory way as ‘‘whores.’’ As symbols of conspicuous consumption in the clubs, beautiful women could also maintain the respectability and class status of the men who spent time with them. Just as the differentiation of a high-art nude from a centerfold in aesthetic terms can sometimes differentiate the consumers of each, an encounter with a beautiful woman could serve to partly legitimate a stigmatized behavior in the strip club: a man could claim to be enjoying her in a purely aesthetic manner, which is generally seen as more respectable than looking at her for the purpose of pornographic (masturbatory) fantasy. This claim, however, is often made to balance out the ‘‘obscene’’ body with which a customer is also faced in such a scenario. Beauty should not be seen simply as a ‘‘natural’’ occurrence, however, for it is often implicated in other social systems. In an ethnographic study of working-class women, sociologist Beverly Skeggs discusses several ways that ideas about ‘‘respectability’’ inform class and gender positionings and affect female subjectivity. ‘‘The discourses of femininity and masculinity,’’ she writes, ‘‘become embodied and can be used as cultural resources,’’ carrying different amounts of symbolic capital in different contexts (1997: 8). More ‘‘legitimate’’ performances carry more privilege. Though a certain degree of physical attractiveness and athleticism may be a job prerequisite for working in a strip club (unless there is an extreme shortage of women willing to work as dancers),
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Body Talk hierarchies within the industry are certainly affected by social class. Skeggs writes that ‘‘physical attractiveness may work as a form of capital (corporeal capital)’’ but also as a form of class privilege (1997: 102). Class privilege in attractiveness may also take the form of specialized knowledge and tools, as well as the resources to procure them. Schiff compares nude dancing clubs with topless clubs in Houston: the nude clubs he writes about cater to mostly working-class customers and feature dancers with less standardized bodies than work at the upper-tier topless clubs. Yet while Schiff analyzes the fact that the nude dancers in the clubs he visited had ‘‘alternative’’ body styles—‘‘their breasts are often small or sometimes flaccid,’’ they may be overweight or have body piercings or tattoos—as ‘‘oppositional’’ to mainstream moralities, such stratifications of body types and earning potentials are fairly mainstream class and gender differences. Women who have the most options as far as where they work, which customers they interact with, what kinds of services they will perform, and when (and how easily) they retire from the sex industry when they decide to do so are usually those who are able to conform to middle-class standards of appearance (and sometimes also of behavior, comportment, and interaction). Some dancers at every club enhanced their appearance through techniques such as hair extensions, plastic surgeries, year-round tanning, etc. Access to such techniques, however, as well as the quality of the results, was connected to social class and economic assets. Even applying stage make-up and accessorizing one’s costume carried with it certain kinds of cultural capital as well as learned skill and financial flexibility. Cultural capital could also influence dancers’ interactions outside the club, especially knowledge of the appropriate level of sexualized comportment and appearance for different situations. Women who had large implants or kept up a ‘‘stripper look’’ or behavior in other spheres could face harassment because of this self-presentation and because of their visibility as women who transgressed expected codes of feminine display. Customers distinguished between dancers whom they found attractive in the club and dancers that they would find attractive in other spheres as well—the girl you could ‘‘take home to mom,’’ the ‘‘girl next door.’’ In a buyer’s market such as Laurelton, dancers were not only in competition depending on the level of club that they worked in, but also often with each other inside the same clubs. A dancer who could not compel the financial support of the patrons was not allowed the ‘‘refuge of being an object’’—in many cases dancers reacted to a lack of interest from the patrons as if it was a personal failure. This is not to say that every man desired interactions with women who were considered conventionally attractive, as men’s tastes vary. Further, just as some men eroticized the moral ‘‘lowness’’ of the dancers as compared to their chaste wives, other men eroticized the poverty or lowness of dancers who could not work in the upper-tier clubs (Frank 2002a). For these men, bodily perfection (or even its approximation) was a means of creating an unattainable object; it was the more approachable, imperfect dancer whose
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference attentions held an erotic charge and whose performances were seen as more revelatory, authentic, and exciting. Dancers were often caught in the middle of a tension between attraction and repulsion, sometimes quite self-consciously. They were presenting themselves not only as beautiful or sexually alluring, as acceptable sexual objects, but also as defiled by their public nudity and their acceptance of financial compensation for sexualized companionship and the voyeuristic pleasures of the customers. This aspect of the men’s experiences became evident in statements the men made about the lowness of dancers in comparisons to their wives, girlfriends, or daughters, as well as in the ways that negotiations were made inside the clubs. Though the stigma of exotic dancing is significantly less than that of prostitution, and may arguably be lessening, there are still many social settings where stripping is seen as unacceptable, immoral, and degrading. Strippers have been denied custody of their children, humiliated in school, socially ostracized, and sometimes criminalized. Ableman writes that ‘‘shame can attach itself to very varied parts of the body’’: It has been said that if a woman were surprised in her bath, she would cover, if she were a Moslem her face, if a Chinese her feet, if a Sumatran her knees, if a Samoan her navel, if a Laotian her breasts and if she were an Alaskan she would put the ornamental plug back in her lip. But the overwhelming majority of women, as well as men, would cover the genital parts. (1982: 43)
While Ableman is clearly generalizing widely, he is right that shame is not consistently associated with one part of the body or one kind of exposure. In strip clubs, what the men feel is shameful, and thus often exciting, may not match what causes the dancers to feel shame—bodily revelations in the clubs, after all, are carefully managed and not usually experienced as invasive. Still, when confronted with a woman who does not cover in the expected way or who is known to make public what ‘‘self-respecting’’ or ‘‘moral’’ women keep private, many people respond with fear, derision, and sometimes retaliation. While the interactions that I am discussing do not involve sexual activity, they do involve viewing the female genitals—publicly and sometimes within close range. Nude clubs, in my experience, generated more anxieties than topless clubs. Some men, in fact, admitted that they rarely viewed female genitalia. Other men did not admit it but gave me many reasons to assume that this was the case, such as a complete lack of anatomical understanding, nervousness and discomfort, or an inability to look. Despite the fact that the male customers often insisted that ‘‘the female body is beautiful to me,’’ for a man who is used to having sex in the dark (and even one who isn’t), cultural and religious devaluations of the female body, especially the genitals, may play an important and exciting part in his experiences in strip clubs. At one club, the women danced on tables that were illuminated from below, right above the customers’ food and drinks (we joked about the fact that
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Body Talk we were still required to wear shoes by the Health Department and told the customers that they were lucky we waxed off most of our pubic hair). Certainly, the genitals are a reminder of the ‘‘abject’’ (urine, feces, the unclean, the impure), as they mark a boundary between inside and outside, forming the margins of the body (Nead 1992: 32). The surfaces of the genitals may be cosmetically enhanced through stage make-up or waxing, but the threat of contamination is still omnipresent. Indeed, as one moves into other realms of the sex industry these boundaries are redrawn, and a customer may come closer to, or further away from, such bodily thresholds.8 In Laurelton, where the dancing is completely nude, the man may find himself gazing up not only at a woman’s labia during a table dance, but also at her anus—the ‘‘essence of lowness, of untouchability’’ (Miller 1997: 100). The anus, which was prominently displayed by the dancers in particular positions and angles, is also figured as a locus of possible homosexual activity—after all, it is the possible erasure of sexual difference, the only part of the genital area that looks similar on both sexes. Given that identifications are multiple, fluid, and even contradictory in fantasy life, and given that some of the men clearly identified with the position of ‘‘being desired,’’ by the dancer or as the dancer, the fantasy of having one’s anus seen (perhaps by a man) certainly has some complicated erotic potential. Bodily fluids, of course, have social and cultural meaning, and are often seen as contaminating or dangerous (Douglas 1966; Kristeva 1982). The very fact that body fluids have been seen as contaminating, however, can also be a source of erotic excitement for some individuals, a fact that has long fueled pornography and erotica. Some customers told stories about witnessing a tampon string that had come untucked or a trail of blood on a woman’s leg while she was dancing, a piece of toilet paper stuck to someone’s genitals, or liquid ‘‘dripping’’ from the vulvas of women working in lower-tier clubs whom they suspected of having engaged in sexual relations before performing on stage. Other customers told stories about these kinds of events that they’d heard second- or third-hand, and such stories circulated in both upper- and lower-tier clubs almost like urban legends. The narratives and possibility alone fascinated some of the storytellers; certain others may have hoped that they might spontaneously observe such ‘‘leakages.’’ For some men, then, ideas about defilement and purity—of or by either the dancer or themselves—play a role in their experiences in strip clubs. Sexualization, erotics, revelation, and social class are thus tangled up together in complicated patterns of both cultural and personal fantasy. *** Nudity is produced, controlled, and made profitable by the state, the clubs, and the dancers in strip clubs. Through multiple social processes, bodily exposure comes to be meaningful and revelatory. While dancers exercise
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference agency in their everyday lives (as all of us do) and in their interactions in strip clubs, we must be cautious in analyzing these venues as celebratory sites, at least for now. As a dancer, I often found myself prohibited from expressing myself in the way that I wanted—by the laws prohibiting me from touching particular parts of my body, by the managers who regulated my outfits and interactions, and even by the customers, who wanted particular kinds of moves, poses, and looks. Working in a lower-tier club may mean that one sacrifices some income for more flexibility—this is a choice made by more privileged dancers, however. Those dancers who worked in the lower-tier clubs by necessity often expressed a desire to move up to the flashier, more upscale clubs because the money and the working conditions were better. Customer, dancer, and community beliefs about gender and social class influence the meanings that underlie the transactions negotiated in strip clubs and mean that the dynamics of concealment and revelation are part of wider social processes. To see nudity as essentially liberating or transgressive is to miss the many ways that the meanings of nudity, and the effects of nudity, are produced within existing social relations. NOTES This research was assisted by a fellowship from the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Ford Foundation. 1. In addition to my experiences working in Laurelton, I also danced intermittently in an upper-tier topless gentleman’s club in the Midwest for a number of years. Further, I have toured and observed in dozens of clubs across the United States. 2. For a detailed history of burlesque, see Allen 1991. 3. In my own experience, I have found that many of the regulations intended to prevent physical contact between the patrons and the entertainers tend to backfire. The clubs that I have worked in with the minimum of physical contact between the parties have been completely nude clubs that served alcohol and that permitted nude dances a foot away from the customer. With too many restrictions and prohibitions on nudity, a different customer base begins to frequent the clubs—sometimes men who care less about the pleasure of the voyeuristic spectacle and more about purchasing more sexual activities such as lap dances. 4. Interestingly, the model artist shows, or ‘‘tableaux vivants,’’ which became popular during the mid-1800s took a slightly different view of what acceptable nudity was, featuring an actress who ‘‘assumed a stationary pose dressed in tights, transparent clothing, or nothing at all,’’ and who changed positions occasionally to allow the audiences different and more risqué views. The focus here was on immobility rather than movement, though there was a transgressive, and illegal, incident in the 1840s in which ‘‘the performers abandoned their stationary pose and proceeded to dance the polka and minuet while completely nude’’ (Gilfoyle 1992: 127). 5. Vicky Funari (1997) describes dancing in a San Francisco peep show where the customers accepted her ‘‘abundant’’ body hair. In my experience, San Francisco strip clubs and peep shows are less conservative than those in the southern and midwestern United States.
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Body Talk 6. House dancers are regular employees of the clubs in which they work (or independent contractors, depending on the state). Feature dancers, on the other hand, have traveling acts and pornographic credentials, and receive special billing from the clubs. 7. Elsewhere I have written extensively about the customers’ desires for, claims to, and perceptions of authenticity in their interactions with the dancers (Frank 1998, 2002a). A discourse of authenticity is important to the male customers of strip clubs, regardless of whether their interactions in the club are actually real and sometimes even because of the fact that they are not real. The paradox that arises is that the incessant demands of some customers to make experiences ‘‘speak’’ the truth leads directly to the possibility that such demands might remain ultimately unmet, a contradiction of which many regulars are aware. I argue that authenticity cannot really be discovered in a place, an object, or an experience—it is a psychological process, derived from the interaction between self and other (imagined or actual). Unlike some theorists of postmodernity and consumption, I do not believe that a concern with authenticity is disappearing— although the terms within which it is understood may mutate over time. The concern with authenticity will not disappear among those engaged in commodified interactions or touristic practice, along with other kinds of social interactions, because authenticity is ultimately a relational problem. 8. Even within a category like pornography, of course, there are boundaries that are drawn and redrawn. As Laura Kipnis argues, the humor found in Hustler ‘‘seems animated by the desire to violate what Douglas describes as ‘pollution’ taboos and rituals . . . a society’s set of beliefs, rituals, and practices having to do with dirt, order, and hygiene (and by extension, the pornographic)’’ (Kipnis 1996: 143). The social transgressions of Hustler are thus quite different from those of Playboy. A recent series of hardcore pornographic films from Extreme Associates exploits the allure of this phenomenon. The films, entitled Cocktails, were directed by a woman and feature female performers drinking various mixtures of bodily fluids—saliva, semen, enema fluids, urine, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Ableman, Paul. 1982. Anatomy of Nakedness. London: Orbis. Allen, Robert C. 1991. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Califia, Pat. 1994. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis. Clark, Kenneth. 1956. The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art. London: John Murray. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dragu, Margaret, and A. S. A. Harrison. 1988. Revelations: Essays on Striptease and Sexuality. London, Ontario: Nightwood Editions. Egan, R. Danielle. 2003. ‘‘Eyeing the Scene: The Uses and (Re)uses of Surveillance Cameras in an Exotic Dance Club.’’ Critical Sociology 30(2): 299–319. Foley, Brenda. 2002. ‘‘Naked Politics: Erie, PA v the Kandyland Club.’’ NWSA Journal 14(2): 1–17. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Frank, Katherine. 1998. ‘‘The Production of Identity and the Negotiation of Intimacy in a ‘Gentleman’s Club.’ ’’ Sexualities 12: 175–202. ————. 2002a. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ————. 2002b. ‘‘Stripping, Starving, and Other Ambiguous Pleasures.’’ In Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, ed. Merri Lisa Johnson, pp. 171–206. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Friedman, Andrea. 1996. ‘‘ ‘The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts’: Campaigns against Burlesque in Depression-Era New York City.’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 7(2): 203–38. Funari, Vicky. 1997. ‘‘Naked, Naughty, Nasty: Peep Show Reflections.’’ In Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle, pp. 19–35. New York: Routledge. Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920. New York: W. W. Norton. Hall, Dennis. 2001. ‘‘Delight in Disorder: A Reading of Diaphany and Liquefaction in Contemporary Women’s Clothing.’’ Journal of Popular Culture 34(4): 65–74. Hanna, Judith L. 1998. ‘‘Undressing the First Amendment and Corseting the Striptease Dancer.’’ Drama Review 42(2): 38–69. ————. 1999. ‘‘Toying with the Striptease Dancer and the First Amendment.’’ In Play and Culture Studies, vol. 2, Play Contexts Revisited, ed. Stuart Reifel, pp. 37–56. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex. Hollander, Anne. 1975. Seeing through Clothes. New York: Viking. Johnson, Merri Lisa. 199. ‘‘Pole Work: Autoethnography of a Strip Club.’’ In Sex Work & Sex Workers: Sexuality & Culture, vol. 2, ed. Barry Dank and Roberto Refinetti, pp. 149–57. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. Kipnis, Laura. 1996. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lewin, Lauri. 1984. Naked Is the Best Disguise: My Life as a Stripper. New York: William Morrow. Liepe-Levinson, Katherine. 1998. ‘‘Striptease: Desire, Mimetic Jeopardy, and Performing Spectators.’’ Drama Review 42(2): 9–37. ————. 2002. Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire. New York: Routledge. Mattson, Heidi. 1995. Ivy League Stripper. New York: Arcade. McNair, Brian. 2002. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge. Miller, William I. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Nead, Lynda. 1992. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perniola, Mario. 1989. ‘‘Between Clothing and Nudity.’’ In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, ed. Michel Fehrer, pp. 237–65. New York: Zone. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Queen, Carol. 1997. Real Live Nude Girl. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis. Reed, Stacy. 1997. ‘‘All Stripped Off.’’ In Whores and Other Feminists, ed. Jill Nagle, pp. 179–88. New York: Routledge.
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Body Talk Rooks, Noliwe M. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Schiff, Frederick. 1999. ‘‘Nude Dancing: Scenes of Sexual Celebration in a Contested Culture.’’ Journal of American Culture 22(4): 9–16. Schweitzer, Dahlia. 2001. ‘‘Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression.’’ Journal of Popular Culture: 65–75. Skeggs, Beverly. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Turner, Terence. 1980. ‘‘The Social Skin.’’ In Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, eds. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, pp. 112– 40. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Waggoner, Catherine E. 1997. ‘‘The Emancipatory Potential of Feminine Masquerade in Mary Kay Cosmetics.’’ Text and Performance Quarterly 17(3): 256–72.
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The Naked Spirit Disrobing, Deviance, and Dissent in Bori Possession Adeline Masquelier Excessive laughter and gazing on nakedness, Is wicked among Muslims, As are showiness and disrespect, False accusations and ignorance, A full veil is best for women. —Hausa song on women’s proper attire. In Beverly Mack, Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song (2004)
Stripping on the Possession Grounds In May 1989, during a bori possession ceremony held some ten miles south of Dogondoutchi (Niger) in a Mawri1 village I shall call Ourgam, something quite unexpected happened. It was late in the afternoon and some villagers had assembled on an empty lot to witness a husband’s gesture of gratitude to the spirits who had made his wife well following years of illness. The man had pledged that he would hold a wasa (possession ceremony) for the spirits if his wife recovered from the affliction which plagued her. Several years later, he was honoring his promise. After some of the Zarma-speaking spirits who control the rain—upon being invited to make an appearance—had taken hold of their hosts’ bodies, a young medium I shall call Zeinabou was suddenly possessed by a spirit whose presence had been neither requested nor anticipated. Such unexpected possession would even become a major source of embarrassment for some of the attending parties—including me. Bori spirits, I should point out, are known to occasionally show up uninvited when they feel the need to communicate urgently with a person or to make pressing revelations (Masquelier 2001, 2002). In this respect, the sudden irruption of
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The Naked Spirit Zeinabou’s spirit on the possession grounds was hardly unusual, especially given the junior status of her devotee—a recent initiate—who presumably lacked the expertise with which more experienced mediums controlled and contained defiant spirits. What that spirit did following her entrance on the possession scene, however, would prove far more problematic. There was, at first, nothing remarkable about the way Zeinabou started to shiver and shake. Her face twisted as if in pain and her bulging eyes rolled in their orbits. As the trance intensified, Zeinabou, alias the spirit, stood up and started walking furiously across the ceremonial grounds. Then, all of a sudden, and instead of mingling with the other spirits who had recently arrived and would soon be welcomed with offerings of money, the spirit suddenly stopped. The light was quickly fading and the air was thick with the red dust raised by the frenetic stomping of dancers who, oblivious to the spirits’ presence, lingered, unwilling perhaps to let the joyous occasion turn so soon into a work session. Despite the lack of visibility, I could see beads of glistening sweat running down Zeinabou’s forehead. Then, abruptly and without warning, the spirit started to untie her host’s wrapper. Alarmed and mindful of the very negative implications of nakedness in Mawri society, I rushed to Zeinabou’s side to try to prevent any further disrobing. The raging force that had opportunistically invaded the young medium’s body bore no resemblance to any of the five spirits that regularly possessed Zeinabou. I had partially managed to hold on to both extremities of the wrapper in an effort to cover Zeinabou’s waist and legs when the spirit started violently pulling down Zeinabou’s underpants. Abandoning all attempts to cover the young woman’s partially naked lower body with her wrapper, I quickly took hold of the undergarment, hoping to prevent the spirit from further disrobing—and ultimately disgracing—her host. In vain. My strenuous efforts to protect Zeinabou from the impending shame of nakedness proved to be no match for the spirit’s uncommon strength. As I wrestled with a force about which I knew nothing, thoughts raced through my mind. Darkness had almost completely set in, I realized gratefully. Perhaps few were aware of the shocking events unfolding before their very eyes and this was why no one had come to lend me a helpful hand. Perhaps, knowing of my close friendship to Zeinabou, participants expected me to take charge and rescue her from any potentially threatening situation. At last, after what seemed like an eternity, the spirit escaped my grasp and, while I stood shaking and out of breath, holding the undergarment, she took off. Soon after, I saw my friend collapse on the sandy ground—an indication that the spirit had left her host—and I rushed once more to cover her bare lower body. While Zeinabou was regaining consciousness, I brought her water—mediums are always thirsty and feeling the urge to cough after possession—and after much hesitation, the undergarment I was still holding. As the realization of what had happened dawned on her, Zeinabou looked at me with a mixture of horror and astonishment. For a moment, she sat there speechless while silent tears streamed down her face. A kind woman who had observed the scene soon led
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Zeinabou to a nearby house where she could cry to her heart’s content and in relative privacy. After my friend seemed to have settled down, I suggested we head back to our respective homes in Dogondoutchi. It was getting late and the unmarked sandy road back to town worried me. I did not want to get lost while driving in the bush with a distraught Zeinabou as sole company. On the way home, Zeinabou remained uncharacteristically silent. I, too, was at a loss for words. Despite, or perhaps because of, the close friendship we shared, I was overcome by anxious sympathy and, at the same time, felt acutely the burning shame of her disrobing. We both knew that the spirit had taken much more than mere cloth when she had violently pulled off Zeinabou’s wrapper and underpants in the middle of a crowded possession ceremony. For Zeinabou and other Hausa-speaking followers of the bori—a preIslamic religion that has become marginalized in recent years thanks to the growing popularity of Islam—spirits are a necessary and inevitable presence in people’s lives. They cause but also cure a variety of ills. They are centrally implicated in the health and reproduction of human communities. They provoke yet also prevent drought and famine (Masquelier 2001). Because they cannot simply be chased at will from homes or even from the bodies they choose to inhabit, they must instead be domesticated through possession ceremonies. During these ritualized events, the bodiless beings are invited to possess human hosts so that they can momentarily gain texture and voice their needs and desires. In return for the sacrificial offerings they receive, they provide protection, advice, and cures. In what follows, I trace the multiple, complex, and changing connections between possession and nudity in Hausaspeaking communities of Niger. I consider the circumstances that led to Zeinabou’s public disrobing and her violation of the social conventions governing the display of un/clothed bodies in this part of West Africa by focusing on Dan Ganda, the spirit supposedly responsible for the denudation. Because of her repeated and forceful attempts to undress her human host during possession, this Tuareg female spirit is not welcome at bori ceremonies.2 Undressing, I hasten to note, is precisely the opposite of what should ideally take place at a wasa (possession ceremony), where the bodies of human hosts are wrapped with colorful garments that establish the physical and social identities of the possessing spirits. By wearing the costumes associated with the particular spirits that mount them, bori mediums give contours and substance to amorphous beings whose presence would otherwise not be so palpably experienced by the participants and their audience. Once the spirits leave their hosts, the latter are undressed. Spirit devotees often remarked to me how crucial this process of dressing and undressing was because it enabled them to mark and make a successful ceremony. In daily life as in bori possession rituals, padding the body with cloth variously signifies prestige, wealth, or respectability. In contrast, nakedness is often taken to be a sign of deprivation, instability, liminality, and social deviancy. If garments are so essential to the creation of virtual bodies on the
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The Naked Spirit possession grounds and if being unclothed or only partially clothed generally means finding oneself in a shameful position, what does the intentional disrobing of a medium by a possessing spirit paradoxically imply? I address such implications by examining the bold nakedness of Dan Ganda in all its problematic and transgressive dimensions. Dan Ganda’s use of nudity in the context of bori ceremonies is not solely a reenactment of the Tuareg spirit’s original strip act, a mere rendition of some mythical and timeless script. It must instead be considered in the context of increasingly conservative Muslim reforms aimed at covering women’s bodies and promoting ever tighter forms of female seclusion. When women’s bodies have become such a site of ideological struggles about Islamic morality and modesty, Dan Ganda’s sartorial transgression—within what is already, from the Muslim perspective, a transgressive space—appears even more, in the words of Mary Douglas, ‘‘out of place’’ and therefore threatening. By focusing on Dan Ganda’s subversive breach of propriety in light of the sartorial battles dissenting Muslim factions are currently waging for the control of women in Nigerien farming communities, I consider how changing Mawri notions of dress and undress are represented, mediated, and at times contested through the medium of bori.
Writing about a Naked Friend Before moving to a discussion of dress and undress, I briefly comment on my relationship to Zeinabou, for it has greatly influenced the way I write about bori, the combative impetus of its devotees, and the outrageous behavior of its spirits. Zeinabou and I met at a wasa in Dogondoutchi—where we were both living—in March 1988. I was conducting doctoral research on bori and she was contemplating becoming initiated as a spirit devotee. Zeinabou soon became a valuable friend. Aside from the sheer volume of information on bori she volunteered on a regular basis, she was an imaginative and vivacious companion (see Masquelier 1995, 2001, 2002). Because at 20 she remained— despite her striking appearance and her father’s best efforts—unmarried, she was almost always available to accompany me to bori ceremonies in nearby villages. The trip to Ourgam, where I knew several bori mediums, was one such occasion, and we both expected to combine work and pleasure during the wasa I had been invited to attend: Zeinabou would dance to the beat of the calabashes and hone her skills as a medium while I planned to watch the performance and engage a few of the attendees in conversations. As I have noted, the visit did not go as smoothly as we had anticipated; we both left Ourgam in a state of shame and distress. To my great relief, however, Zeinabou soon recovered from the embarrassment she had suffered upon emerging from trance to find herself naked. Days later, she even took pleasure in recounting for me the indelicate spirit’s mythical history and filling many gaps in my confused understanding of her position in the local bori pantheon. During the weeks that followed, she
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference mentioned several times (and without any apparent shame) the fact that she needed to ‘‘arrange’’ (gyara) that spirit in a ceremony—perhaps to demonstrate publicly how efficient she had become at avoiding a repeat disrobing. In his beautifully complex account of Tuhami, his tilemaker friend, Crapanzano speaks of the captivating nature of the Moroccan man’s discourse, adding that in the process of listening to Tuhami’s stories, Crapanzano became ‘‘an articulary pivot about which [Tuhami] could spin out his fantasies in order to create himself as he desired’’ (1980: 140). When we met, Zeinabou felt similarly compelled to tell me about her life as a medium, her struggles to comply with her spirits’ demands, her fears, her hopes. She seemed to relish the sharing of her most intimate secrets, the humiliations at the hands of spirits, and the failures and successes she had experienced earlier in life, as if retelling these events to a foreign woman made them somehow more important or more real. Needless to say, I was an eager audience. Her ability to spin an entire world of spirits before my very eyes and to discuss unselfconsciously subjects which many mediums had difficulty, or were afraid of, mentioning, fascinated me. Zeinabou, too, seemed to thrive on these encounters (during which she often used herself as a ‘‘study’’ case). While I validated her knowledge of bori and her role as a spirit medium, she, like Tuhami with his seductive power over Crapanzano, captivated me with accounts of her exciting and drama-filled life. Each success, each punishment by a spirit for her lack of morality or discernment became the stuff of conversation and, at times, critical analysis. The disrobing incident was no exception. When I left Niger a few months after our visit to Ourgam, I remained nonetheless ambivalent about probing deeper into the significance of Zeinabou’s degrading exposure. For one thing, I felt that the whole incident, disturbing as it had been to her and to me, could not become an object of anthropological scrutiny. Rather, it should remain what it was already becoming for me—a shocking but fading memory. Since then, other incidents in Zeinabou’s life as a medium as well as further conversations I had with her during subsequent research trips to Niger eventually convinced me that I could write about the disrobing without further violating my friend’s dignity. By sharing a slice of Zeinabou’s life and discussing what happens when ‘‘bodiless’’ spirits who need to don a human ‘‘body’’ insist on depriving that body of the covering that identifies it as a site of otherness, I hope to shed more light on the issues of modesty, liminality, and protest that have become so central to the way rural Hausa speakers negotiate their moral identities in the context of increasingly contentious Islamic sartorial practices. My exploration into bori uses of nudity is based on the single experience of a young woman who discovers at her expense the costs of not being fully prepared for the range of potential alterities enabled by spiritual possession. Zeinabou’s disrobing, like much of her life, is irreducibly particular, yet also exemplary. As a unique and extraordinary event, it is hardly representative of what generally goes on during a wasa. Yet, all the same, it is part of bori. Aside from reminding us that unpredictability is a central feature of possession cere-
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The Naked Spirit monies (Masquelier 2001, 2002), the spirit’s stripping of her medium is a convincing demonstration of the polyphonic and occasionally dissonant nature of bori experience. ‘‘Particular events,’’ Abu-Lughod (1993: 14) remarks, ‘‘always happen in time, becoming part of the history of the family, of the individuals involved, and of their relationships.’’ In this sense, Zeinabou’s disrobing became part of her history as well as part of bori’s local history. Of course, the denudation was never meant to happen. Because, despite all odds, it did happen, the incident allows us to consider certain dimensions of Mawri experience that are rarely scrutinized in normal circumstances. More specifically, the transgressive nakedness of an entranced medium sheds light on what the possessed body should, can, yet sometimes fails to signify, or, conversely, what it oversignifies. It is precisely this failure, or excess, of signification that forces us to question the bori conventions having to do with female power and modesty, which are usually taken for granted.
Dan Ganda’s Stripping: Seductive or Shameful? Dan Ganda, it turns out, invariably attempts to strip her host during possession. Yet, despite the local association of nakedness with liminality and insanity, her consistent efforts to shed her host’s clothing were described to me neither as a sign of madness, nor as an expression of rage. While the spirit’s immodest impulses are reprehensible even by bori standards, her story nonetheless suggests that there is more to her seemingly obsessive disrobing than a simple endeavor to embarrass local bori audiences. According to that story, Zaki Sarki, a fierce and powerful spirit of Zarma ethnicity,3 controlled the river Niger. Tolerating no intrusion, he mercilessly decapitated any spirit who came to the river. Despite his reputation as a heartless executioner, there were always defiant spirits eager to challenge him. None ever managed to survive, however. Anxious to help her fellow spirits and stop the bloodshed, the beautiful Dan Ganda came up with a clever plan. She took off her clothes. In her stark nakedness, she then started walking slowly toward Zaki Sarki. She was hoping to seduce the ferocious spirit and lure him away from the river, Zeinabou told me. When he saw the bare-breasted Dan Ganda come to him, Zaki Sarki was so enticed by her beauty that he completely forgot why he was standing by the riverbank. He soon dropped his ax and left with Dan Ganda. The story does not say what happened next, but, as Zeinabou put it in response to my inquiries, male spirits react much like male humans when in the presence of beautiful women. Dan Ganda, who is also known as Tahamou, thus used the power of her nakedness to neutralize Zaki Sarki before he could resume his ruthless killing. Her tactics proved more effective than any attempts to fight the murderous spirit by force. Not only did Zaki Sarki drop his weapon, but he stopped beheading rival spirits altogether. While he has retained his peaceful demeanor, Dan Ganda, on the other hand, still asserts her presence on the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference possession grounds by trying to rip her mediums’ clothing off and lay their bodies bare. Outrageous and provocative, she enjoys toying with her hosts’ vulnerability: by exposing their selfhood, she also transgresses—what are admittedly lax—norms of bori modesty. Dan Ganda, whose name appropriately means ‘‘drop on the ground’’ in Zarma, is not the only spirit seeking to shock sensibilities, however. In the manner of praise-singers who inherited the smithing craft from their matrikin and feel no shame in discussing sexual matters, Makeri,4 the blacksmith spirit, enlivens ceremonies by embarrassing his audience with sexually explicit talk and pulling up women’s wrappers so he can peek inside. Because it is seen as an expression of gado (heritage), the shameful behavior exhibited by Makeri’s mediums remains acceptable even as it offends. Dan Ganda’s indiscretions, however, are of an entirely different order because no appeal to gado can be made to justify the spirit’s apparent lack of control as she strips her host naked on the possession grounds. By all accounts, the beautiful Tuareg spirit committed a terrible and irreparable breach of propriety when she denuded herself in front of Zaki Sarki, even if her stripping was meant as an act of kindness and was destined to save the lives of some of her fellow spirits. While Makeri’s obvious intent is to shame, his ‘‘rude’’ language and provocative behavior have no harmful effects on the hosts who relinquish control of their bodies during possession. They simply arouse embarrassed laughter in the audience, because, like rituals of reversal and other antistructural patterns of behavior, which preserve the structure they ostensibly contradict, they do not ultimately undermine the integrity of personal or social bodies. Dan Ganda, by contrast, reveals her human host in all her stark nakedness, leaving her with no shred of dignity, so to speak. That much became obvious to me as I witnessed Zeinabou’s emotions hovering between mortification and despair, moments after her denudation. Although my friend had only recently become an official spirit medium, she had already acquired a solid footing in bori circles and was by no means unaware of the kinds of indignities occasionally visited upon mediums by their possessing spirits. She had also learned the hard way that spirits always have the last word: throughout the time I had known her, they had repeatedly ‘‘punished’’ her with painful wounds and ailments in retaliation for her careless, selfish, and disrespectful behavior (Masquelier 2001). While it could be argued that in Ourgam, Dan Ganda was simply acting as she always does and that there was nothing unusual about the manner in which she treated this particular medium, Zeinabou nonetheless felt stigmatized by the disrobing. Although she knew perfectly well that she had been the victim, and not the culprit, during that infamous possession episode, she could not quite separate her agency from that of the spirit and let Dan Ganda shoulder the burden of blame. During possession, the devotee’s selfhood is eclipsed by the spirit’s presence. Since whatever the possessed medium says or does will be attributed solely to the possessing spirit, a devotee who insults her
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The Naked Spirit spouse or threatens a neighbor while in the throes of possession offers no apologies for such behavior because, as everyone knows, it was not she who was speaking during trance. From that perspective, Zeinabou had nothing to be ashamed of, since she was not responsible for what had happened during the time that Dan Ganda had mounted her. Nonetheless, she blamed herself for the incident.
Dressing, Undressing, and Transgression in Bori While possession ostensibly ‘‘frees’’ the medium from certain responsibilities, as I have argued elsewhere (Masquelier 2002), it also creates a whole new nexus of unavoidable duties as human hosts learn to adjust to the social, financial, and moral demands of their powerful alter egos. For devotees of Dan Ganda, becoming morally responsible would primarily mean finding ways to prevent the spirit from ever successfully stripping her mediums so that the infamy of public nakedness could never be visited upon them. Upon learning what had happened moments before to Zeinabou, Bagadou, a bori leader who was attending the wasa in Ourgam, exploded: ‘‘You know better than showing up without pants! You are Dan Ganda’s medium. You should always wear pants under your wrapper!’’ Citing Zeinabou’s immature ways, he admonished her at length for her carelessness. In Bagadou’s opinion, Zeinabou was at fault for not having taken precautions to ensure that Dan Ganda, if she possessed her, could not violate her devotee’s modesty. The young medium was not the only woman who had to take sartorial safeguards to prevent disrobing by a spirit: several of her close friends, anxious to avoid being stripped of their layers of civility by a callous spirit, wore a full ‘‘armor’’ of cloth (two pairs of pants, a bra, two shirts, and a triple layer of wrappers secured by sashes) before attending possession ceremonies. In Dogondoutchi and the surrounding villages, spirits who commingle with people during wasani (the plural of wasa) are literally given visibility, texture, and color when the bodies of their human hosts are wrapped and bound with dazzling garments made mostly of leather or handwoven cloth. By donning the red, white, black, or black-and-white-striped wrappers or robes of the particular spirits that mount them, bori devotees endow these otherwise un-bodied beings with physicality, enabling their presence to be palpably and colorfully experienced by ceremonial participants (Masquelier 1996b). Aside from binding ordinarily inaudible, invisible social ‘‘persons’’ to fleshy bodies, bori garments also visually aid in educating or reminding the audience about the spirits’ histories, status, and moral characteristics. Red is the color of fire, which is why the fearful Kirai, spirit of lightning, wears a red robe, a red sash, and a red bonnet. The self-absorbed and seductive Maria, whose surreal beauty captivates male spirits as well as men, is partial to white—this is how she demonstrates her vanity and her horror of dirt.5 In the context of possession, dressing, then, is about stepping into a public
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference role for a ritually circumscribed period of time. Hosts are helped into their bori garments by ritual assistants only after the spirits have demonstrated that they intend to ‘‘stay’’—that they can be counted on to do the work of bori (healing, offering counsel, and providing protection). As soon as the spirits depart, their hosts regain consciousness and their limp bodies are divested of their distinctive coverings by assistants who fold the garments and store them until the next ceremony. As I noted earlier, the times of dressing and undressing spirits are critical moments of wasani. Dressing a medium too soon after a spirit has started riding him could result in confusion and danger: spirits are known to switch from one host to another at the onset of trance. If the original host had been hastily dressed before the spirit’s presence had been fully ascertained, the spirit would see ‘‘her’’ clothes on a now ‘‘vacant’’ host. This could spell trouble for that devotee—or for those in charge of the event. While, at one level, bori dress ideally serves to concretize spirit identities (in much the same way that dress in other contexts discloses meanings and distinctions central to Mawri society), at another level, it paradoxically conceals what should be kept private and inviolable even in trance when the possessed body no longer signifies itself. In short, it functions both to cover and to uncover. Rules of modesty that apply to everyday life are nonetheless regularly flouted by bori mediums who, when they become ‘‘other,’’ are no longer accountable for their occasionally outrageous behavior—as in the case of the blacksmith spirit. Despite expectations that sartorial conventions will be violated by immodest or rowdy spirits during possession sessions, bori devotees are urged to follow certain dress requirements to ensure the preservation of a modicum of decency. A woman’s legs may become exposed during a wasa when she is possessed by an indigenous spirit whose sole attire is a loincloth. There is usually little she can do to hide her thighs from public exposure, but she must take pains to guarantee beforehand that her genitals and buttocks will remain covered at all times. A woman I knew who regularly participated in bori ceremonies thus wore a brassiere to prevent her bare breasts from being exposed each time her possessing spirit, a foul-mouthed blacksmith, violently stripped her of her blouse.6 To prevent the exposure of body parts that should remain shrouded in cloth, female mediums attending possession ceremonies often wear two or three wrappers layered one on top of the other around their waists. Should a wild spirit mount them and lead them on a particularly rowdy chase in front of the assembled crowd, this sartorial precaution insures that the spirit’s furious contortions will not—accidentally or intentionally—denude them. If one layer of cloth is torn off or inadvertently comes off, the wrapper underneath will preserve the human host’s modesty. In a conversation about disrobing, a couple of female devotees even admitted to wearing a pair of drawstring pants—a traditionally male garment that was until recently considered very inappropriate female attire—underneath several tightly fitted wrappers at all wasani to ward off further the possibility of shameful exposure. While the fullness of attire conventionally speaks of its owner’s prosperity
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A ritual assistant checks that the clothes of Kirai, the spirit of lightning, are properly fitted on a possessed medium during a bori ceremony. All photographs in this chapter were taken by the author.
or high rank, swathing oneself in cloth here is no mark of wealth, prestige, or seniority; it is more practical, aiming to protect one from inadvertent undress at times when one is no longer able to personally preserve appropriate norms of body coverage. Despite the fact that when it happens (as it did to Zeinabou), it is the spirit, and not the medium, who theoretically violates norms of modesty, nakedness (tsirara) nonetheless emerges as transgression in the context of bori possession. By revealing body parts which should remain invisible to the public eye—even as these parts are momentarily no longer the medium’s, so to speak—undress blurs the contours of the possessing spirit and uncovers the humanity of that body. Spirits need bodies—which they can penetrate and mold—to become physically present and visible to the human eye, but literally naked bodies are perhaps too ‘‘organic’’ for these normally ethereal creatures. Letting a possessed medium walk around half- or inappropriately dressed enables the humanity of the medium to subversively resurface at a time when it should be totally effaced by the spirit’s daunting presence.7 Nakedness here is as much a matter of immodesty as of structural marginality: stripped of its personal specificity, yet also devoid of the binding layers that ideally stabilize its
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference transcendence from mere humanity into a spirit, the host’s body has lost the colorful and culturally legible signs that serve to mark the boundary between spiritual and human states. As a creature of transition, and therefore of transgression, it becomes, through the exposure of its naked, ‘‘raw’’ surface, a perfect expression of the liminal, of ‘‘that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both’’ (Turner 1967: 99). In other contexts, the transgressive impact of nakedness can be harnessed to effectively divest a person ‘‘of the trappings of his office,’’ Turner further notes (1967: 110). When statues of a stark naked Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were displayed in Canberra, Australia, in 1995, most residents were outraged by this crime of lèse majesté masquerading as art, although a few pointed to the strange surge of humanness emanating from this elderly couple ‘‘stripped of all pretension and defense along with their clothing’’ (Taussig 1999: 36). To some observers, it was precisely the ordinariness created by nudity that accounted for the outrage that many people experienced. As clumsy as it was, this new take on ‘‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’’ reminds us that beneath the artifice of clothing, we are, in the words of a local pundit, ‘‘all possessed of similar physical assets and liabilities, whether high born or from the common herd’’ (in Taussig 1999: 38). When Zeinabou was divested of her clothes by a rebellious Dan Ganda, she was, like the naked royals and the emperor in new clothes, stripped down to her humanity. Her now ordinary body could no longer contain the extraordinary. Unlike Queen Elizabeth in her statuesque nudity or the emperor in his absent new clothes, however, Zeinabou could recloak her wounded pride in the clothing of bori and hope that by the next wasa, everyone would have forgotten the embarrassing incident. Spirits too, I should note, exist as social beings who are enjoined to preserve a veneer of civility even if, paradoxically, they routinely aim to transgress, outrage, or ridicule during their ritualized encounter with mortal beings. It is, in fact, for the sake of preserving both their and their spirits’ respectability that bori mediums are expected to follow certain social and sartorial conventions while participating in possession ceremonies. These conventions, some bori devotees would argue, were consistent with the social etiquette that regulated dress and the display of bodies in Arewa until members of Izala,8 a reformist anti-Sufi association that has gained wide currency in the region, started making sartorial corrections to local male and female garb. Even before Izala’s fashion reforms, it was nonetheless widely acknowledged, especially in Muslim circles, that bori mediums were often very lax about following acceptable standards of body coverage. For many local residents, particularly Muslim opponents of bori, wasani were and still are the epitome of lasciviousness, immodesty, and unrestrained behavior. Women show up for ceremonies in their most beautiful attire and move their bodies sensuously when they dance in full sight of the assembled crowd. As they glide gracefully toward the musicians whose pace they try to follow, their
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A member of bori dances gracefully during a wasa while the audience watches.
blouses will often slide to one side, revealing a smooth shoulder. During their fast-paced stomping, scarves sometimes fall to the ground, leaving heads bare. And as if sitting on a mat next to men to whom they are unrelated were not offensive enough, junior women often end up in close physical proximity to male mediums while in the throes of trance. I was often told that womanizers in the bori community ended up ‘‘being possessed’’ far more often than their respectable counterparts because their alleged trance enabled them to touch, or brush against, the bodies of pretty female mediums with total impunity. While bori demeanor and dress routinely offend Muslim sensibilities with their apparent lack of restraint, the sartorial freedom enjoyed by spirit mediums is not limitless, as Zeinabou’s story reminds us. Before I return to Zeinabou’s undress and its problematic implications, a brief discussion of changing styles and norms of modesty provides the necessary backdrop for the unfolding of Dan Ganda’s disrobing saga. It also shows that if clothing is crucial to the ceremonial process of ‘‘molding’’ spirits onto human forms, it is equally central to the fashioning of social and moral persons.
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Tying and Untying Clothing in Dogondoutchi Up until recently, Dogondoutchi residents all took great pains to appear stylishly dressed and spent comparatively vast amounts of money to periodically refurbish their wardrobe. Though parading in expensive-looking attire and displaying impressive numbers of distinct outfits remain primary markers of wealth for a large number of people in Dogondoutchi, they are not necessarily reliable ones. During my successive trips to Niger, I regularly met impoverished individuals who outshone their wealthier neighbors with clothing tailored according to the latest fashion and made of the richest cloth. Aside from indicating socioeconomic status, the style, color, and lavishness of clothes also connote religious affiliation and educational background. Educated civil servants thus characteristically dress in tight-fitting European pants and multipocketed shirts of dull colors and go hatless, while Muslim traders wear brightly colored, voluminous riguna—ample robes worn over matching longsleeved shirts and drawstring pants—made of heavy brocade and richly embroidered hats or large turbans. Nowadays, however, even non-Muslim men increasingly tend to adopt the cumbersome and prohibitively costly babban riga (‘‘large robe’’) that has become the garment of choice for those who wish to appear dignified or to dissociate themselves from the rusticity attributed to non-Muslims. Conversely, some Muslim men, most of them members of Izala, are eschewing the traditional Hausa Muslim attire because of its association with tainted, problematic Islamic practices—practices which they aim to eradicate in favor of a more ‘‘authentic’’ Islam (Masquelier 1996a, 1999, in press).9 By wearing less eye-catching attire—composed of drawstring pants and a matching long-sleeved shirt that falls below the knee—and urging other men to adopt similarly modest and less expensive clothing, the reform-minded ’yan Izala (members of Izala) are promoting frugality and the rational utilization of resources—values that contradict fundamental Mawri values based on generosity and ostentation. If Izala men are concerned about the modesty of their appearance— sleeves must be buttoned up to hide wrists, heads should be turbaned to cover hair—their efforts to alter the parameters of respectability and decency nonetheless center primarily on women’s dress and deportment (Masquelier 1999). For wives and daughters of ’yan Izala, acknowledging membership in the reformist movement translates into wearing the hijabi, a veil whose color and fabric match the rest of their outfit, encompassing the body down to the ankles. Though the bright green, yellow, purple, or blue shades of the hijabi cloth paradoxically insure that women wearing such outfits will not go unnoticed when they walk down the streets (compared to their ‘‘heathen’’ counterparts wearing mostly earth-tone wrappers and matching blouses together with small head-scarves or longer head-coverings), the professed intent is to hide women from the public eye and protect their virtue. Whether or not it can be argued
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Young veiled girls attending an Izala school
that Nigerien women’s entry into modern public life has been perceived by men as a form of ‘‘erotic aggression’’ (Sabbah 1984: 17), it is clear that women have become the focus of renewed attention on the part of reformist Muslims eager to construct female bodies as repositories of a newly prescribed and enacted Islamic morality. In the face of growing numbers of unmarried women whose unregulated sexuality has become iconic of social disorder (Mernissi [1975] 1987), Izala reformists who profess to liberate Muslims from the shackles of idolatry and ignorance have zeroed in on female dress and deportment in an effort to contain the evil twins of secularization and Westernization.10 Their efforts to cover and isolate women have often met with disapproval from other Muslims—especially women—who resent this heavyhanded promotion of morality even if they silently agree about the suitability of ‘‘modest’’ attire—by which they mean a head-scarf, a loose-fitting top, and an ankle-length wrapper—for married women. Irrespective of whether they support Muslim reforms or even consider themselves Muslims, Mawri men are responsible for annually providing their wives and children with new clothes. This duty to regularly swathe one’s dependents in cloth is crucial to the making and strengthening of family bonds, so much so, in fact, that women will occasionally use their husbands’ failure to supply them with clothes as grounds for divorce. My friend Hadiza once angrily recounted to me how her daughter Fatima had finally left her
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Young girls wearing the hijabi (and their brother) pose for the author before leaving for school.
husband because, in addition to not feeding her properly, he had not bought her one single complet (a set of three wrappers) in three years of marriage. That Fatima would rather face the insecurity that comes with being a divorcée born to a large, impoverished family than the indignities she suffered as a married woman forced to wear a limited number of worn outfits for several years in a row is not surprising given the importance of clothing in the creation and maintenance of social personhood in Mawri society. Clothing speaks not only of status, wealth, modesty, and fashion; its very manufacture traditionally had numerous conjugal and reproductive connotations (see Darrah 1980: 125; Masquelier 1996b). For instance, darme (to tie), which describes the action of putting one’s clothes on—tying one’s wrapper or apron around one’s waist—is also used to refer to the process of contracting a marriage (darmen arme: to tie a marriage). Clothing the spirit during a wasa is also called a tying: female spirits wear wrappers that are tied around their waists or across their chests; male spirits wear sashes that hold their robes in place and, in a few cases, turbans that must be wrapped tightly around their heads. Wearing clothes has further implications for the making or strengthening of
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The Naked Spirit relationships of all kinds. I have discussed elsewhere the complex role that clothing plays in making and unmaking connections between the world of spirits and the world of people (Masquelier 1996b). Because gifts of clothing solidify bonds between husbands and wives (this is why cloth figures so prominently in the valise—sets of gifts that a groom presents to his new bride before he is allowed to take her to her new marital home), between patrons and clients, and between children and parents, a deceased person’s garments are never kept lest they remind surviving kin too vividly of their recent loss. While clothing thus demonstrates one’s involvement in complex spiritual and human networks of reciprocal relations, nakedness—a state in which the legs, thighs, chest, buttocks, and abdomen are not covered as they should be— is, conversely, synonymous with deviance and destitution because it primarily implies an absence of social connections. Huntu (nakedness) in Hausa can be used to describe a poor person as well as a naked person, further underlining the association between undress and deprivation. Young Qur’anic scholars who learn the value of humility by begging for food are often recognizable by the tattered, second-hand clothes which underscore their liminal status. Being unclothed or scantily clad amounts to ‘‘a negative state’’ (Perniola 1989: 237) because it can also imply a lack of interest in protecting the boundaries of one’s humanity through social practices (feeding, dressing) that reinforce the distinctions between human and nonhuman. Once they have been convicted of associating with evil spirits for nefarious ends, witches are thus expected to spend their days picking rags off the ground. No longer dangerous to others because they have been neutralized during the witchcraft ordeal that confirmed their guilt, they now collect the refuse and debris of those who were once their friends or victims. While most people take great care to protect the integrity of their social persona in the layers and folds of their garments, convicted witches, like mad persons who roam the bush in tattered clothes or undress publicly, have rejected society or been rejected by it. The unwavering attention these lonely figures devote to collecting shredded cloth speaks to their own decaying social identities and to their surrender to permanent liminality. Rather than substantiating social connections, the bits of fabric they surround themselves with here metonymically reproduce what happens when individuals are stripped of their ‘‘social skin.’’ Not all those who wear rags or dress scantily in contemporary Dogondoutchi are considered insane, however. Children and babies, for instance, may remain in a state of partial or full undress without suffering any consequences, especially if they are simply playing in the family compound. While mothers take great pains to bathe and dress their young children before taking them out on a visit or a trip, it is not unusual to see children running in the streets with minimal clothes on their bodies. I have witnessed mothers admonish their sons for leaving for school without shoes on or berate eight-year-old girls for wearing nothing but underpants, but generally speaking, until Izala reformists recently started encouraging parents to veil daughters as young as
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While the man—wearing drawstring pants, a short riga (robe), and an embroidered hat—is fully dressed, the three children are not. One of them is wearing nothing but plastic flip-flops.
five years old, children were often—and many are still—left to their own devices when it came to matters of dress. Older children and adults, on the other hand, are required to be appropriately dressed in public settings. Long gone are the days when men who tied a leather apron or a loincloth around their hips were fully clothed. Only certain spirits can nowadays get away with less ‘‘body’’ coverage than is socially appropriate in most circumstances: for instance, Azane, a strong and generous spirit of indigenous origin known for his tenderness with children, simply dons a leather apron adorned with fringes and mirrors. Such sartorial adherence to the past hardly defines bori as a static institution endlessly reproducing the mores of Mawri culture, however. In tandem with changing norms of body coverage, bori has evolved its own regulations concerning the public presentation of older spirits whose personal attire can no longer be considered an appropriate form of ‘‘social skin,’’ especially for female mediums. Today, women possessed by indigenous spirits thus rarely if ever take off their own blouses before donning the handwoven wrappers that ritual assistants wrap around their bodies. In short, pre-Islamic Mawri dress is now considered scanty even by bori standards. Certain contexts specifically require nudity on the part of the participants, however. During wrestling competitions, young men strip down to a loincloth
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The Naked Spirit and cover their bodies with oil to enhance their beauty—and presumably their slipperiness. For women, too, certain forms of nudity and neglect occasionally become prescribed. New widows are expected to unbraid their hair and refrain from washing it for forty days to mark the period of takaba (mourning) that signals their transitional status as husband-less women. In times of drought, when farmers are desperate to protect their families from the specter of famine, postmenopausal female members of the ’yan ’kasa (‘‘sons of the earth’’), a priestly lineage, leave their homes wearing nothing but rags. Loud and boisterous, they carry broken calabashes and walk around local cemeteries to bring the longawaited rain.11 As Bastian (this volume) insightfully notes for southeastern Nigeria, such prescriptive nudity has little to do with the undress of the insane person who has surrendered his social identity in favor of ‘‘naked self-involvement.’’ It is in such contexts that we can appreciate the—otherwise problematic—distinction made first by Western art critics (Clark 1956) and later by anthropologists (Beidelman 1968) between ‘‘nudity’’ and ‘‘nakedness.’’ While nudity can be an acceptable, even respectable, form of undress—to the extent that it even becomes a ‘‘form of dress’’ (Berger 1972: 54)—nakedness is morally suspect and socially deviant because, as Western art critics and Mawri farmers would agree, it reveals too much. Unlike mad people who expose themselves publicly, young competitors who wrestle nude and old women in rags who clamor for rain have shed their clothes but not their ‘‘social skin,’’ and this is why their apparent ‘‘nakedness’’ is not shocking to those who understand its place and purpose.12
The Naked Self/Other in Possession Unlike the positive expressions of sartorial liminality I have just described, Dan Ganda’s undress is not ritually prescribed. We are told that Dan Ganda originally took off her clothes for the explicit purpose of seducing Zaki Sarki. As soon as he saw Dan Ganda in the nude—or, as Zeinabou once put it, as soon as she uncovered her breasts—Zaki Sarki entirely forgot what he was doing by the river. When Dan Ganda forcefully undresses the body she has ‘‘caught’’ through possession, however, denudation appears to take on a different meaning. Rather than signifying or provoking in the spectator the desire it allegedly produced in Zaki Sarki, the naked body of Dan Ganda’s host expresses disorder, wrongness, and defiance, judging from Bagadou’s furious response. That is, of course, if we assume that Zaki Sarki was simply charmed by the nude Dan Ganda, as Zeinabou would have us believe. It is indeed tempting here to translate undress as seduction and, on the basis of a distinction between the stripper (as willful agent) and the stripped (as unwilling object), to try to make sense of Dan Ganda’s public stripping by contrasting the mythical spirit in all her confident and sensuous nudity with her human host’s shameful and traumatic nakedness.13 Despite my friend’s disclaimers, however, I want to suggest that disrobing may have more to do—or at least, no less to do—with aggression than with seduction when we consider Dan Ganda’s strenuous efforts to strip
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference her female hosts in the context of Izala reformists’ fervent bid to cover women and to enforce tighter forms of female seclusion. There is no consensus as to when Dan Ganda surfaced in the bori imagination, but her appearance nonetheless seems to coincide with the local emergence of reformist Islam in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Like other spirits of the bori pantheon that have surfaced in the last half century, Dan Ganda nonetheless demonstrates the profound impact that Muslim practices have had on Mawri communities. Discussing bori as a means of articulating wider conflicts implies understanding the transgressive nature of the spirit’s ritual stripping in light of the sartorial wars currently waged by opposed Muslim factions for the alleged preservation of Qur’anic tradition. This is not to say that Dan Ganda appeared in reaction to a perceived suppression of women’s sartorial choices. Bori spirits are not the frozen products of history, but malleable expressions of the human imagination. If, through Dan Ganda’s agency, nakedness is now used by some as a weapon and perceived by others as a threat in the seemingly more tolerant context of bori ceremonies—recall Bagadou’s angry admonition to Zeinabou—one may surmise that it would not be so to such an extent had Islamic notions of propriety and modesty not become such crucial foci of anxiety in contemporary Niger. If it is easy to see spirits as figures of history, it is much harder to contextualize Dan Ganda’s particular brand of lewdness. Despite attempts to trace a historical pattern of dissent through disrobing, I found no other instances of the use of nudity as an expression of female protest in this region of West Africa. Elsewhere in Africa, women have a long history of stripping to challenge male and colonial authority (Bastian 2001; Goheen 1996; MacGaffey 2000; Takougang and Krieger 1998). In southeastern Nigeria, nudity has traditionally been a potent expression of female anger, especially when combined with the uncovering of genitals (Bastian, this volume). In western Cameroon in the 1990s, women stripped to protest against perceived abuses of power by local gendarmes in much the same way that their predecessors had protested against an abusive colonial regime (Takougang and Krieger 1998; see also Kaberry 1952). Among the BaKongo of the Lower Congo, a myth of the origin of discrete clans describes how the exposure of a woman’s genitals angered her brother enough to start a war—against his sister—that led to the dissolution of matrilineal solidarity (MacGaffey 2000: 156). Unlike the Nigerian and Cameroonian uses of nudity as social protest, the latter example of genital cursing is closer in form to the transgression which Zeinabou perpetrated, because both are individual acts. Zeinabou’s stripping is, of course, an exceptional incident, and differs in this respect from the pattern of disrobing observed in the Lower Congo, where numerous women have gone on record as uncovering their genitals to shame adversaries during village quarrels. Ultimately, it is also difficult to assess the effectiveness of a young woman’s ‘‘curse’’ if we must compare her experience to the deeply shameful performance of postmenopausal women seeking to gain public attention. Whether or not we can con-
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The Naked Spirit clude, as MacGaffey does for the Kongo case, that in the context at hand the ‘‘eat me’’ insult is a woman’s ultimate weapon, I would argue nonetheless that in exposing herself publicly—even as she claimed not to want to—Zeinabou was using Dan Ganda’s story as a mythic charter for an aggressive female response to male control. Before going any further, it is worth pointing out that Zeinabou was, despite all appearance to the contrary, a strong, determined, and ambitious young woman. She hoped to become a visible and successful member of the bori community, yet at the same time she was plagued by doubts concerning her place in the moral community. She wanted to marry and have children, but after the man she loved had broken their engagement, she had started collecting lovers. Mindful that she had become financially dependent on the favors of her admirers, yet openly disregarding her father’s wishes that she marry into a respectable Muslim family, Zeinabou was struggling to re-create herself as a virtuous member of the bori community. While she longed for the respectability of married life, she enjoyed the freedom that her position as a burdurwa (unmarried young woman) afforded her. She was certainly not ready to curb her mobility—something which would have profoundly affected her ability to participate in bori ceremonies—or exchange her tight-fitting, curve-enhancing outfits for the long-sleeved robe and tent-like veil of Izala women. Through her possession by Dan Ganda, Zeinabou was expressing her internalized rejection of ever more encompassing Islamic moral and aesthetic values. That she was also regularly possessed by Malam, a Muslim spirit whose calm and reflective countenance during wasani epitomizes bori’s admiration for Islamic literacy, further complicates the picture of the young medium that has emerged so far. Bori adepts who are possessed by spirits of divergent, even contradictory, orientations are hardly exceptional, however. As Boddy notes for Sudanese zar spirit possession, ‘‘a woman’s personal pantheon may represent the different facets of her social identity or express her internalization . . . of domestic political tensions’’ (1989: 8). Despite the young medium’s efforts to reconcile her commitment to her Muslim spirit—he was allegedly teaching her Arabic script—with her internalization of Dan Ganda’s anti-Muslim sentiments, the coexistence of Dan Ganda and Malam in Zeinabou’s body meant that one could never foresee what would happen during possession. On the evening of our visit to Ourgam, it was Dan Ganda who surfaced aggressively to ‘‘speak’’ through her absence of clothes about her contempt for novel Islamic forms of female encompassment and sartorial control. Possession makes it possible for a medium to reflect on her life, her situation, and the world she lives in, but as Boddy (1989: 350) suggests, it does so obliquely, without demanding that she take responsibility for her conclusions. Dan Ganda’s startling but nonetheless timely appearance provided a forum for airing issues which could not otherwise be broached without severe penalty.14 By bursting onto the scene unexpectedly, the spirit lent Zeinabou the defiant ‘‘voice,’’ or rather script, she needed to express herself when she
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference could not be herself. Analyzing Dan Ganda’s disrobing of her medium in terms of Zeinabou’s own revolt against an increasingly patriarchal system raises, of course, the issue of where to locate intentionality, consciousness, and strategy. Obviously, Zeinabou did not intentionally summon Dan Ganda to ‘‘stage’’ a protest against what she experienced in everyday life as an encroachment of male power over female spaces and bodies.15 Spirits are not, people will tell you, the instruments of their hosts’ will, but rather the opposite. Yet, all the same, Zeinabou’s own life impinged upon, and colored, the performance of Dan Ganda just as she, in turn, was affected by the message delivered by the spirit during possession. The dialectic of self and other ‘‘is one from which no true synthesis can emerge. Human and spirits contextualize each other, maintain each other in contraposition,’’ Boddy (1989: 353) notes. What was novel, disturbing, but also instructive about Dan Ganda’s possession of Zeinabou was precisely the respective contextualization of self and other that occurred to create a uniquely startling and shocking performance out of the tangle of meanings, motivations, and memories from two parallel, yet distinct worlds— one human, the other spiritual.
The Ambiguous Powers of Nakedness Zeinabou’s stripping by her spirit, I have argued so far, is more than the simple reenactment of Dan Ganda’s original denudation because in each possession performance ‘‘knowledge and experience of the spirit world together keep pace with knowledge and historical experience of the human’’ (Boddy 1989: 271). Of the spirit world, and more specifically Dan Ganda’s world, little is known apart from the encounter with Zaki Sarki I have already described. Bori adepts routinely classify Dan Ganda as a member of the Gillaji, a family of Tuareg spirits who, as befits respectable cattle herders, express notorious disdain for farmers and, by extension, for activities that revolve around agriculture. Like her Tuareg kin, Dan Ganda hates the dirt of farming and refuses to attend wasani during the rainy season—when most able-bodied Mawri are busily tending their fields. As a Tuareg woman, Dan Ganda is considered more assertive and independent-minded than traditional Mawri wives, who should exhibit restraint in their demeanor and show obedience to their husbands. In this respect, she is the perfect vehicle of female protest within the space of bori. Paradoxically, the stark prohibitions which Dan Ganda’s devotees face against letting the spirit do as she wishes and the strong advice they receive to transform their bodies into unassailable bulwarks of modesty remind us that even in the seemingly female-friendly space of bori, provocation coexists with censorship. In a manner reminiscent of the gendered dynamics of everyday life, perhaps, (male) bori adepts thus strive to muzzle (female) spirits even as they allow them to perform. Despite the admonitions Zeinabou received, Dan Ganda succeeded, at least once, in stripping her host naked during a wasa. Because of the excep-
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The Naked Spirit tional character of the event, it is difficult to predict whether such a stripping will ever occur again and what this could ultimately mean for the women afflicted by Dan Ganda’s violent urge to disrobe publicly. Yet, at a time when Izala followers are insisting that veiling is a divine injunction that must be obeyed by all women and girls who have reached puberty,16 Dan Ganda’s one and only successful denudation of Zeinabou (to my knowledge) forces us to consider the shifting implications of undress, and more specifically how undress, in the contemporary context of trance, creates a space of contestation and enables a form of female defiance for which there are no historical precedents in this region of the continent. Tempting as it may be to read the spirit’s personal history as a recapitulation of the changing meaning of nudity—from seduction to contestation—in Mawri communities, such a reading nonetheless problematically assumes a homogeneity among performances that rarely exists. Dan Ganda’s successful attempts at undressing her medium speak to the spirit’s own historical trajectory and the way it collides with local history. Spirits ‘‘are living, sentient beings with a history of their own,’’ Boddy (1989: 302) points out, and in this respect, Dan Ganda is no exception. But then what do we make of Zeinabou’s claim that Dan Ganda is a flirt? An interpretation based on the necessary association between nudity and eroticism, though pertinent, is far too simple because it fails to take into account emerging levels of meaning that complicate Dan Ganda’s portrayal and thicken her connections to the host and the audience with each possession performance. While Westerners have long understood the nude as both a site of eroticism and an erotic sight for male—and even female—pleasure, such understandings are not uniformly and unquestioningly shared by local residents: despite occasionally displaying pictures of scantily clad Indian beauty queens or Western women modeling lingerie on the mud walls of their homes, most Mawri have been relatively unaffected by the growing production and marketing of soft-core pornography. This is not to say that Dan Ganda’s disrobing lacks an erotic dimension, however. Rather, eroticism, when it emerges, does so in the context of polysemic performances that generate, at times, diverse and conflicting interpretations independently of what the spirit/host couple might wish to convey. From this perspective, Zeinabou’s insistence that Dan Ganda’s undress be understood as seduction is a sobering reminder that no single conclusion can be extracted from bori performances that are, by definition, fluid, multifaceted, and replete with ambiguity. The ‘‘appeal’’ of an uncovered body lies here in the eyes of the beholder rather than in the eyes of the performer— even when these happen to be one and the same person. *** Stripping naked, Bataille (1986: 17) has argued, ‘‘is the decisive action’’ which ruptures the deceptive self-containment of identities. Nakedness, he further contends,
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication. . . . Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality. (1986: 17)
In the context of our discussion, Bataille’s potent description is all the more compelling because, as well as characterizing nakedness as deviancy and instability, it also nicely captures what bori possession is about. Following Bataille, we could infer that after losing her protective layers of clothes, Zeinabou was no longer self-possessed in both senses of the term. Her exposed flesh, her uncovered genitals spoke of a radically compromised identity. But whose compromised identity—the spirit’s or the medium’s—are we referring to? This chapter did not address this question directly and in fact has argued that, since the distinction between human self and bori self became obfuscated, it is problematic here to assign agency to a single being, to trace who was doing the stripping to whom. Precisely because the spirit’s and the medium’s identities and histories are so intertwined, Dan Ganda’s mounting of Zeinabou in Ourgam was both ‘‘a personal experience and a cultural performance’’ (Obeyesekere 1981: 101). From this vantage point, the sight of a naked medium in the throes of possession was not only deeply shameful but also socially significant because, in addition to allowing Zeinabou to step outside her world and gain perspective on her life, it made a defiant statement against an increasingly male-centered order of cultural practices. Granted, the performance in Ourgam will forever remain shrouded in ambivalence—poised perhaps more ambiguously between seduction and curse than was intended by the original spirit/human dyad. Yet, at a time of heightened Islamic anxiety about the clothed female body’s capacity to signify various levels of piety and purity, Dan Ganda’s lack of clothes speaks volumes about Mawri women’s capacity to challenge some of the patriarchal notions of moral order that have emerged through the forum of newly established Islamic traditions. At another level, the spirit’s nude appearance reminds us of the vital role that the body plays in local struggles to carve out identities that can henceforth be ‘‘put on’’ and ‘‘shown off ’’ (Bowlby 1987). If Hausa speakers variously present themselves as conservative Muslims, Izala reformists, or even bori devotees by donning clothes whose styles and colors are associated with particular religious constituencies, they often also pressure others to cover up or modify their attire to promote a particular moral agenda. Indeed, judging from the number of recent incidents in which urban Nigerien (and, more rarely, Western) women have had their clothes ripped off by an angry mob allegedly offended by their immodest garb, uncovering bodies is an effective means of differentiating those who belong to a moral community from those who don’t. Not unlike the scarlet letter that signaled an adulteress, a blasphemer, or a drunk in Puritan New England, stripping here reaffirms the boundaries of the moral community by
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The Naked Spirit stigmatizing those who, because they lack some vital moral fiber, necessarily stand outside of it. Yet, if Dan Ganda’s sartorial saga is any indication, nakedness can express much more than deficiency, estrangement, and liminality. For one thing, it need not be a victimizing process in which a few become the target of moral reforms intended to produce newly embodied forms of morality and modesty. When those who stand naked are the willful agents of the stripping (as Zeinabou was in a complicated way), nakedness becomes a powerful shield to deploy against forces, human and otherwise, that are perceived as intrusive or even threatening. Because the body surface is such an easily manipulable medium of social interactions, it often becomes a privileged site of battle for the expression of personal identities and the definition of moral communities. NOTES Research on which this chapter is based was carried out thanks to a research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health, a dissertation grant from the National Science Foundation, a grant for anthropological research from the WennerGren Foundation, a fellowship from Tulane University’s Committee on Research, and a Tulane University Newcomb Foundation grant. A version of this essay was presented at the American Anthropological Association in 2000, at the Symposium on Contemporary Perspectives in Anthropology in Louisiana in 2002, and at the meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2003; participants have been generous with their comments. I am especially indebted to Nicolas Argenti, Misty Bastian, Janice Boddy, Dorothy Hodgson, Laurel Kendall, Michael Lambek, and Brad Weiss for their valuable suggestions. Dorothy Ko offered perceptive advice. As always, my final thanks are to the people of Niger who have generously answered my queries and welcomed me into their lives. 1. Though they are not a homogenous group, the Hausa-speaking millet farmers who occupy the arrondissement of Dogondoutchi refer to themselves as Mawri. They are traditionally recognizable by their ethnic mark, a double scar that cuts the cheek from the corner of the mouth to the ear on either side. Though they identify with the more encompassing ethnic category known as Hausa, they use the term Hausa as an ethnic marker to refer to Hausa speakers from northern Nigeria. 2. Spirits can theoretically possess male and female devotees, though I never heard of men being possessed by Dan Ganda. In this article, since I am primarily discussing the case of a female host’s relationship to a female spirit, I will refer to both the human host and the possessing spirit as ‘‘she.’’ 3. Zarma-speakers are the second largest ethnic group in Niger. 4. The term makeri means ‘‘blacksmith.’’ 5. For a more detailed account of the role of clothing in bori, see Masquelier 1996b. 6. I suspect the black lace bra also lent flair and sophistication to her feminine persona. 7. While Dan Ganda’s mythical nudity can never be encompassed by a human body in its ‘‘naked’’ reality, one could also say that Zeinabou’s undress also ends up revealing too much about the medium’s nonspiritual nature.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference 8. Izala is the shortened name of an anti-Sufi organization known as Jama’atu Izalat al-Bid’a wa Iqamat al-Sunna (Movement for Suppressing Innovations and Restoring the Sunna) that was founded in 1978 in Nigeria. The movement rapidly spread through Niger and neighboring countries (see Grégoire 1993; Gumi 1992; Kane 1994; Masquelier 1996a, 1999, in press; Umar 1993). 9. These reforms focus on the many dimensions of social, spiritual, and family life which Izala reformists find problematic. From matters of hygiene and food consumption to the distribution of wealth, there are very few aspects of everyday life that Izala does not address. 10. In this respect, Izala reformists are hardly unique. Much energy is expanded all over the globe by Muslim men eager to shroud their wives and daughters in cloth. That some previously ‘‘veil-less’’ women are now fighting for the right to veil by staging sit-ins and hunger strikes suggests that the debates centering around the veil have become more than simply expressions of a gender struggle. As an item of clothing, Ahmed (1992: 166) notes, ‘‘the veil itself and whether it is worn are about as relevant to substantive matters of women’s rights as the social prescription of one or another item of clothing is to Western women’s struggles over substantive issues.’’ 11. The Mawri are not the only ones exploiting the liminal dimension of nudity during rain rites. In north-central Tanzania, Sanders (2000: 469) observes, Ihanzu women dance ‘‘naked and s[i]ng their way through the village, bellowing and gesticulating obscenities’’ to bring the rains. 12. The requirement in various parts of Africa that smiths be nude has been noted by Herbert (1993: 94), who suggests that prescriptive nudity may ‘‘link the smelter more closely with nature, corresponding to his isolation in the bush during smelting and his mediating role between the wild and the civilized.’’ 13. My efforts to clarify the circumstances that initially led Dan Ganda to undress were always met with Zeinabou’s adamant denial that Dan Ganda was stripping for a purpose other than seduction. Zeinabou insisted that this was just Dan Ganda’s way of saving her friends from Zaki Sarki. While I take seriously Zeinabou’s perspective, I feel obliged to explore the nonverbal and muted ways in which meaning is produced and consciousness articulated in bori. 14. One might, of course, argue that in this particular case, Zeinabou did suffer severe repercussions from her inability to ‘‘silence’’ Dan Ganda with layers of cloth. 15. Zeinabou herself would never admit to having created Dan Ganda’s performance. In her eyes, she was simply the instrument through which Dan Ganda’s message could be revealed. 16. Some Izala reformists maintain that girls aged five or older should wear a hijabi (veil) long enough to shroud the ankles. I saw numerous young girls donning brightly colored veils on their way to school or to a friend’s home.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ahmed, Lila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Bastian, Misty L. 2001. ‘‘Dancing Women and Colonial Men: The Nwaobiala of 1925.’’
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The Naked Spirit In ‘‘Wicked’’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy, pp. 109–29. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. Bataille, André. 1986. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights. Beidelman, T. O. 1968. ‘‘Some Nuer Notions of Nakedness, Nudity, and Sexuality.’’ Africa 38(2): 113–31. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bowlby, Rachel. 1987. ‘‘Modes of Shopping: Mallarmé at the Bon Marché.’’ In The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, pp. 185–205. New York: Methuen. Clark, Kenneth. 1956. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Washington, D.C.: Pantheon. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Darrah, Allan. 1980. ‘‘A Hermeneutic Approach to Hausa Therapeutics: The Allegory of the Living Fire.’’ Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goheen, Miriam. 1996. Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Grégoire, Emmanuel. 1993. ‘‘Islam and the Identity of Merchants in Maradi (Niger).’’ In Muslim Identity and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Louis Brenner, pp. 106–15. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gumi, Sheikh Abubakar. 1992. Where I Stand. Lagos: Spectrum. Herbert, Eugenia W. 1993. Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaberry, Phyllis. 1952. Women of the Grassfields: A Study of the Economic Position of Women in Bamenda, British Cameroons. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Kane, Ousmane. 1994. ‘‘Izala: The Rise of Muslim Reformism in Northern Nigeria.’’ In Accounting for Fundamentalisms, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, pp. 488–510. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 2000. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mack, Beverly. 2004. Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Masquelier, Adeline. 1995. ‘‘Consumption, Reproduction, and Prostitution: The Poetics of Sweetness in Bori.’’ American Ethnologist 22(4): 883–906. ————. 1996a. ‘‘Identity, Alterity, and Ambiguity in a Nigerien Community: Competing Definitions of ‘True’ Islam.’’ In Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner, pp. 222–44. London: Zed. ————. 1996b. ‘‘Mediating Threads: Clothing and the Texture of Spirit/Medium Relations in Bori.’’ In Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa, ed. Hildi Hendrickson, pp. 66–93. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ————. 1999. ‘‘Debating Muslims, Disputed Practices: Struggles for the Realization of an Alternative Moral Order in Niger.’’ In Civil Society and the Political Imagina-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference tion in Africa: Critical Perspectives, ed. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, pp. 219–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ————. 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ————. 2002. ‘‘From Hostage to Host: Confessions of a Spirit Medium in Niger.’’ Ethos 30(1): 49–76. ————. In press. ‘‘ ‘Our Prayers Are Better Than Yours’: Contested Models of Islamic Worship in Dogondoutchi, Niger.’’ In Religious Modernities in West Africa: New Moralities in Colonial and Postcolonial Societies, ed. John Hanson and Rijk van Dijk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mernissi, Fatima. [1975] 1987. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perniola, Mario. 1989. ‘‘Between Clothing and Nudity.’’ In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, ed. Michel Feher, pp. 237–65. New York: Zone. Sabbah, Fatna Aït. 1984. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Pergamon. Sanders, Todd. 2000. ‘‘Rains Gone Bad, Women Gone Mad: Rethinking Gender Rituals of Rebellion and Patriarchy.’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 6: 469–86. Takougang, Joseph, and Milton H. Krieger. 1998. African State and Society in the 1990s: Cameroon’s Political Crossroads. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Taussig, Michael. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Turner, Terence. 1980. ‘‘The Social Skin.’’ In Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, pp. 112– 40. London: Temple Smith. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Umar, Muhammad Sani. 1993. ‘‘Changing Islamic Identity in Nigeria from the 1960s to the 1980s: From Sufism to Anti-Sufism.’’ In Muslim Identity and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Louis Brenner, pp. 154–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century Satsuki Kawano
‘‘A fat man with only his loin cloth on stood in the center of the street fanning himself,’’ wrote an American businessman and writer, Francis Hall, in his journal about a scene he observed while riding through rural Yokohama on August 7, 1860 (1992: 209). Hall repeatedly noted that he saw laborers working in fields in their loincloths, children in a state of complete undress (1992: 154), and women dropping their garments to their hips to nurse or cool down (1992: 210). Furthermore, it was not uncommon for men and women to bathe together at a public bathhouse. Artist William Heine, who came to the U.S. from Dresden and joined Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853, described a bathing scene in rural Shimoda: ‘‘Old and young, men and women, boys and girls: they scramble about together in a remarkable medley as naked as frogs’’ (1990: 133). Japanese ideas of undress (hadaka) revolved around the varying degrees of exposure of skin. The body in the state of maru hadaka is completely exposed, without a shred of clothing, while the state of hadanugi refers to a form of partial undress revealing the upper portion of the body. While people distinguished among the different forms of undress, partial or complete undress was
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference culturally and morally acceptable (except for the upper class) in a range of social contexts. Clothes were used on special occasions. Not only garments, but also tattoos for male laborers1 and tooth-painting for married women were proper forms of bodily adornment. Beyond following these rules of dress, it was equally important to undress in a proper context. And laborers working in loincloths during the hottest months of the year, or bathers in complete undress at a public bathhouse, maintained their social appearances appropriately. Furthermore, people were trained to see, but not stare at, undressed bodies in these public situations. Thus, making the undressed body socially appropriate depended not only on practices of bodily adornment, but also on people’s cultivation of different rules of seeing. Yet Western visitors found frequent bodily exposure in Japan and Japanese people’s undressed bodies disturbing. In the West, nakedness has been negatively judged as a culturally and morally inappropriate state of undress (Clark [1956] 1972; see also Bastian, this volume). If nakedness is a culturally lower form of undress, nudity is its higher counterpart; it is even an appropriate target for aesthetic inquiries. Using their culturally and historically specific understandings of undress, many Western observers judged the Japanese people by Western standards of propriety and found them naked. To align Japanese practices of undress with Western standards of modesty and civility, Japanese leaders and officials came to take legal measures to regulate undress in public. Specifically, the Misdemeanor Law (ishiki kaii j¯orei) was established in 1872 in the capital of Tokyo, and the state imposed the law on regional governments in 1873. As a result, some forms of undress became illegal and subject to fines. In urban, public spaces, commoners could no longer remain undressed or partly dressed (e.g., in loincloths or waistcloths). The law also banned the common practice of men and women bathing together at public bathhouses. Thus, the state’s legal measures prohibited women from appearing in partial or full undress in public. As a result of the state’s intervention, ordinary people’s bodies became the objects of intense sartorial surveillance as new rules for displaying bodies, in and out of clothing, came into effect. The state’s regulation of undress in 1873 was certainly not an isolated disciplinary practice, but rather belongs to a set of interrelated, systematic, and institutionalized modes of controlling people’s bodies. In 1872, for example, the state adopted Western-style tailcoats and frock coats as the ceremonial dress for the upper class (Miyamoto 2004). Western-style dress was also introduced to the military, government offices, schools, and factories. As Imanishi (1997) has suggested, through newly instituted compulsory schooling, general drafting, and the imposition of public health practices, early Meiji Japan witnessed the state’s attempt to make ‘‘docile’’ bodies (Foucault [1977] 1979) out of the nation’s subjects. At first glance, the state’s imposition of dress looks like a simple old story of Westernization, and, as a number of scholars have shown (e.g., Imanishi
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century 1997), Foucault’s framework of bodies rendered docile seems to work quite well. A closer examination reveals that accommodations were made at multiple levels by those who imposed order and by ordinary people. At one level, the nation’s new leaders discouraged undress in public among urban populations to improve Japan’s reputation among Western visitors, while paying less attention to undress among rural working populations. At another level, people made some effort to clothe themselves in front of police officers, but otherwise ignored the law and remained unclothed. Thus, just because the ban on undress was legislated, we cannot assume that people, or even the state, fully accepted Western values of modesty and morality. Rather than overemphasizing the state’s success in controlling people’s bodies in my analysis, however, I pay special attention to the complex relations of power at work and focus on the agencies of those involved in or affected by such policing: Western visitors, the Meiji leaders and officials, and ordinary people (men and women, rural and urban populations). By tracing the extent to which Western-based notions of bodily modesty penetrated Japanese people, we find complex negotiations of power between Western powers and the Meiji state on the one hand, and the Meiji state and Japanese people on the other. Through an examination of the Meiji Misdemeanor Law and a discussion of Western and Japanese writings, drawings, and pictures produced during this period, this chapter explores the processes by which practices of undress were transformed, and the extent to which new, Western-based understandings of propriety and modesty penetrated the Japanese population in the late nineteenth century.2 The transformation of dress codes in late-nineteenth-century Japan has often been understood as an adoption of the Western discourse of the sexualized body. Yet, by demonstrating that a sexualized discourse of bodily exposure existed in pre-Meiji Japan, I will reexamine the nature of the transformation that occurred in rules of undress and bodily display. In pre-Meiji Japan, people cultivated certain ways of seeing each other’s nude bodies on the street, at bathhouses, and at workplaces with a distinct sense of modesty and control. Yet the Misdemeanor Law, insensitive to different ways of seeing, presupposed people’s sexualized gaze on nude bodies and redefined certain forms of bodily exposure as forms of transgression. Thus the transformations favored by Western visitors and sought by Meiji leaders affected not only the rules of covering one’s own body, but also the manners of seeing, but not staring, at the nude bodies of others. As Turner (1980: 112) points out, the surface of the body is ‘‘the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual,’’ and as such, it is the privileged forum for the enactment of ‘‘the drama of socialization,’’ a process that is often most visibly expressed through the language of bodily adornment. In this chapter, I would like to develop this line of thought and examine the ways in which people’s bodily surfaces further provide stages for socializing actors to see them in certain ways. By forcing commoners to cover their bodies and thus suggesting that their bare bodies
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference were naked, Meiji leaders set in motion a reconsideration of local definitions of appropriate versus inappropriate undress, thereby profoundly altering Japanese discourses on nudity, eroticism, and gaze.
Sexuality and (Un)Dress during the Late Tokugawa Period The backbone of the Tokugawa hegemony (1603–1868), the system of hereditary classes (i.e., warriors, farmers, artisans, merchants, and outcasts)3 defined people’s social status, and dress was one of the signifiers of a person’s social identity. The shogunate (national government) and local governments regulated dress as a way of maintaining these class distinctions.4 As the hereditary elite class, samurai warriors ran the shogunate as well as local governments. In formal contexts they followed complex dress codes according to their rank within their hereditary class, but in daily life they were often dressed in an upper kimono coat (haori) and a pair of plated wide pants (hakama) (Miyamoto 2004). Merchants and artisans regularly wore a form of kimono called a kosode (a long, one-piece garment with sleeves) and tied a sash around their waist, though this form of dress was not limited to people of these classes. People used kosode of different colors, materials, and styles to mark class, gender, and age (Murakami 2004a). Agriculturists in the field wore a short, kimono-shaped upper garment and a pair of Japanese-style pants, and reserved one-piece garments for ceremonial occasions (Murakami 2004b). By the late Tokugawa period, the accumulation of wealth in urban areas had allowed the blossoming of mass culture and townspeople competed with each other by seeking the latest fashions. Yet the shogunate did not welcome such a development and strongly encouraged frugality, condemning the regular use of luxurious dress among non-elite people. Dress codes involve not only rules about the covering of bodies but also rules regarding when and how bodies can or should be undressed to various degrees. Though the upper class did so only infrequently, both urban and rural populations regularly appeared in partial or complete undress in a wide range of culturally defined contexts. First of all, working populations in urban and rural areas were often dressed in loincloths or exposed their torsos and portions of their legs. Second, it was not uncommon for women of various ages to expose their torsos in public, particularly in hot weather or when nursing. Third, certain culturally marked occasions, such as sumo wrestling or purification rites, customarily required undress to different degrees. Fourth, people bathed in a complete state of undress at public bathhouses.5 People went to bathhouses regularly, not only to maintain cleanliness, but also to socialize and because they enjoyed bathing.6 Though wealthy merchants and warriors of high rank had private baths, others did not always have them at home.7 In both urban and rural areas, communal bathing was common, and it was not unusual for men and women to bathe in the same bathhouse. Upper-class women who bathed in a bathrobe at private baths were a
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century notable exception (Nakano 1970: 72). Within the city limits of Tokyo, officials made some attempts to regulate mixed bathing, and in 1791 and 1803 banned it altogether, citing a concern with potential impropriety (Nakano 1970: 112). For a while, the practice of mixed bathing declined, and bathhouses for women appeared in some neighborhoods of Tokyo. However, mixed bathing came back again and persisted despite the repeated bans. Rather than favoring a nude body, the Japanese are said to have found a body more erotic when it maintained a tension between its covered and uncovered portions (Nomura 1983: 12–13, cf. Screech 1999). Yet in Tokugawa Japan, unclothed female bodies apparently became a subject of sexual desire in popular culture, along with partly covered women in the process of (un)dressing, putting on make-up, sleeping, or relaxing after a bath. Many woodblock prints depict female bathers in a state of partial or complete undress at public bathhouses. In some of these prints, a male voyeur is secretly looking at women in complete undress (Nakano 1970). Though I found no reliable accounts of women’s experiences in the context of mixed bathing, we can be nonetheless reasonably certain that bodily exposure at bathhouses did not imply an invitation for sexual intimacy (see Wiener, this volume, for a similar point about exposed breasts). On the basis of some poems that depict mixed bathing scenes, we can gather that bathhouses were not totally free from incidents of sexual harassment. A poem describing a female servant proudly telling others of yelling at a man who harassed her at the bathhouse and other poetic accounts of women moving away from the tub upon being harassed (Hanasaki 1992: 154–55) nonetheless suggest that sexual advances were not welcomed by female bathers. Thus, despite the sexualization of female bathers in popular culture, order was maintained in mixed bathing settings.
The Transformation of Bodily Exposure in Meiji Japan The opening of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century brought a new era of international relations and new ideas of bodily modesty to a nation that had remained isolated for three centuries. During the Tokugawa period, the shogunate had prohibited international migration and contact with Westerners except for some Dutch traders. The arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1853 and the treaty of 1854 with the U.S. forced Japan to reopen its doors to the world.8 American and European politicians, military officers, traders, and travelers arrived in major Japanese ports, and they published their impressions of Japan. In their publications, they repeatedly commented negatively on practices of undress among the Japanese, as is attested by the quotations from Hall and Heine that introduced this chapter. The reputation of Japanese people among Westerners mattered to the nation’s new leaders in the Meiji period (1868–1912). They struggled to raise Japan’s status in the international community,9 avoid colonization, and unify the nation at home. To find talented individuals who could contribute both to
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference the industrialization of Japan and to the creation of a strong, modern military, hereditary classes were abolished, and the traditional dress codes that distinguished them lost their official significance.10 The upper class, military officers, and the police rapidly adopted Western-style dress as a sign of modernity. For men, jackets, trousers, and short hair, as opposed to a kimono and long hair in a topknot, became emblems of the new era. For women, getting rid of black tooth-painting, which indicated their married status, signaled the arrival of new dress codes. Though most women did not do away with kimonos in Meiji Japan (Murakami 2004b), some upper-class women began to attend dance parties in Western-style dresses. As the nation’s new leaders strove to transform people into loyal, respectable subjects of the modern state, new dress codes developed as part of the emerging social and political order. In this order, people were introduced to new ideas of bodily modesty, a process which transformed socially acceptable forms of undress into those of transgression. By the nineteenth century, the feelings of shame and eroticism associated with naked bodies had become highly internalized in Europe (Elias [1939] 1994: 136). Consequently, Western travelers during the late nineteenth century found the undressed in Japan inappropriately naked, a state that signaled a lack of civility, modesty, and shame. When the town of Yokohama prohibited porters from working in loincloths in 1868, for example, Scottish journalist John R. Black reported triumphantly, ‘‘[T]he Japanese were finally modifying the rules [of undress] so as to align them with Western ideas [of modesty and propriety]’’ (1970: 158). For Europeans and Americans in Meiji Japan, even more shocking than the public spectacle of laborers in loincloths was the practice of partial and complete undress among Japanese women in public places (see also Bastian, this volume). Francis Hall wrote in his journal on July 15, 1861, The screens of the house are wide open to the street for the summer fervors are great and a half dozen women, married as their black teeth denote, are lying face downwards and leaning upon their elbows on the mats. Each one has thrown off her upper garments from her shoulders and is bare to the waist balancing this nudity by tucking up her lower garments till her legs are left bare to her thighs. Their faces are to the center of the room and their feet describe the periphery of a circle. (1992: 357)
Moreover, it was not uncommon for passersby to encounter women who revealed their breasts in public when nursing (e.g., Hall 1992: 210). Hall even saw women bathing by the roadside in full view of passersby (1992: 218). Beyond these forms of undress, women’s nudity when bathing along with men at bathhouses was by far the most controversial form of undress for Westerners who witnessed such practices. Admiral George Henry Preble, who accompanied Commodore Perry to Japan, wrote in his diary in 1854 that mixed bathing in a public bathhouse was ‘‘strange’’ and ‘‘anything but agreeable’’ (1962: 183, 204–205).
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century The fact that frequent undress among women in public did not cause promiscuity or social chaos puzzled Western observers. Townsend Harris (1804–78), first American consul and minister to Japan (1856–61), commented on the practice of mixed bathing in his journal on October 29, 1856: ‘‘I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people so generally correct’’ ([1930] 1959: 252). His general observation that the Japanese people were polite and orderly did not quite fit with what seemed to him a sign of shamelessness and disorder. Thus the practice of undress in public called for an explanation. In explaining Japanese practices of undress, some Westerners evoked the Judeo-Christian notions of original sin and sexual innocence (e.g., Guimet [1876] 1977: 36; La Farge 1897: 35), though, unlike the early visitors to Bali described by Wiener (this volume), they did not necessarily see Japan as a paradise. In his account of Japanese society, British diplomat Rutherford Alcock, who spent three years in Japan in the early 1860s, wondered if the Japanese were in a ‘‘state of primeval purity and innocence, or the very reverse’’ (1863: 79). Westerners who stayed long enough in Japan concluded that showing little concern for bodily exposure was a specifically Japanese trait. Alcock, among others, argued that Japanese women bathing with men at public bathhouses retained a sense of modesty: ‘‘Where there is no sense of immodesty, no consciousness of wrong doing, there is, or may be, a like absence of any sinful or depraving feeling’’ (Alcock 1863: 253). Discussions of mixed bathing took an interesting twist when Japanese bodies in their primeval innocence served as a foil against which to reassert the decadence of Western civilization (see also Wiener, this volume). Edouard Suenson, a Dane who joined the French army and came to Japan in 1866, critiqued ‘‘ugly’’ foreigners who visited bathhouses in order to gaze at bathers (Suenson 1989: 94). Immodesty, in his view, was in the eye of the beholder. Were the Japanese really indifferent to each other’s bodies in a state of complete undress? Judging from the observations of certain Western visitors and woodblock prints of bathing scenes, the Japanese handled nudity with a certain degree of circumspection. In drawings by the French artist Georges Bighot (Shimizu 1992: 69, 71), known for many humorous scenes of everyday life in Japan between 1882 and 1899, women are depicted holding towels in front of their abdomens as they walk out of the bathtub or walk around in the washing area. Although holding towels would not allow women to completely conceal their abdomens, this was a culturally appropriate way of preventing ‘‘overexposure’’ at bathhouses. Thus, bathers maintained proper social appearances by maintaining certain postures and moving their bodies in culturally appropriate ways. Far from being sexually innocent, Japanese people had been participating since the Tokugawa period in the mass production and consumption of sexual objects and practices (e.g., woodblock prints, drawings, and prostitution). And female bathers, in partial or complete undress, had begun to appear as sex-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ualized objects in numerous woodblock prints and stories. Thus we cannot assume that the Japanese imported a sexualized gaze on undressed bodies from the West during the Meiji period (cf. Imanishi 1997: 146). Nonetheless, people learned not to gaze at nude bodies in public.11 In particular, staring at exposed bodies at bathhouses was socially inappropriate (Suzuki 1993: 72– 73). Violations of these rules led to observable effects. Hall wrote, ‘‘I seldom fail to notice a shrinking look from [the] foreign gaze on the part of the female, for there is a modesty even in the public bath which impels them to hide always those parts of the body which modest women everywhere most desire to conceal’’ (1992: 359). Despite its subtlety, Japanese commoners did have a sense of modesty. British scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain, known for his significant contributions to Japanese linguistics during his stay in Japan (1873– 1911), quoted the editor of the Japan Mail, who wrote, ‘‘[T]he nude is seen in Japan, but is not looked at’’ ([1890] 1971: 60). Thus the Japanese were neither in a state of child-like innocence, nor indifferent to the sexual aspects of unclothed bodies. People made the effort to see nude bodies in certain ways and allowed others to maintain socially appropriate bodily appearances. Yet the viewer’s sense of control often went unnoticed and many Westerners took such apparent lack of reaction as indifference.
Legal Control over Undress On August 4, 1868, in the port of Yokohama, town officials started prohibiting day laborers from working in their loincloths in summer and requiring public bathhouses to build screens at the entrances to keep undressed bathers hidden from the street. In February 1869, mixed bathing was banned in Tokyo. In October 1871, it became illegal in Tokyo for people to work in loincloths or to cool off in public by revealing their torsos. These legal measures later came to constitute part of the Meiji Misdemeanor Law. The law was first enacted in Tokyo in 1872, and subsequently in other regions of Japan. As a result, undress in urban, public places (walking or working in loincloths or while exposing the upper torso), mixed bathing, and certain forms of sumo wrestling12 became illegal. Examining the nature of these regulations, we find that one goal of this bodily reform was to prevent men and women in partial or total undress from being together in a public, social situation. Though in pre-Meiji Japan the shogunate had attempted to control rules of bodily display,13 there are a number of differences between the nature of control during the late Tokugawa and the early Meiji periods. The Meiji Misdemeanor Law did not emphasize hereditary class distinctions and frugality, and the law also defined the amount of the fine for each type of violation (Kumakura 1979: 577–80). Such changes were consistent with the accelerating capitalist transformation that characterized the Meiji period. Moreover, unlike the shogunate’s officials in the previous era, Meiji officials employed the notions of good health (kenk¯o) and hygiene (eisei) to rationalize the im-
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century position of clothes. For example, in the 1872 municipal regulation, officials in Kanagawa emphasized that bodily exposure harms health in the heat of summer and that illnesses are avoided by clothing the body (Imanishi 1997: 149). One notable development during the Meiji period was that officials became increasingly concerned with the foreign gaze. In 1871 in Tokyo, for example, officials declared that ‘‘although such practices [of walking or working in loincloths or exposing torsos] are common customs . . . undress in public places is a serious shame. . . . it concerns the national reputation . . . with an increasing contact with foreign countries and visitors’’ (Imanishi 1997: 150). Similarly, in the port town of Yokohama, a window to the West with a designated residential district for foreigners, officials banned laborers from working in their loincloths because ‘‘foreigners do not do so’’ (Imanishi 1997: 147). When the state announced the imposition of the model Misdemeanor Law on regional governments in 1873, Meiji officials pressured three major cities and five major ports to swiftly enact it. These regions attracted Westerners and thus were set apart from the rest of Japan. The presence of foreigners and their gazes on Japanese practices were the initial reasons for banning certain forms of undress in Yokohama and Tokyo, but in remote provinces, officials did not always refer to foreign others. They described undress with a variety of negative terms, such as ‘‘ugly,’’ ‘‘immodest,’’ ‘‘shameful,’’ and ‘‘barbarous.’’14 In remote areas, therefore, the critical foreign gaze on exposed bodies, though sometimes used to justify the implementation of sartorial reforms, remained an imagined stare at best. The use of the police force is another characteristic of the Meiji control over undress. Policemen patrolled urban neighborhoods, scolded offenders by hitting or slapping them, and charged them fines. An English merchant, Arthur H. Crow, who came to Japan in 1881, describes an encounter with a policeman: ‘‘A puny, dignified policeman dressed in white ducks, observing the luckless coolie stark naked (excepting the maro or loin cloth), approached him quietly, and gave him a smart rap with his cane’’ (1883: 251). Dressed in Western-style uniforms, policemen symbolized modernity and the new order, whereas the offenders, in their kimonos, emblematized the old, ‘‘backward’’ ways. People soon learned to avoid policemen whenever possible or to act in a manner that they knew would be judged appropriate by police standards (Obinata 1992: 170). In legal manuals written for the general public, it is not unusual to find pictures of policemen who are about to hit offenders with sticks. Offenders lower their heads to beg for forgiveness while joining their hands or bowing deeply (Obinata 1992: 178; Ogi, Kumakura, and Ueno 1990).
The Meiji State’s Intentions In the early years of enforcement, bodily exposure in public was one of the most frequent violations of the Misdemeanor Law in Tokyo. Out of 5,120
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference deliberate offenses reported in 1879, 4,322 were violations of the ban on public nudity (Obinata 1985: 44). The number of such offenders rose dramatically in the first years, declined for a few years, and rose again in the mid1880s.15 Interestingly, the timing of the government’s effort to amend inequitable treaties with Western countries coincides with stricter enforcement of the ban on undress. The Meiji government sent the Iwakura Delegation to the U.S. to revise the 1858 treaty in 1871, for example, and the Misdemeanor Law was legislated in Tokyo in 1872. In 1878, the number of offenders violating the ban on undress jumped from 3,179 to 7,545, and during the same year Terajima Munenori, the minister of foreign affairs, began negotiations to recover Japan’s rights to independently determine tariffs. In 1885, the new minister of foreign affairs, Inoue Kaoru, asked the ministers of Western countries to prepare for official negotiations, and a round of official meetings took place between 1886 and 1887. The number of violations rose again in 1885 and 1886. Though Meiji officials saw a need to regulate undress and took legal measures to suppress it in certain contexts, it is still questionable whether they strongly believed undress was immoral. Considering the ways in which the Meiji state legislated and enforced the ban on undress, the legal control of bodily exposure might have been a state effort to improve Japan’s second-classcitizen status in the eyes of the international community. If so, the ban was a strategic accommodation of the new moral order imposed upon Japan by Western powers, and Meiji leaders’ and people’s attitudes share some similarities, as we will see below.
Contesting the New Dress Codes People in early Meiji Japan were far from passive recipients of the Misdemeanor Law. An essay entitled ‘‘Discussions on Civilization’’ (Kaika Mond¯o), published in 1876 (Ogawa [1876] 1929: 141), includes a critique of the police who set fines for various violations. Evoking the Tokugawa discourse that devalued profit-seeking activities and regarded money as something dirty, the author of this essay compared the government collecting fines to a lowly merchant chasing after money. Furthermore, he stated that nobody remained unclothed in cold weather; people undressed when they were hot or when their clothes became too cumbersome for the task at hand. The author implied that people took good care of themselves and the state therefore had no need to protect their health by resorting to unpopular legal measures. Fifteen years after the initial ban had been enacted, practices of undress remained alive. And there was no clear sign that people were accepting the new ideas of bodily modesty. People learned to cover their bodies when policemen were present, but otherwise disobeyed the law and laughed at the imposed order. Arthur H. Crow describes the attitude of his coolie, who was found naked by the policeman:
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century (N)ever did I see a man appear so frightened. . . . He quickly shuffled the small rug over his shoulders, which, in the official sense, constitutes clothing, but got a severe rating from the constable, accompanied by a rough shaking. The moment the latter was out of sight, the look of penitence departed, and peals of laughter showed how much impression had been made upon the offender. (1883: 251)
Englishwoman Isabella Bird (1831–1904), who visited the remote countryside of Japan in 1878, also wrote in her popular travel log about her experiences, which were similar to Crow’s. When traveling in a cart in Akita Prefecture, Bird encountered a policeman accompanying a prisoner, which caused her runner to stop suddenly to put on clothes. Two young runners behind her also hastily put on clothes. Her runner ‘‘literally grovelled in the dust, and with every sentence that the policeman spoke raised his head a little, to bow it yet more deeply than before.’’ Although he ‘‘never recovered his spirits,’’ as soon as the policeman was out of sight, ‘‘the two younger men threw their clothes into the air and gamboled in the shafts, shrieking with laughter’’ ([1880] 1984: 157). Thus many offenders do not seem to have been repentant. They pretended to be sorry and scared when policemen were around. In 1889, the ban on bodily exposure was still challenged for its absurdity. Mary C. Fraser, the wife of a British diplomat, described a meeting with her cook’s grandmother ‘‘in the kitchen one warm afternoon without a shred of raiment on her old brown body’’: [These elderly people] scoff at modern ideas [of clothing], and doubtless talk of the good old times when they were young and all these absurd decency fads had not cropped up. Who wants clothes except for warmth, or to look smart on proper occasions? Why be bothered with them in the house, in August? ([1899] 1911: 83)
For the older servant class, there was nothing wrong with undress in hot weather. The ban on bodily exposure was even challenged directly through collective violence, though people’s reactions to the ban were usually more diffuse than an organized resistance. Early Meiji Japan (1868–77) was characterized by frequent farmers’ riots (Imanishi 1997: 181). Riot leaders often resisted taxation, land reforms, hereditary class distinctions, the military draft, and even the requirement of short hair.16 The organizers of the Meiroku Riot in Kyoto in 1873 demanded, among other things, that the ban on undress be repealed (Tsuchiya and Ono 1931: 260).
Consequences of Regulating Undress The Meiji control over undress resulted in an uneven establishment of relevant legal codes across Japan (cf. Suzuki 1993), and this point is underemphasized in the discussions of undress. The Meiji state included the ban on
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference mixed bathing and certain forms of sumo wrestling in the model Misdemeanor Law, imposed upon regional governments in 1873 (Ogi, Kumakura, and Ueno 1990: 7), but excluded the ban on undress in public places (on the street and in storefronts). As a result, prohibitions against mixed bathing and mixed sumo wrestling were established more consistently across regions than the ban on undress in public places. Because municipal officials were given some freedom to modify or omit articles of the Misdemeanor Law in their own version, officials in some regions made exceptions to the ban and allowed undress among various working populations, such as fishermen, farmers (article 62; Fujimoto 1985: 44), and laborers (Kamiya 1977: 172). In one region, officials permitted bodily exposure among those who ‘‘pull carts and carriages as well as those who carry heavy objects on steep hillsides’’ (article 65; Inada 1995: 54). Thus, some regional governments authorized people to work in loincloths or without covering their torsos, and the central government permitted such exceptions. In contrast, these forms of undress were illegal in major cities and port areas. As a result, rather than standardizing practices of undress across Japan or instilling new values of modesty in all subjects, the Misdemeanor Law produced a new discourse of state-sanctioned hierarchy, according to which individuals belonging to different regions of Japan were judged and, if necessary, disciplined. How did the Meiji prohibitions against undress transform the nature of Japanese bodies? In pre-Meiji Japan, at bathhouses or on the street, people learned not to stare at exposed bodies as sexual objects, though sexual desires existed and found expression in popular culture. Western observers did not realize this hidden nature of the sexualized gaze. The Misdemeanor Law, however, authorized the sexualized gaze on undressed bodies regardless of context. As a result, the exposed body was no longer a symbol whose meanings emerged in the field of relations; it was made a fixed sign of immorality, immodesty, and shame. In this new discourse, there was no need to hide the sexualized gaze upon exposed bodies; now it was the bodily surfaces that had to be concealed to avoid such a gaze. Furthermore, prohibitions against undress, and the Misdemeanor Law, established a strict separation between public and private spaces. The Misdemeanor Law aimed at controlling certain spaces where a large number of unrelated people came and went, such as streets, bridges, beaches, rivers, outside the residence, and outside the shop (Ogi, Kumakura, and Ueno 1990: 3–14). In these spaces, the earlier rationale for taking off one’s clothes (to take a bath or to cool off ) became irrelevant. In addition, the Misdemeanor Law required people to clothe their bodies at home when and where passersby could see them. Thus the Misdemeanor Law aimed to transform homes into enclosed private spaces (see Narisawa 1991; Makihara 1994: 256). Examining the nature of control over the body in eighteenth-century Europe, Foucault observed, ‘‘Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century place of disciplinary monotony’’ ([1977] 1979: 141). The Meiji state attempted to make urban public places, such as streets, places of ‘‘disciplinary monotony’’ even though they were not architecturally enclosed, along with schools, military facilities, hospitals, and prisons. These changes in the meanings of undress shed a new light on the photographs of partly or completely covered Japanese women in the E. S. Morse collection (Konishi 1983), which was produced in Yokohama between 1880 and 1890 for foreign export. The majority of the women photographed are heavily covered. Exposed female bodies are also extremely rare in photographs from foreign publications of this period.17 Given the frequency of undress described in Western visitors’ writings and drawings produced during this period, photographic representations in the Morse collection do not necessarily illustrate Japanese women’s appearance in daily life. In addition, considering that most of the photographs of people taken during this period were posed, it is safe to assume that photographers intentionally covered the bodies of their female models because they knew that exposed female bodies were considered obscene in the West. In addition, as Mary C. Fraser’s account of her cook’s grandmother suggests, female models probably preferred to be photographed in clothes to ‘‘look smart’’ on a formal occasion.18 In the Morse collection, however, a few photographs of young female models (mostly geishas and prostitutes) stand out. They are pictured with bare breasts while the rest of their bodies are covered (Konishi 1983: 170–71). Some of these women are sleeping, while others are bathing, relaxing, or sitting at a table. Given the uniformity of these bare-breasted images and the fact that Western men often bought these pictures as souvenirs, we must assume that Japanese photographers were aware of the highly sexualized meaning of women’s breasts in the West. These photographs for foreign export suggest that the Japanese consciously used female bodies as strategic objects of self-representation in the face of intense Western scrutiny. On the one hand, photographers covered the bodies of female models and presented them as modest and civilized, in alignment with Western ideas of propriety. On the other hand, they occasionally capitalized on an expanding Western market for the eroticization of the exotic other and commodified female bodies by exposing their breasts, although in a minor, limited way. The deployment of these two strategic representations of female bodies depended on the new discourse of undress endorsed in late-nineteenth-century Japan. Because the new discourse presupposed an immodest gaze that eroticized exposed (female) bodies and redefined them as targets of concealment, these bodies acquired novel possibilities of forbidden pleasure. *** The Meiji state faced the urgent task of ‘‘civilizing’’ Japanese people to fight off foreign colonial powers and improve Japan’s political status in the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference international community. Because Western visitors often criticized undress in Japan as an indicator of Japan’s lack of civility, the Meiji state needed to establish a higher order in public places by controlling bodily exposure. Behind Meiji leaders’ attempt to ‘‘civilize’’ the people lay their struggle to amend inequitable treaties with Western powers. Seen in this light, the legal control of undress, along with other articles in the Misdemeanor Law, embodies Meiji leaders’ strategic image-building in late-nineteenth-century Asia, where the majority of its territories were colonized or half-colonized by the West. Later, colonized populations of the Japanese empire, such as the Ainu and the Okinawans (Imanishi 1997: 175), faced the state’s projects of bodily reforms—this time, the Japanese disciplined ‘‘barbarous’’ non-Western others to acculturate them into Japanese ways. However, the imposition of dress in Meiji Japan cannot be easily taken as a simple triumph of the state’s new order. Then what changes were brought to practices of undress during this period? First, Western observers brought new definitions of nakedness and nudity, and both partial and complete undress among Japanese people were frequently redefined as forms of transgression, or nakedness. In other words, many Western observers ignored the distinctions among various forms of undress maintained by Japanese actors and the different contexts in which these forms of undress were employed. Westerners, therefore, tended to lump partial and complete undress together into a single category of nakedness. Second, the Meiji state unevenly and incompletely adopted Westerners’ definitions of nakedness. Officials endorsed Western ideas of nakedness more consistently in select regions (mainly in urban areas) and prohibited undress involving partial or complete female nudity in the company of men. However, officials tended to allow rural populations to retain pre-Meiji notions of nudity and both rural and urban populations to practice same-sex bathing at bathhouses. Third, keeping pre-Meiji notions of nudity and resisting new ideas of propriety, people strategically clothed their bodies in the presence of the police to avoid punishment. In sum, then, by legally regulating undress, Japan added a new discourse of bodily exposure without completely eliminating the pre-Meiji notions of undress. Furthermore, strategies of accommodation, disobedience, and change among the multiple, interacting groups of actors examined in this chapter go beyond Gramscian notions of resistance. The agencies of those involved clearly challenge the stereotypical image of a Meiji Japan that uncritically copied Western practices. If the uneven establishment of the state’s ban on undress was not a failed moral crusade, the ban can be better understood as a strategy to ‘‘look smart’’ in foreign eyes and a way of addressing a larger goal of modernization. Regardless of the state’s intention, the ways in which Westernbased notions of nakedness were handled in nineteenth-century Japan probably helped certain forms of undress to survive to the postwar years. Even though much has changed since the Meiji period, practices of undress still flourish in public arenas, during ritual purification and festivals, in sumo
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century wrestling and other sports, and at bathhouses and outdoor hot springs. Breastfeeding in public was common until at least the early postwar years. Though it is rare, mixed bathing is still practiced in some areas in contemporary Japan (Clark 1994). The survival of undress today can be a marker of a nation that became fully industrialized and modern, but not Western. In conclusion, the strategic and selective adoption of Western ideas of nakedness by Meiji leaders impoverished rich but subtle ways of seeing practiced by Japanese actors. The case of Meiji Japan invites us to reconsider Turner’s observation (1980: 112) that bodily surfaces provide significant sites on which ‘‘the drama of socialization’’ is enacted, and reveals the process of not only resocializing Japanese actors into a new language of bodily adornment, but also retraining them to habitually gaze at bare bodies as sexual objects. Thus the transformation of undress in a Meiji Japan was ultimately a change in ways of seeing as well. NOTES I am grateful for helpful comments provided by my colleagues who read an earlier version of this paper for my seminar presentations (April 2002), sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Mid-West Japan Seminar. This chapter also benefited from valuable comments provided by Roberto DaMatta, Scott Clark, and Brian McVeigh. I would like to thank Adeline Masquelier and the reviewers of this volume, who provided useful editorial suggestions and insightful comments. 1. Western visitors were astonished to see tattooed Japanese men. For example, British diplomat Rutherford Alcock states that Japanese men tattoo their skins with ‘‘the most artistic and elaborate ornamentation’’; ‘‘it is impossible to deny that they look remarkably like a race of savages—if not savages, in their war paint’’ (1863: 191). 2. I conducted archival research at the National Diet Library in Tokyo for this project. I found many descriptions of people’s practices of undress written by Western observers. However, except for those written by upper-class Japanese men, few sources reveal the subjectivities and personal experience of the undressed in their own words. In addition to memoirs and journals, I also explored sources in popular culture (senryu, ¯ or humorous poems) and newspaper articles. 3. These social divisions are based on prestige rather than on wealth, and thus should be distinguished from socioeconomic classes. Some merchants, for example, had considerable influence and wealth, but officially they were given little prestige. 4. The shogun headed the shogunate and virtually ruled Japan, while the emperor, whose ancestors once headed the ancient state of Japan in political and religious capacities, exerted symbolic authority over the shogunate without power or means to rule people in a practical sense. Feudal lords governed their regional territories, called han, while the shogunate controlled and facilitated national networks of transportation, exchange, consumption, and information flow across regions. The establishment of the Meiji government in 1868 centralized multilayered systems of authority by abolishing the shogunate and building a new modern state headed by Emperor Meiji. 5. We should not take complete undress for granted at public bathhouses throughout the Tokugawa period, since both men and women bathed in loincloths during the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference early Tokugawa period, when steam baths were common at bathhouses (Nakano 1970: 114). As new types of bathhouses developed offering tubs filled with hot water, both men and women came to bathe in the tub without loincloths (Nakano 1970: 70). 6. During the Tokugawa period, there were also specialized bathhouses ( yuna buro) with illegal prostitutes (prostitution itself was legal). The shogunate regulated these bathhouses and later banned them. By the late Tokugawa period, these specialized bathhouses had disappeared and those with second floors had developed. On the second floor, female attendants served male customers tea. Here I limit my analysis to regular contexts of bathing. 7. The situation varied according to regions. In Tokyo, not only lower-rank warriors and townspeople but also well-to-do merchants regularly bathed at public bathhouses due to the scarcity of water (Jinbo¯ 1977: 28–29). In some rural areas, there were village bathhouses as well (Jinbo¯ 1977: 11). 8. The U.S. aimed to establish a new trading route across the Pacific, and access to ports in Japan was considered to facilitate the long journey by making a supply of coal available to American ships on their way to China. In addition, due to the prosperity of American whaling during the 1840s and 1850s, a treaty with Japan was considered necessary to ensure the safety and freedom of American sailors who were shipwrecked near Japan and were held by the shogunate. 9. Established in 1868, the Meiji government faced the urgent task of amending inequitable treaties that the Tokugawa shogunate had signed: the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan (the Harris Treaty) of 1858 and similar treaties with Holland, Russia, the U.K., and France. These treaties allowed Western countries to maintain extraterritoriality and denied Japan its right to independently determine tariffs. I will discuss this issue later in more detail. 10. Because the hereditary class system restricted what people could do but also guaranteed certain privileges based on social status, its abolition opened new possibilities but also eliminated privileges taken for granted. Therefore, these reforms met resistance and caused violent uprisings across Japan. 11. The account of the Iwakura Delegation, sent to America (1871–72) to amend the 1858 treaty, further illuminates the Japanese sense of bodily modesty. Kume Kunitake, a historian who accompanied the delegation, was bewildered by the sight of American husbands and wives holding hands and kissing in public. Kume concluded that Americans had ‘‘little control over themselves, and they have an ugly custom of expressing desires and emotions too straightforwardly’’ (Kume and Nakano 1934: 252– 55). For Kume, intimate bodily contact and attention between men and women implied weakness in character and a lack of proper moral discipline. Just as it was immodest for men and women to pay close attention to and touch each other in public places, at public bathhouses, it was inappropriate to stare at each other’s unclothed bodies, let alone touch them on purpose. 12. Though sumo wrestling between men was a form of entertainment and ritual, sumo between women occasionally became a sexualized comic show. 13. Japanese scholars are split between those who emphasize discontinuities (e.g., Imanishi 1997) and those who stress continuities (e.g., Kumakura 1979) between Tokugawa and Meiji regulations. 14. I compared versions of the Misdemeanor Law announced in various regions of Japan, such as Tokyo and Osaka (in Ogi, Kumakura, and Ueno 1990), Kyoto, Kuma-
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century moto, Hiroshima, and Aichi (in Kamiya 1977), Fukuoka (in Fujimoto 1985), and Gunma (in Inada 1995). 15. I examined the number of violations in Tokyo between 1875 and 1886. Figures are found in Obinata 1985. 16. Before the Meiji reforms, both men and women wore longer hair according to their class; short hair was reserved for criminals. For Meiji leaders, short hair was a symbol of modernity, because it was common among Westerners, while for many others, it signified transgression of the normal social order. 17. I used the Gaizo¯ Database, maintained by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Out of 268 hits with the keyword ‘‘woman,’’ there were only four images of bare-breasted women and no pictures of completely nude women. It is possible that Western authors or publishers removed pictures of completely undressed women. For example, the official report on Perry’s expedition to Japan submitted to the U.S. Congress did not include a drawing of mixed bathing due to its controversial nature (Imanishi 1997: 140). 18. I would like to thank Scott Clark for drawing my attention to this point.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alcock, Rutherford. 1863. Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan. Vol. 1. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green. Bird, Isabella. [1880] 1984. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. London: Virago. Black, John R. 1970. Yangu Japan (Young Japan). Vol. 2. Trans. Nezu Masashi. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Chamberlain, Basil. [1890] 1971. Japanese Things; Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, for the Use of Travelers and Others. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle. Clark, Kenneth. [1956] 1972. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Clark, Scott. 1994. Japan: A View from the Bath. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Crow, Arthur H. 1883. Highways and Byeways in Japan: The Experiences of Two Pedestrian Tourists. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivingston. Elias, Norbert. [1939] 1994. ‘‘The History of Manners.’’ In The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel. [1977] 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Fraser, Mary Crowford (Mrs. Hugh Fraser). [1899] 1911. A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan: Letters from Home to Home. London: Hutchinson. Fujimoto Toshifumi. 1985. Fukuokaken ni okeru chih¯o j¯orei to shite no ishiki kaii j¯orei (The Misdemeanor Law as the regional legal code in Fukuoka Prefecture). Fukuoka Chiikishi Kenkyu¯ 4: 25–49. Guimet, Emile. [1876] 1977. Bonjour Kanagawa. Trans. Aoki Keisuke. Yokohama: Yurindo. ¯ Hall, Francis. 1992. Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama, 1859–1866. Ed. Francis G. Notehelfer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Hanasaki Kazuo. 1992. Edo nyuyoku ¯ hyakusugata (Bathing scenes from Edo). Tokyo: Miki Shobo. ¯
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Harris, Townsend. [1930] 1959. The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris: First American Consul and Minister to Japan. Rev. ed. Rutland, Vt., and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Heine, William. 1990. With Perry to Japan: A Memoir. Trans. Frederic Trautmann. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Imanishi Hajime. 1997. Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to seibunka (Discrimination and the sexual culture in modern Japan). Tokyo: Y¯uzankaku. Inada Masahiro. 1995. ‘‘Gunmaken futatsu ni miru bunmei no kyosei’’ ¯ (The imposition of civilization seen through Guma prefectural laws). In Gunma Shiry¯o Kenkyu¯ 5: 41–57. Jinbo¯ Kazuya. 1977. Ukiyoburo: Edo no sent¯o (Bathhouses in Edo). Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha. Kamiya Chikara. 1977. ‘‘Chiho¯ ishiki kaii jorei ¯ no seko¯ to unyo¯ no jittai’’ (The legislation and enforcement of the Misdemeanor Law in regional contexts). In Meiji h¯oseishi seijishi no shomondai (Issues in the legal and political history of Meiji Japan), pp. 165–212. Tokyo: Keio¯ Tsushin. Konishi Shiro, ¯ ed. 1983. Hyakunen mae no Nihon (Japan: A hundred years ago). Tokyo: Shogakkan. ¯ Kumakura Isao. 1979. Bunmei kaika to fuzoku ¯ (Civilization and manners). In Bunmei kaika no kenkyu¯ (A study of civilization), ed. Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ¯ pp. 569–92. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kume Kunitake and Nakano Reishiro. ¯ 1934. Kume hakushi kyuj ¯ unen ¯ kaikoroku (The memoir of Dr. Kume). Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu. La Farge, John. 1897. An Artist’s Letters from Japan. New York: Century. Makihara Norio. 1994. ‘‘Bunmei kaika ron’’ (Discussions on civilization). In Nihon tsushi ¯ (The history of Japan), pp. 249–90. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Miyamoto Keitaro. ¯ 2004. ‘‘Fukuso’’ ¯ (Clothes). Network Encyclopedia. http://ds.hbi .ne.jp/netencyhome/index.html. Murakami Nobuhiko. 2004a. ‘‘Kosode.’’ Network Encyclopedia. http://ds.hbi.ne.jp/ netencyhome/index.html. ————. 2004b. ‘‘Kimono.’’ Network Encyclopedia. http://ds.hbi.ne.jp/netencyhome/ index.html. Nakano Eizo. ¯ 1970. Sent¯o no rekishi (History of bathhouses). Tokyo: Y¯uzankaku. Narisawa Hikaru. 1991. ‘‘Kindai Nihon no shakai chitsujo’’ (Social order in modern Japan). In Rekishiteki zentei, Gendai Nihon shakai (Historical preconditions, Japanese society series), vol. 4, pp. 77–140. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Nomura Masaichi. 1983. Shigusa no sekai (The world of gestures). Tokyo: NHK Books. Obinata Sumio. 1992. Nihon kindai kokka no seiritsu to keisatsu (The formation of the modern Japanese state and the police). Tokyo: Azekura Shobo. ¯ ————, ed. 1985. Meiji zenki keishich¯o, Osaka-fu, Kyoto-fu, keisatsu t¯okei (I) (Statistical information from the police department in Osaka and Kyoto in the early Meiji Period, vol. 1). Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo. ¯ Ogawa Tameharu. [1876] 1929. ‘‘Kaika mondo’’ ¯ (Discussions on civilization). In Meiji bunka zenshu, ¯ Bunmei kaika hen (The civilizing process, The cultural history of Meiji Japan series). Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha. ¯ Ogi Shinz¯o, Kumakura Isao, and Ueno Chizuko, eds. 1990. ‘‘Ishiki kaii j¯orei’’ (The Meiji Misdemeanor Law). In Nihon kindai shis¯o taikei, Fuzoku sei (Customs and sexuality, Modern Japanese thought series), vol. 23, pp. 3–29. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
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Japanese Bodies and Western Ways of Seeing in the Late Nineteenth Century Preble, George Henry. 1962. The Opening of Japan: A Diary of Discovery in the Far East, 1853–1856. Ed. Boleslaw Szczesniak. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Screech, Timon. 1999. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700– 1820. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Shimizu Isao, ed. 1992. Zoku Big¯o Nihon soby¯o-shu¯ (Japan through Bighot’s prints, part 2). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suenson, Edouard. 1989. Edo bakumatsu taizaiki (Skitser fra Japan). Tokyo: Shin Jinbutsu Ôraisha. Suzuki Rie. 1993. ‘‘Bakumatsu Meiji shoki no ratai shuzoku ¯ to obeijin’’ ¯ (Westerners and the custom of bodily exposure in the late Edo and early Meiji periods). Nihon Rekishi 543: 62–78. Tsuchiya Takao and Ono Michio. 1953. Meiji shonen n¯omin s¯ojy¯oroku (Records of riots by farmers in early Meiji years). Tokyo: Keiso Shobo. ¯ Turner, Terence. 1980. ‘‘The Social Skin.’’ In Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, pp. 112– 40. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.
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six
Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Janice Boddy
There is a scene in the film Topsy-Turvy1 —about the musical partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan—in which London actors dining at the Savoy ponder the news that General Charles Gordon is dead. The year is 1885. The men are indignant and perturbed. Gordon, ardent Christian and campaigner against the slave trade, hero to his countrymen, and governor of Sudan in Ottoman Egypt’s employ, was killed by followers of the Mahdi, a charismatic Muslim holy man, while besieged by them at Khartoum. Several times the Mahdi had sought Gordon’s conversion, to no avail. Gordon’s death two days before a British rescue mission reached the town was a brutal blow to imperial pride. The struggle between Gordon and the Mahdi would frame relations between British officials and Muslim Sudanese for decades to come. More, it personified the encounter between civilization and savagery, science and superstition, Christianity and what politicians and the press called ‘‘the false religion’’ of Islam, polarities that so energized the late Victorian age. Through the lens of Victorian popular culture—poetry, novels, fiction for boys—the empire appeared a modern Camelot, defended by Christian gentlemen who were stoic, entrepreneurial, just. Here Gordon became a mythic figure, the
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan archetype of a superior race sent to battle ‘‘heathens’’ on the fringe of the settled world, a martyr for Empire and Christendom both. The young Winston Churchill phrased it thus: That one man, a European among Africans, a Christian among Mohammedans, should by his genius have inspired the efforts of 7,000 soldiers of inferior race, and by his courage have sustained the hearts of 30,000 inhabitants of notorious timidity, and with such materials and encumbrances have offered a vigorous resistance to the increasing attacks of an enemy who, though cruel, would yet accept surrender . . . is an event perhaps without parallel in history. (Churchill [1899] 1987: 57)
For more than a decade the Mahdists held Sudan. Then, in 1898, Kitchener led an Anglo-Egyptian force to reconquer the region and occupy Khartoum.2 Upon hearing of Kitchener’s victory, Queen Victoria telegraphed, ‘‘Surely he is avenged!’’ (Magnus 1958: 133). Journalist G. H. Steevens wrote, ‘‘When civilisation fights with barbarism it must fight with civilised weapons,’’ and ‘‘the deadliest weapon against Mahdism’’ was a railway, built to speed imperial troops through the desert, along the Nile, and into the obdurate heart of Islamic Africa ‘‘with machine-like precision’’ (Steevens 1898: vii, 22). And with goods. For the railway also brought Victorian commodity culture—products and the ideas they conveyed. Churchill, a cavalryman in the campaign and war correspondent for the Morning Post, described how troops encamped at the advancing railhead were sustained: Every morning in the remote nothingness there appeared a black speck growing larger and clearer, until with a whistle and a welcome clatter, amid the aching silence of ages, the ‘‘material’’ train arrived. . . . At noon came another speck, developing in a similar manner into a supply train . . . [carrying water] . . . and the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whiskey, soda-water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort. ([1899] 1987: 175)
Not mentioned but surely also delivered was soap—an amenity of conquest that bore a heavy semantic load. Anne McClintock (1995: 207) notes that at the start of the nineteenth century, soap was scarce in Britain ‘‘and washing a cursory activity at best,’’ but by century’s end it was being mass-produced and held a privileged place among manufactured goods. Ideas about cleanliness condensed a range of bourgeois values, among them monogamy (clean sex), capitalism (clean profit), Christianity (being cleansed of sin), class distinction, rationality, racial purity. More, a close practical connection obtained between Victorian preoccupations with hygiene and evolutionary thought. Washing bodies, clothes, and homes—work done mainly by women—joined sexual purity rites such as race and class endogamy as techniques, in Foucault’s terms, for ‘‘maximizing life’’ and ensuring the ‘‘longevity, progeniture and descent of the classes that ‘ruled’ ’’ (Foucault 1990: 123; see also Davin 1997). Soap had become both an instru-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ment and a symbol of bourgeois civilization, figuratively marking off the ‘‘cultivated’’ and ‘‘developed’’ from the ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘barbarous,’’ and ‘‘unwashed.’’ Yet Victorian ideas about the healthy, vigorous, racially clean bourgeois body did not emerge in a Europe focused solely on itself. Rather, as Ann Stoler (1995: 7) argues, ‘‘they were refracted through the discourses of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those confidences were built, could not be disentangled.’’ The imperial politics and language of race furnished a scaffold to which domestic distinctions of class and nation were secured; the reverse was also true. Scholars from Mary Douglas (1966) to Timothy Burke (1996) have shown that beliefs about the disorderliness and filth of others are claims for the integrity and merit of one’s own social group. By invoking the discourse of cleanliness and filth, bourgeois Britons set themselves off from a host of ‘‘unruly others,’’ be they prostitutes, Irish, or Sudanese. Commodities such as soap and Western clothing, along with the concept of hygiene and concern for racial purity on which they relied, figured in latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century efforts by Britons to imagine, domesticate, and latterly improve the Muslim population of northern Sudan. British reports of Muslim Sudanese as dirty, lazy, and superstitious were legion, and drew on opposing self-perceptions to erect boundaries between ruler and ruled. In light of Gordon’s sinister end, such boundaries were especially firm from the time of the abortive relief sortie (1884–85) to beyond the reconquest of Sudan. Yet once the British were in control, productive administration demanded that some native failings be remedied; Sudan would have to be ‘‘civilized’’ to some degree. My purpose is twofold. First I illustrate the closely linked themes of hygiene, religion, race, and social evolution in popular late Victorian publications which, depicting events in Sudan, justified its violent overthrow in the British imagination. Second, and more briefly, I suggest how these ideas inflected colonial discourse surrounding pharaonic (female) circumcision, commonly practiced in Muslim Sudan even today.3 Colonial officials judged pharaonic circumcision a consummate ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘an insurmountable barrier to full social relations between British and Sudanese’’ (Deng and Daly 1989: 35; see Kenrick 1987). Though their efforts to stop it were supported by prominent Sudanese women and men, the interference was resented and, in the late 1940s, pharaonic circumcision became a nationalist cause. Yet the body surfaces of colonizers and colonized had been marked with political import far earlier than this, well before the reconquest began.
Of Dervishes and Gentlemen Soon after news of Khartoum’s fall reached London in February 1885, a torrent of ‘‘Gordon literature’’ flooded British shops and streets. Disconsolate editorials, letters, and biographies drenched the reading public in lament.
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Cromer (1908, v. 1: 432), no Gordon defender, ventured that Gordon’s published journal was ‘‘probably read by every educated man in England.’’ More than twenty-five books about the man appeared within a decade of his death. But Victorian writers of popular fiction who used the saga as their backdrop offered more than elegiac praise: they gave hope of vindication, of redeeming the imperial master-narrative. G. A. Henty, former war correspondent and prolific author of boys’ adventure books, wrote two novels centered on Gordon’s plight: The Dash for Khartoum, which appeared in 1892, and With Kitchener in the Soudan, published in 1903. They are complex assertions of Victorian social values and, given their wide and impressionable readership, worth exploring for the images of Africa, Arabs, and Empire they contain. Both are lively yarns with obvious pedagogical intent; Henty usually wrote a preface, sometimes addressed ‘‘Dear lads,’’ in which he laid bare the moral of his tale. Though he stuck close to reported events, he burnished the brutality of imperial exploits to convey a wholesome image of Britons abroad: his heroes are always chivalrous, dutiful, humanely benevolent. To the anthropologist, these highly formulaic tales are myths, imparting sacred truths in the guise of secular entertainment. Doubtless they schooled many a future officer of imperial Sudan. The Dash for Khartoum depicts Mahdists as barbaric foes whose courageous if misguided exploits shatter the smug expectations of well-drilled but unseasoned British troops while affirming their racial supremacy: As if utterly heedless of death the Arabs rushed forward through the leaden storm, but were mowed down like grass before it. . . . the wild courage of the natives was of no avail against the steady discipline of [the British troops]. (Henty 1892: 123)
Though the ‘‘dervishes,’’ as followers of the Mahdi were called, are brave, their fighting tactics are chaotic: as for these slippery black beggars, the less we have to do with them the better I shall be pleased. You go at them, and you think you have got it your own way, and then before you can say knife there they are yelling and shouting and sticking those ugly spears into you and your horses, and dancing around until you don’t fairly know what you are up to. There ain’t nothing natural or decent about it. (Henty 1892: 135)
Contrast the ‘‘wild,’’ ‘‘indecent,’’ ‘‘unnatural’’ tactics of the Sudanese with the conduct of the British, who remain civil and disciplined even under duress: as the camel corps cross the blazing desert, supplies of water run dangerously low, yet the men ensure there is always enough for tea. This first story set against the background of Gordon’s demise concerns two British boys, Edgar and Rupert, one from a titled family, the other not, who are switched as infants. When they cannot be told apart it is decided that the wealthy family shall raise them as twins. Well educated and now in his teens, Edgar learns of the mix-up from the treacherous woman—the selfish untitled
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference mother—who had engineered it. Convinced that he is the pauper, he runs off to join the campaign to extricate Gordon from Khartoum. In the desert a few days before the city’s fall Edgar is caught and made the slave of an Arab shaykh. As he now speaks a little Arabic, he learns that his captor has come to the front not from faith but for profit—to plunder British baggage camels. In this he has met some success. When Edgar overhears news of Gordon’s death in January 1885, his hope of rescue dissolves. According to his captors, the Mahdi has declared all white captives to be his personal property and requires that they be sent to Khartoum. But the wily shaykh intends to keep Edgar for himself, and to avoid detection he disguises Edgar in Arab clothes and has his skin stained dark. The entourage departs for Kordofan, beyond the reach of British troops. Once in the shaykh’s village Edgar resolves to learn ‘‘the native language’’ and customs well enough to make his escape. He applies himself patiently and resourcefully to his servitude. Though young and slight, he works diligently in the fields and accomplishes twice as much in a day as the shaykh’s southern Sudanese slaves, both of them full-grown men. He makes himself useful, showing people what to do with their looted supplies—how to open tins, boil tea, prepare cocoa and arrowroot. One stolen camel carries medical supplies and, despite his lack of formal knowledge, Edgar’s innate good will and practical common sense enable him to become physician to the shaykh’s people, dispensing quinine, cleaning and dressing wounds. In short, he is a civilizing influence: hard-working, eminently practical, an envoy of modernity in the barbarians’ midst. When the camp is threatened by dervishes sent by the Mahdi to punish the shaykh’s defiance, Edgar shows his captors how to form a military square and use their rifles effectively, thus enabling them to thwart a mounted force twice their size with few casualties of their own. For this he wins his freedom. Meanwhile Rupert, who had joined the Gordon relief campaign later than his ‘‘brother,’’ learns by a series of coincidences that Edgar—whom he and his parents have been desperate to find—has been abducted. As the imperial force retreats down the Nile in 1885, Rupert is granted leave to stay behind and search for his ‘‘twin.’’ He has a wig made up to resemble native hair, blackens his skin, and with the lure of payment in camels and cash engages some friendly Sudanese to accompany him. He too has learned some Arabic, rapidly learns more, and is careful to mimic the gestures of his companions lest his breeding reveal his foreignness. At length Edgar and Rupert serendipitously meet in the desert. They take a few moments to recognize each other, as both look and act like Arab Sudanese. Ultimately it is Edgar’s voice that gives him away: his accent signals his true identity, race, and class. Similar themes unfold in With Kitchener in the Soudan (Henty 1903). There the second son of an all but bankrupt earl secretly marries a governess, an orphaned woman of good family, and falls out with his father, who had wished him to make a lucrative match. The son alters his name and moves
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan with his wife to Egypt. He speaks Arabic and in 1883 enlists in the Egyptian army as a translator in a disastrous expedition against the Mahdi that few survive.4 He is given up for dead. His wife, however, feels sure her husband is alive—that, aided by his language skills, he would have disguised himself as an Arab and somehow escaped the Mahdi’s spears. Never losing hope, she remains in Cairo, where she teaches to support their son, Gregory. Gregory, in turn, learns several dialects of Arabic and ‘‘the negro language’’ from the family’s Sudanese servant. When, in the mid-1890s, his mother dies, Gregory resolves to find out what became of his father and arranges to be taken on as a translator in Kitchener’s avenging force. Once in Sudan, Gregory rapidly proves his worth by staining his skin dark, donning a jibba—the dervishes’ patched cotton tunic—and crossing the desert to infiltrate the Mahdist camp as a spy. He returns unscathed with information that Kitchener uses to secure the site where the advancing railway is to join the Nile. Next, Gregory is assigned to a gunboat. His vessel engages craft carrying dervish fighters and their families across the Nile to where they are massing for an assault on imperial troops. When a boatload of natives is struck by a shell and sinks, Gregory gallantly leaps into the river to save a drowning woman; the two wash up on shore beyond the British lines, whereupon Gregory is captured by a dervish emir. The emir has sworn to kill any unbeliever he meets. Yet before he can strike, the rescued woman, who happens to be the emir’s favorite wife, cleverly intervenes by throwing her robe over Gregory, placing him under her protection. Thus released from his vow, the emir praises Gregory’s courage, confessing that he would never have risked his own life for a stranger’s. Gregory replies, What I did, Emir, I believe any white officer who was a good swimmer would have done. No Englishman would see a woman drowning without making an effort to save her, if he had it in his power. As to the fact that she was not of the same race or religion, he would never give it a thought. It would be quite enough for him that she was a woman. (Henty 1903: 173)
Eventually, Gregory breaks free and rejoins the imperial force. After the dervish defeat, he makes inquiries of those who had lived through the siege of Khartoum. Gregory learns that his father had indeed survived the Kordofan bloodbath in 1883—the only white man to do so. He had escaped disguised as a dervish, and made his way to relative safety with Gordon in Khartoum. But early in September 1884, he had joined the ill-fated party heading north via the risen Nile to report on conditions in the beleaguered city. When their steamer ran aground, all were murdered by the Mahdi’s allies. Gregory visits the site and miraculously, hidden behind a rock, finds his father’s diary recounting his audacious battlefield escape, telling how, wearing a bloodstained jibba, he had befriended a wounded dervish and successfully doctored him by mustering his common sense. And the document reveals Gregory’s noble
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference birth, that he is now the rightful earl. The present claimant, a cousin, described by his peers as a ‘‘consummate ass’’ (Henty 1903: 217), is thus undone. The mythic elements in these tales are legion. That they are variants of the Prince and the Pauper theme is clear: nobility is in British blood, and will ‘‘out’’ in chivalrous deeds; more, they assure the newly elevated middle class that one needn’t be born a prince to be a gentleman, indeed that every gentleman is noble at heart. Female characters are predictably few, deployed mainly to deepen the contrast between British and Sudanese men. They tend to be kind, self-sacrificing, shrewd, thrifty, and, whether native or English, protective of the white youth in their power. Henty’s Sudanese women are intelligent, lively, and glib, forthright with their husbands and other men. Yet like their British counterparts they are also modest and vulnerable; importantly, their own male defenders fail to protect them as they should. The breeding and native ‘‘good sense’’ of the British lads allow them to redress the Arabs’ lack.
Darkening Skins . . . A striking theme in Henty’s Sudan novels is the ability of British males to disguise themselves as dervishes and pass undetected by dervishes themselves. Henty was not the only author to use this device. A. E. W. Mason does so in his adult novel The Four Feathers (1903), which likewise invokes Sudan and the Gordon tale. There were, of course, precedents for Victorian men ‘‘passing’’ as Arabs. Most prominent was Sir Richard Burton, whose Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah first appeared in 1855 and ran to numerous printings. Burton’s account, like those of less venturesome Orientalists, had filtered into the popular imagination and taken hold. For Victorians, dressing as an ‘‘Arab,’’ though not passing for one, was a widespread affectation; oriental costume was popular at fancy dress balls and on the London stage. Such putting on of ‘‘Arabness’’ was frivolous, perhaps, and romantic, a means to tame the exotic by emulation.5 Yet it was no less serious for that. For in displaying the capacity to know and assume ‘‘the other’’ at will, it affirmed the superiority of the self beneath the guise (see Said 1979). In the late nineteenth century, speculation that racial and ethnic differences had biological roots linked older views of social hierarchy to selected Darwinian insights on secular, natural time (Fabian 1983; Gilman 1985; Said 1979: 206ff.). Guided by the telos of progress, scholars calibrated the features of advanced and backward races, classes, cultures, and societies—categories often conflated in Victorian works. Social and physical ‘‘types’’ were ranked as more or less evolved. Europeans, of course, were the former, but with an admonition. For if nature is truly dynamic, as Darwin proposed, surely the telos could be reversed. Degeneration, Sander Gilman (1985: x) observes, was ‘‘the underside of progress.’’ Its possibility threatened the confident classifications on which the empire was built. Bourgeois Europeans, concerned for the
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan continuing supremacy of the race, came to regard stigmatized groups within their fold—prostitutes, the Irish, criminals, the unemployed—as congenitally ‘‘atavistic,’’ bestial, savage, dirty, actually or metaphorically ‘‘dark.’’ Supported by the Lamarckian idea that environmentally induced characteristics could be fixed in the social organism, fears of European retrogression inspired a number of liberal movements: to improve the lives of the poor; apply newly devised principles of hygiene to the seething slums; educate the masses; promote sobriety, chastity, and moderation so as to prevent overindulgence that, it was thought, leads to insanity. Less sanguinely, they also gave rise to programs of eugenic modification and surveillance (Nye 1985; Davin 1997). Anne McClintock notes that the threat of degeneration heightened concern over Victorian women’s sexuality and domestic station. ‘‘Body boundaries,’’ she observes, ‘‘were felt to be dangerously permeable and demanding continual purification, so that sexuality, in particular women’s sexuality, was cordoned off as the central transmitter of racial and hence cultural contagion’’ (1995: 47). For middle-class women, childrearing and ‘‘improving the racial stock’’ became national and imperial duties, and motherhood an exalted, if debated, role. Moreover, women were advised to employ scientific principles in all facets of homemaking: infant feeding, childrearing, cleaning, meal planning and preparation (Davin 1997). Domestic life ideally became a hub of rationality, in contrast to the supposed disorderly, unscientific, unsanitary practices of ‘‘inferior’’ groups. The maintenance of imperial boundaries of all kinds—physical, social, territorial—came to depend on domestic discipline, sexual probity and restraint, moral and physical hygiene (McClintock 1995: 47). In Sudan such principles would be brought to bear, to a degree, on Arab women too, who were enjoined to reproductive proficiency for the good of the colonial state. The Victorian doctrine of degeneration also supported scholarly views of ‘‘oriental’’ history as a legend of decay: the erosion of Islam and decline of its once glorious civilization into ignorance, indulgence, and excess. But if ‘‘Arabs’’ were deemed backward, fallen from levels they had once attained, they were nonetheless considered more highly evolved than ‘‘Africans.’’ Victorian social geography was, as Fabian (1983) notes, both spatial and temporal at once: leaving Europe meant traveling back in time, finding ever earlier ‘‘stages of man’’ the farther from Europe one went. The idea that such distance could be lessened if not wholly overcome, that ‘‘backward’’ races would benefit from having the ‘‘advanced’’ in their midst, offered a persuasive rationale for imperial expansion. However rarefied the debates of late Victorian scholars became, their ideas—like those of scholars in any age—were not created of whole cloth but engaged with issues abroad in the society of the day. Nor did ‘‘scientific racism’’ remain an elite understanding: it seeped into everyday life through advertisements, novels, travel books, and broadsheets, thereby contributing to dispositions in civil society. Such a dialectic between pedagogues and the populace is,
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference in Gramsci’s (1971) view, essential to successful hegemony, the socially produced assumptions about the world that, having become naturalized, go unquestioned and serve to effect and regulate social relations. The scientific mystique that cloaked ideas of race and class presented them as ‘‘objective’’ and morally neutral—empirical facts of life. Popular media normalized such views by reflecting them as only so much common sense. Still, to understand how Victorians understood Sudan we must take a further step: the lands of the upper Nile were anomalous, both Arab and African at once. This was a liminal zone, capable of erupting into savagery at any time. Since nomads were thought to outnumber farmers—an impression likely created by the upheavals of the Mahdist regime—it was seen as less advanced than incipiently civilized Egypt, which had slipped from past grandeur but was reviving under Europe’s sway. Egypt, for its part, and aided by Europeans, had been on the point of taming Sudan by putting an end to the slave trade when native ‘‘atavism’’ flared. Reversing the havoc was up to European gentlemen, confident exemplars of evolutionary fulfillment like the paragons of Henty’s Sudan tales. Henty’s characters who successfully pass as Sudanese Arabs leave the frontiers of European enlightenment and cross, like Gordon, into the realm of the dangerous and imperfectly known. They are bent not only on gaining knowledge of their foes but also, like Gordon, on domesticating them. Still, their success at deception suggests that the skills of a Burton reside in every British gentleman. Burton had perfected his mannerisms before venturing out in disguise, training himself in the gestures, postures, and pious invocations that mark customary behaviors in the East. Henty’s young men do likewise, though more swiftly and in predictable caricature. But for Mason’s hero Harry Feversham, who arrives in Sudan disguised as a swarthy Greek, ‘‘becoming’’ a Sudanese dervish takes three whole years of sun, wind, and study to perfect (Mason 1903). Yet the Burton analogy is inexact. For while Burton sought only to be taken for a Persian, those who would pass for Sudanese must stain their skin dark, altering not just their language and habits of gesture and dress but a feature of appearance not readily subject to self-control. For them there is the added frisson of descending the evolutionary ladder in pretense. This was, however, a temporary and reversible ‘‘devolution’’ in pursuit of a noble cause— to reclaim a lost brother, rescue a fellow officer, avenge a countryman’s death. While Henty’s and Mason’s heroes skillfully ‘‘play’’ those beneath them in rank, class, and race, the Sudanese whose identities they assume cannot return the compliment, for in character, word, and deed they would, the authors imply, fail to pass for ‘‘gentlemen’’ even if their skin did not reveal them at once.6 Gregory’s exchange with the dervish emir on rescuing women is a case in point. The heroes not only darken their skin, they also assume the jibba, sign of poverty and Muslim piety and loyalty to the Mahdi’s cause. The Mahdi twice
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan sent Gordon a jibba, inviting him to convert; Gordon spurned them, appalled at the thought of donning a ‘‘filthy Dervish’s cloth’’ just to prolong his life (Compton 1974: 140, 133), and is thought to have died in uniform dress. Our fictional heroes willingly wear the jibba in order to further the mission of civilization, and live to reclaim their rightful place. Significantly, Kitchener, when attached to the Gordon relief expedition in 1884, had done so too, in order to gain intelligence of the Mahdist forces holding Gordon and Khartoum.7 In masking their whiteness and donning the clothes of the ‘‘backward race,’’ the boys distinguish themselves from the resolute Gordon and emulate his avenger instead. Moreover, their journeys home from their ordeals rehearse the evolutionary logic of progress, from Africa to Egypt to England, jibba to khakis and red serge, dark skin to white, squalor and filth to order and cleanliness, wasteland to human production and fertile soil. Symbolically they annul the disenchantment and fear of retrogression occasioned by Gordon’s death. The boys enact, as it were, an implicit rescue of ‘‘Gordon’’ himself, of the civility he had come to represent. Yet they never abandon their ‘‘real’’ identities: the inner truth of themselves as white, pure, and socially refined remains intact. Like Kitchener, they dissemble their race for the sake of civilization: no ‘‘going native’’ is implied. In Henty’s Sudan books, the British civilize by violence, something they tellingly refer to as ‘‘work.’’ But his young protagonists do more: they are peaceable envoys, demonstrating the wonders of British domestic science to the Sudanese. This too, Henty suggests, is imperial toil. Importantly, when they are thus employed our heroes’ race is not disguised. The pallor of their skin, revealed in words and illustrations, both heightens the contrast between them and their antagonists and, in bringing that contrast to conscious attention, affirms its relevance to Victorian modernity. The boys’ dark disguise is a fleeting transgression, a strategic layer of dirt—Douglas’s matter out of place— that can always be removed by soap. Indeed, the characters suggest that, whatever their skins ephemerally show, only those who are white by birth can cross racial boundaries and impart their wisdom unchecked, thus clarifying for readers the Arabs’ failure to measure up. Gregory teaches the emir about gentlemanly ways; Edgar’s diligence as both doctor and slave instructs his captors in the value of hard work, scientific knowledge, and practical ‘‘common sense.’’
. . . and Washing Clean A theme that weaves through Henty’s books is the progressive influence of trade, and the need for a host of commercially produced ‘‘things’’ to sustain a civilized life. The list of commodities Gregory is counseled to buy before joining his regiment is long and minutely detailed, including not only his specialized kit but provisions to augment the meager army fare:
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Of course you get beef, biscuit, or bread, and there is a certain amount of tea, but nothing like enough for a thirsty climate . . . so you had better take up to four or five pounds. . . . You might take a dozen tins of preserved milk, as many of condensed cocoa and milk, and a couple of dozen pots of jam. (Henty 1903: 71)
Once beyond the railhead, Gregory needs a baggage camel and a native servant to manage his personal supplies. In The Dash for Khartoum (1892) Henty reveals that some European goods had already found their way up the Nile by 1884: Edgar’s shaykh, for instance, has an ample supply of matches. He implies that other items, like soap and Western attire, first arrived in Sudan with the European troops. The shaykh’s camel raid nets him not just coveted rifles, but articles of European clothing—khaki suits, shirts, socks, boots. The Sudanese, Henty writes, are (improbably) ‘‘puzzled’’ by the clothes, ‘‘and Edgar had to put on a shirt and pair of trousers to show how they should be worn’’ (Henty 1892: 247). When the entourage arrives at their village in Kordofan, Edgar is required to reveal his whiteness to the welcoming crowd by washing, but finds it impossible to remove the blacking from his skin with water alone. ‘‘I wish to goodness,’’ he muttered to himself, ‘‘I had got a cake or two of soap here, but I suppose it is a thing that they never heard of; even a scrubbing brush would be a comfort. I shall be weeks before I get myself thoroughly white again.’’ (Henty 1892: 245)
The observation is anachronistic. In Wad Medani on the Blue Nile, soap was produced throughout the Mahdist period, as British surveyors later observed (Henderson 1965: 33; Daly 1986: 22). And Kitchener was dismayed to learn that ‘‘Manchester goods’’ were available in local markets despite a strict economic blockade (Daly 1986: 22). Indeed, peoples of the upper Nile had been at least peripheral participants in the world market since the seventeenthcentury caravans of Sennar, an indigenous kingdom centered near Khartoum (Spaulding 1985). No matter. To late Victorians like Henty soap was a civilizing force, and civilization was not a pluralizable noun. Designed to purify bodies, clothes, and homes, soap was, as we have seen, a material metonym of Britain’s industrial empire and the values it extolled. Its utility was not just practical, but rhetorical: it signified a social order only speciously external to its use. Put another way, its use was a performative act: it brought about hygiene, the rational, scientific, and ranked state of social affairs for which it stood. Thus soap was both allegorical object (Richards 1990: 133ff.) and a practical means to enlighten the ‘‘primitive’’ world—Africa, of course, but also the dark and festering urban jungles at home. Reciprocally, producers of soap and other items of domestic hygiene drew on images of ‘‘evolutionary primitives’’—monkeys, apes, and dark-skinned peoples—in advertising their wares (McClintock 1995), illustrating the dialec-
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan tic between empire and metropole that Stoler (1995, 2002) describes. An advertisement for ‘‘Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap’’ from 1887 shows the figure of Britannia holding a laurel wreath over the bust of a chimpanzee, claiming that Monkey Brand ‘‘saves labour and prolongs life. Promotes cleanliness and secures health. . . . Causes brightness and dispels gloom. Teaches economy and avoids waste.’’8 Here soap is not merely an instrument or symbol but an agent of bourgeois values in and of itself. Advertisements, remember, are highly condensed communications: while they aim to produce sufficient knowledge to persuade, their successful execution presumes a knowing subject, a reader versed in the ‘‘prior meanings’’ that stand ‘‘as a guarantee . . . for the ‘truth’ in the ad itself ’’ (Williamson 1978: 99). With this in mind, consider a much reproduced Victorian ad for Pears soap that relied on familiarity with Gordon’s conflict with the Mahdi for effect. Entitled ‘‘The Formula of British Conquest,’’ it features six half-naked spear-carrying ‘‘dervishes’’ recoiling awestruck upon seeing the words PEARS’ SOAP IS THE BEST emblazoned in white on the side of a massive rock in the Red Sea Hills. Thomas Richards, in The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain, suggests that this ad, more than others, shows the commodity as a magic medium ‘‘through which English power and influence could be enforced and enlarged in the colonial world’’ (1990: 123). Commodities are not simply the vanguard of imperial rule; they create the empire all by themselves. They are the weapons that will allow ‘‘illiterate savages who cannot appreciate the value of things’’ (Richards 1990: 121) to be subdued. But given its historical context, there is more to the ad than this. Victorian conceits notwithstanding, an inability to decipher English hardly betrays illiteracy, and as we’ve seen, it was unlikely that Sudanese Arabs would have been quite so perplexed by soap. The advertisement does proclaim the civilizing mission of commerce, but with a wry and melancholy twist, for in August 1887, when it appeared in the Illustrated London News, commodities were the only British force with a prospect of penetrating Sudan. Below the drawing is a quotation (omitted from McClintock’s version [1995: 225]) from a war correspondent who covered the Gordon relief campaign: Even if our invasion of the Soudan has done nothing else it has at any rate left the Arab something to puzzle his fuzzy head over, for the legend PEARS’ SOAP IS THE BEST, inscribed in huge white characters on the rock which marks the farthest point of our advance towards Berber, will tax all the wits of the Dervishes of the Desert to translate.
This was not an apocryphal tale. A precedent had been set by British troops stationed in eastern Sudan in the 1880s, who picked out their regimental badges in white stones on the black rock faces of the Red Sea Hills (Kenrick 1987: 9–10). There is more. At a halt in the hills along the uncompleted Suakin–Berber railway, begun in vain hope of reclaiming the region from Mahdist troops, imperial navvies had painted the words ‘‘Otao Junction’’ in
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Pears advertisement, Illustrated London News, August 27, 1887, p. 247
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan white on a small rock, and opposite, on the boulders of a hill, ‘‘PEARS SOAP IS THE BEST SOAP 5/5/85.’’ Decades later other such ‘‘ads’’ could still be made out on nearby hills: ‘‘Drink Eno’s Fruit Salts,’’ ‘‘Barnes and Co.’s Preserved Provisions are the Best.’’9 The troops, themselves immersed in commercial culture, had created a ‘‘proper English railway depot’’ complete with painted advertisements, facetiously claiming this hostile place for home before evacuating Sudan with the rest of the Gordon relief force in 1885. Not only, then, might British entrepreneurs see commodities as a means of ‘‘conquest’’; so too might thwarted British troops, in a whimsical attempt to maintain a toehold in the land where Gordon came to grief. Richards (1990) and McClintock (1995) analyze this ad as the marketers’ invention; yet Pears artists had simply taken the navvies’ creation and completed it, the addition of wonderstruck dervishes making visible the evolutionary fantasy on which the imperial venture relied. In Britain, the efficacy of the Pears advertisement depended on popular understandings of dervishes as dirty, violent, backward, and fanatical, in contrast to readers’ notions of themselves as clean, orderly, rational, capitalist, literate, and humane. The dervishes are pictured half clad and, of course, carry weapons—tellingly spears, not guns, albeit they used both. Though dervishes twice broke a British square and slew the Christian hero of the age, the British leave only words of domestic wisdom behind as their parting shot. But like forsaken Israelites beholding the Ten Commandments carved on stone by an unseen hand, the Mahdists draw back agape. By drolly invoking both biblical themes and domestic commodity culture, the ad reassures readers that they belong to a ‘‘we’’ who can bring enlightenment—Christianity, cleanliness, and commerce—to the savage Sudanese. Fast forward to 1898, and see how the image has changed. The second figure is an ad from the Illustrated London News published in 1898, one month after the British victory at Omdurman. It alludes to the earlier Pears advertisement, yet replaces the 1885 failure with 1898 success—in Lever Brothers’ name. Entitled ‘‘The March of Civilisation: Sunlight Soap at Khartoum,’’ it shows British officers placing a sign for Sunlight Soap on a mud-brick wall while bemused jibba-wearing dervishes, a veiled woman, and an all-butnaked boy look on. Now the hidden hand reveals itself: not God but British troopers write the words, and not in the wilderness but in the heart of the former Mahdist state, the Muslim town where an exemplar of Christian civilization had dwelt. Note too the inference that domestic soap (and its many referents) will overwhelm and enlighten the Sudanese, perhaps even convince them of the imperfections of their faith, or of the value of empirical observation over conjecture and superstition. And again the ad is documentary, for below the drawing are printed a letter to Lever Brothers and eyewitness reports attesting that one J. R. Williams has been ‘‘the first . . . to place your advertisement in Khartoum.’’ Cleanliness, Christianity, and commerce, the hallmarks of ‘‘civilization,’’ accompanied imperial forces in fantasy and in fact.
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Sunlight advertisement, Illustrated London News, October 8, 1898, p. 525
Not surprisingly, these principles were explicitly urged upon Sudanese too, but with a notable elision. For, fearing a revival of the zeal that had led to Gordon’s death, Christians were forbidden to proselytize in the Muslim north. Instead, scientific medicine and pedagogy bore the onus of civilizing, hence domesticating, Muslim Sudanese.
Making Prolific Mothers Fast forward again, to 1920, twenty-one years after the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan came to be. The head of the Sudan Medical Department, ostensibly yielding to ‘‘insistent persuasion’’ by the English wife of the education director ‘‘after she had witnessed the barbarous customs at circumcision and birth,’’10 has just convinced administrators to establish a school for midwives in the native town of Omdurman, across the White Nile from Khartoum. It is interesting that in public accounts the Midwives Training School owed its start to a spectacle of ‘‘African barbarity.’’ There were other, less openly acknowledged reasons for the move. World War I had just ended and government projects deferred for its duration were being resumed. The fertile lands of the Gezira, south of the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, were being converted into a mammoth cotton plantation with backing from Parliament and British
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan entrepreneurs. There was, however, an abiding shortage of native labor to cultivate the crop, which fatalities during the recent influenza epidemic had done nothing to relieve (Bell 1999: 296). Moreover, poor sanitation and the custom of pharaonic circumcision were held to be causing high rates of infant and maternal mortality and postpartum sterility among Muslim Sudanese, those whom, despite their famed religious zeal, the British preferred to employ. With the Gezira project soon to be underway, an ample and disciplined workforce was crucial to secure. Phrased in the language of humanitarian advance, and surely inseparable from this in officials’ regard, midwifery reform became one quiet means to that end. In 1921, British nurse-midwife Mabel Wolff opened the midwifery school with four hard-won recruits. She set to work with capable optimism, writing in her inaugural report ‘‘that constant teaching will, in time, have an effect in influencing the younger generation and the trained Diayas [midwives] against the barbarous custom.’’11 To Britons on the ground, Arab Sudanese women consistently failed to behave in civilized ways. Kitchener’s men had described them as half naked and ‘‘appallingly hideous,’’ with hair ‘‘all dripping with grease’’ (Alford and Sword [1898] 1969: 83, 144–45). Wolff considered traditional midwives to be ‘‘very conservative, completely ignorant and extremely dirty.’’12 Besides the ‘‘abominable,’’ ‘‘barbarous custom’’ of pharaonic circumcision,13 she complained of ‘‘the peculiar customs of the natives greasing themselves and their surroundings.’’14 Her initial goal: to impress upon students the need for cleanliness and order—cultivate their appreciation of soap.15 However adept she was at preaching the doctrine of hygiene, Wolff had mixed success in curbing ‘‘the barbarous custom,’’ which, because it results in a scar that constricts the flow of bodily wastes and requires an incision to enable birth, she considered a major impediment to cleanliness and health. As an interim measure she taught a less harmful operation that was adopted in several communities where her medical midwives worked. But while the severity of the practice was reduced, it did not disappear. Long after the colonial era the wife of a former British official wrote, How the Arab women ever produced any children is difficult for a European to imagine. The universal and barbaric practice of genital mutilation, whether infibulation or clitoridectomy, would make intercourse painful. There could be no birth without preliminary slashing and subsequent cobbling together by, in the majority of cases, untrained locals using septic tools. The . . . constant teaching and preaching of the Midwives’ Training School, did nothing to alter public opinion. . . . The apparent determination of Arab women, enduring this primitive treatment, to continue to inflict it on the next generation, is shocking. (Kenrick 1987: 110)
Pharaonic circumcision had tainted Arab Sudanese. Britons linked it to all that was backward, evil, ignorant, unwholesome, and unclean. Calling the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference practice ‘‘barbaric’’ invoked the specter of social evolution; it was an exercise of discursive authority that precluded any need to consider indigenous women’s points of view.16 To most Muslim Sudanese, pharaonic circumcision was not unhygienic but purifying and religiously prescribed. Yet the Mahdi had not condoned it (Holt 1970; Daly 1986), and the Egyptian mosque-based religious scholars whom officials engaged to wean Sudanese from charismatic Islam condemned it, to little avail. Anxious lest British objections unduly provoke Muslim men, administrators charged the ‘‘barbarous custom’’ to unschooled, superstitious women, especially older women, whom they continually reproached. As one official opined, ‘‘They are ignorant, obstinate, brutal, and are quite capable of stirring up trouble, so that the only way to deal with them is by overwhelming public opinion.’’ ‘‘Mohammedan men,’’ he continued, know that female circumcision is against their faith but need government help to stop it.17 In this one detects a cunning shift: Gordon’s adversaries have transmogrified. Now the fanatical foes are not the spear-wielding Mahdists of the Pears advertisement so much as their headstrong, impious mothers, sisters, and wives. In a 1924 memo on female circumcision circulated to district commissioners, the British intelligence director declared that no very great propaganda with the male population of the country can be expected until the female portion of it which controls the children for all their early and impressionable years, is raised to a higher standard of mental and moral development, which seems impossible as long as the custom of Pharaic circumcision holds.18
His view was widely shared.19 Muslim Sudanese women were deemed obstacles to imperial progress, namely, the transformation of domestic life that it required. Thus the production, edification, and control of Arab workers had to begin with their prospective mothers, for along with its physical effects, female circumcision was thought ‘‘liable to cause serious mental disorder, thus further handicapping a sex that is considered behind the development of the men of the country.’’20 Moreover, ‘‘setting aside the ordinary motives of humanity, the Government is deeply interested in the increase of population,’’21 which infibulation (but tellingly not excision) was believed to impair. So to make women better mothers, at once more prolific and less ‘‘backward’’ in their nurturing abilities and techniques, officials in the 1920s began attending, fitfully at first, to women’s domestic education and health; here the midwifery school was the principal venture. Through such biopolitical crusades, it was hoped, the seeds of ‘‘civilization’’ would take root within Muslim households and grow from the inside out (cf. Mitchell 1991; Steele 1998). Colonial documents leave the impression that cleanliness and clothing were solely European concerns, that exogenous canons of deportment were foisted on unruly Africans through health initiatives, primary education, and the like, with an eye to making them intelligible subjects and tractable work-
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan ers. But clearly in Sudan there were indigenous logics of bodily purity too, with histories of their own (see Boddy 1989; cf. Hunt 1999). When training Sudanese midwives, Wolff spoke Arabic and made generous use of vernacular terms—among them the word ≠tahara, ¯ conventionally translated as ‘‘purity.’’ Such renderings were illusory, masking deep incongruities of premise and belief while lending unsuspected support to the very practices she sought to unseat. This was compounded by the fact that in Sudan as well as Britain at the time, ‘‘purity’’ was more than a physical state. Associated with the control of women’s sexuality, its presence or absence marked social boundaries, underscored group integrity. While for Sudanese purity and cleanliness were typified by the infibulated, hence marriageable, female body,22 to Wolff there was no more unseemly instance of those traits. In the long run Sudanese women selected from colonial repertoires, blending local practice with scientific methods and ideals in ways consonant with their own meanings and concerns (Boddy 1998, 2003). British notions of purity as hygiene thus became entangled with local postulates; pharaonic circumcision, meant to purify female bodies by removing external ‘‘masculine’’ parts and creating a more perfect and secure ‘‘house’’ of the womb, came to be performed with antiseptics, local anesthetics, and sterilized tools. Wolff ’s trust that with biomedical education Sudanese would ascend an imaginary ‘‘ladder of development’’ and ‘‘the barbaric custom’’ would disappear now seems romantic and naïve; the intricacies of colonial exchanges can never be wholly foreseen.
Coda Colonial discourse linking enlightenment and evolutionary progress with cleanliness, discipline, commerce, ‘‘proper’’ motherhood, and the tacit principles of Christianity was ubiquitous and imposing. Moreover, it endures. Fast forward one last time, to 1994. I have returned to the northern Sudanese village where, as a student, I began ethnographic fieldwork nearly two decades before. But now I am a ‘‘lady professor’’ and my standing has radically changed. No longer is it permissible for me to ‘‘waste’’ time sitting and talking with women friends. Instead I am escorted on a round of semi-official visits to the clinic and girls’ and boys’ elementary schools. So it happens one morning that I am ushered to the front of a class of nine- and ten-year-old boys. Immediately the teacher stops his lesson. I utter the mandatory greetings; the children as a body rise and respond in a loud rhythmic chant. The teacher then gives a signal, and the boys begin reciting in singsong English, accompanied by illustrative gestures: Every day, when I get up, I wash my face, I wash my face. Every day, when I get up, I brush my teeth, I brush my teeth. Every day, when I get up, I wash my hands, I wash my hands. Every day, when I get up, I comb my hair, I comb my hair.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Somehow it seemed fitting that the litany should be in English. I, perhaps the closest thing to a British school inspector to visit since independence in 1956, am an appropriate, if reluctant, witness, able to confirm that imperial values are still being promoted, and in their consummate tongue. Tellingly, however, the soap the boys use is neither Pears nor Sunlight, but a local Sudanese brand. NOTES This chapter is based on research for a book, Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. I am extremely grateful to the women of Kabushiya and Gedo regions of northern Sudan for our continuing conversations. Several individuals and institutions have greatly facilitated the archival portions of this work: El Haj Bilal Omer of the Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum; Clare Cowling, Archivist, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; S. M. Dixon of the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine; the Public Records Office, London; the National Records Office, Khartoum; the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the Church Missionary Society Archive, Birmingham University; the Rathbone Archive, Liverpool University; the School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, London University; the Middle East Archive, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford; and the British Library. Jane Hogan of the Sudan Archive, Durham University, has been an invaluable help and fund of knowledge. My research and writing have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Fellowship Fund of the University of Toronto, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy. Warmest thanks to them all; while they have contributed to the chapter’s insights, its faults are mine alone. 1. Mike Leigh, writer and director; Simon Channing-Williams, producer; USA Films, 1999. 2. Ostensibly the invasion was undertaken on behalf of Ottoman Egypt, colonial masters of Sudan from 1821 until the Mahdi’s rise to power in the early 1880s. 3. The ‘‘pharaonic’’ procedure (≠tahur ¯ faraowniya, or pharaonic purification) involves removing a girl’s external genitals (excision), then stitching up her genital opening (infibulation), leaving a small passage for urine and menstrual blood. 4. The expedition was led by a British officer in the Egyptian army, Hicks Pasha, against the Mahdi’s troops, who had taken El Obeid in Kordofan. 5. In this regard it was not unlike spirit possession as it affects northern Sudanese women (Boddy 1989). 6. See McClintock 1995: 69 on ‘‘colonial passing’’ in Kipling’s Kim. She suggests that Kim is able to ‘‘pass’’ because of his ambiguous racial heritage; being half-Irish, he is ‘‘racially closer to the Indians than if he had been wholly English.’’ This is not true of the thoroughly English heroes of Henty’s books. 7. Thanks to Douglas Johnson for pointing this out. The episode is captured in the film Khartoum (Robert Ardrey, writer; Basil Dearden, director; Julian Blaustein, producer; MGM/UA, 1966), starring Charlton Heston as Gordon and Sir Lawrence Olivier (in blackface) as the Mahdi. 8. Illustrated London News, September 17, 1887, p. 353.
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 9. P. B. E. Acland to Robin Baily, August 11, 1932, Sudan Archive, Durham (hereafter cited as SAD), 533/3/30. See also Acland memoirs, SAD 707/15/13. 10. M. E. Wolff to British Social Hygiene Council, February 1933, SAD 582/ 10/16. 11. Midwives Training School, First Annual Report, 1921, SAD 579/3/15. 12. The account of Wolff ’s first encounters with Sudanese women was written by her colleague, E. M. Kendall, matron of the Midwives Training School from 1946 to 1955 (Kendall 1952: 42). See also O. M. F. Atkey, ‘‘Female Circumcision in the Sudan,’’ April 7, 1930, National Record Office, Khartoum (hereafter cited as NRO), Civsec 1/57/3/121 and 1/44/2/12, 1924–37. 13. Annual Report, Midwifery Training School, Omdurman, October 20, 1921, SAD 579/3/15. 14. M. E. Wolff to director, Medical Department, March 7, 1921, SAD 579/3/7. 15. ‘‘Elementary Practical Lessons for Midwives of the Sudan,’’ n.d., SAD 581/5/7. 16. These were, of course, different from those of Europeans; as briefly addressed below, the Sudanese women with whom I conducted research said they perform circumcisions to make female bodies pure, clean, and smooth (Boddy 1989). 17. Medical Department Circular, February 17, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/ 12/4b. 18. C. A. Willis to district commissioners, February 19, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/ 44/2/12/8. 19. H. A. MacMichael to R. V. Bardsley, February 23, 1924; Bardsley to MacMichael, February 25, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/5–6. 20. Medical Department circular, February 17, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/4b. 21. Willis to district commissioners, February 19, 1924, NRO Civsec 1/44/2/12/8. 22. These issues will be pursued in Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. See also Boddy 1989.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alford, Henry S. L., and W. Denniston Sword. [1898] 1969. The Egyptian Soudan: Its Loss and Recovery. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press. Bell, Heather. 1999. Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899–1940. Oxford: Clarendon. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ————. 1998. ‘‘Remembering Amal: On Birth and the British in Northern Sudan.’’ In Pragmatic Women and Body Politics, ed. Margaret Lock and Patricia Kaufert, pp. 28–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ————. 2003. ‘‘Barbaric Custom and Colonial Success: Teaching the Female Body in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.’’ Social Analysis 47(2): 60–81. Burke, Timothy. 1996. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Burton, Richard. [1855] 1964. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. 2 vols. Reprint, New York: Dover. Churchill, Winston. [1899] 1987. The River War: The Sudan, 1898. Sevenoaks, U.K.: Sceptre.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Compton, Piers. 1974. The Last Days of General Gordon. London: Robert Hale. Cromer, Evelyn Baring. 1908. Modern Egypt. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Daly, Martin W. 1986. Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davin, Anna. 1997. ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood.’’ In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, pp. 87–151. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deng, Francis M., and M. W. Daly, eds. 1989. Bonds of Silk: The Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Gilman, Sanders L. 1985. Introduction to Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, pp. 1–23. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith. New York: International. Henderson, J. D. D. 1965. Sudan Republic. London: E. Benn. Henty, George Alfred. 1892. The Dash for Khartoum: A Tale of the Nile Expedition. London: Blackie. ————. 1903. With Kitchener in the Soudan: A Story of Atbara and Omdurman. London: Blackie. Holt, P. M. 1970. The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1898: A Study of Its Origins, Development, and Overthrow. Oxford: Clarendon. Holt, P. M., and M. W. Daly. 1979. The History of the Sudan. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1999. A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Kendall, E. M. 1952. ‘‘A Short History of the Training of Midwives in the Sudan.’’ Sudan Notes and Records 33(1): 42–53. Kenrick, Rosemary. 1987. Sudan Tales: Recollections of Some Sudan Political Service Wives, 1926–56. Cambridge: Oleander. Magnus, Philip M. 1958. Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist. London: Murray. Mason, A. E. W. 1903. The Four Feathers. New York: Macmillan. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nye, Robert A. 1985. ‘‘Sociology and Degeneration: The Irony of Progress.’’ In Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, pp. 49–72. New York: Columbia University Press. Richards, Thomas. 1990. The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. London: Verso. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Spaulding, Jay. 1985. The Heroic Age in Sinnar. East Lansing: African Studies Center, Michigan State University.
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Purity and Conquest in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Steele, David. 1998. ‘‘Lord Salisbury, the ‘False Religion’ of Islam, and the Reconquest of the Sudan.’’ In Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised, ed. E. M. Spiers, pp. 11– 33. London: Frank Cass. Steevens, G. W. 1898. With Kitchener to Khartum. London: Wm. Blackwood & Sons. Stoler, Ann L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ————. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers.
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seven
Did You Bathe This Morning? Baths and Morality in Botswana Deborah Durham
‘‘Did you bathe this morning?’’ The two Herero1 girls laughed, taking a break from their morning household work to lean over the compound fence and chat. Their arms and legs were coated with dust and the residues of sweat and oils smudged their faces: they may have bathed earlier themselves, but it didn’t show at mid-morning. I suspected the teenage girls were being impudent, ‘‘playing with me,’’ as children in the urban village of Mahalapye sometimes did. They were also perhaps curious about me as an American. Americans and Europeans were reputed, in villages in Botswana, to be surprisingly indifferent to bathing and cleaning. I had heard stories of Peace Corps volunteers who had been observed doing laundry by swishing clothes around a tub with a stick (instead of diligently scrubbing them section by section through multiple washes and rinses). I had been asked about the slovenly dress of European development workers and tourists—unironed clothes, lack of seemly underclothing, and dress appropriate to housework or play worn in offices and downtown. And people had repeatedly let me know that whereas they themselves, Africans, bathed twice a day, many whites seemed to bathe much less often—sometimes not even daily.
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Did You Bathe This Morning? At the time the girls’ question seemed mostly amusing for inverting the common Western stereotype that Africans are incorrigibly dirty—contextually dirty from dusty villages or tropical environments burgeoning with microflora and mud, and inherently dirty by virtue of race or moral temperament. I didn’t write the encounter into my fieldnotes. And yet the question remains vivid in my memory, as too does the experience of bathing. As I fell into the routines of the village, including the ritual of daily baths, bathed in the company of others on trips or in the high-energy preparations before a funeral, watched baths being prepared in city and village, and listened to stories of the bathed and unbathed, I came to see baths as intricately woven into the social ethos of civic and domestic life. Who bathes, who doesn’t, when baths are taken and how are bound up with expectations of civic personhood and the political context of liberal democracy in Botswana. Baths are also at the center of domestic moral economies. As the labor involved in preparing a bath enters into negotiations of loving care and anxious spousal tensions, baths inscribe domestic asymmetries into the larger civic moralities of who has, and who has not, bathed. The sympathetic interdependencies and labor inequalities within households are the background against which baths are seen to be independent acts of selfdevelopment by individuals in the public domain. Household and gender inequalities, and conceptualizations of bodily condition as intersubjective, are the contested material that reveals the hidden inequalities in civic ideologies of individual responsibility, liberalist egalitarianism, and the possibilities for self-improvement through hard work. Hidden and revealed, baths are one lens through which social marginalization and civic inequalities make sense to participants and so are perpetuated and accepted. In asking me whether I had bathed, the girls were probing to see what kind of person I was.
Bathing and Dirt When the young girls asked me whether I’d bathed, or when a man commented that old people don’t bathe often, they were not distinguishing between categories of people who are dirty or clean. They were talking about bathing, not dirt; about those who undertake to make themselves clean or else do not do so. While people do talk about themselves or others as washably dirty (in Herero, o nandova, s/he is dirty), and while there is a sense that some bodies are inherently more prone to become dirty, baths are not simply about dirt. Although school textbooks preached hygiene, such that bathing was part of a constant battle against dirt and germs, the village baths seemed less about the need to keep dirt always at bay than about a moral and civic personhood, about making oneself into a kind of person through the act and consequences of bathing. The young women who teased me, like people of all ages that I knew in the village,2 plunged without hesitation into dirt and dirty activities. They scrubbed pots blackened by fires, emptied chamber pots into stinking decrepit latrines at the corner of compounds, kneaded manure and dirt into
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference the fine plaster that smoothed walls and courtyards, and swept the even dirt yards in clouds of dust. Outside the village they did the work of farming and herding without noting the dirt of it all. What they complained about was not getting dirty, but the amount of work involved: the work itself was the important issue. Women and men were often quite dirty, publicly and visibly dirty, with sweat, stains, dust, and dirt streaking their skin, wearing clothes spotted and torn and disarrayed. To appear thus while working was appropriate, even approved, and young women felt no shame or injury to their vanity in being seen so. Indeed, older men often remarked how beautiful they were as they toiled in their yards or walked around the neighborhood in distinctly dirty condition; a person’s diligence at work was included in the idea of beauty, and ideal marriageability. Insofar as dirt is the background of the daily bath, the dirt that I am talking about here is ordinary, everyday dirt. It does not have the capacity for contagion, or the danger of pollution, that characterizes the more ‘‘religious’’ dirt discussed in the classic anthropological account of dirt and cleanliness, Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966). People do not pull away from the herdboys and others whose dirt and smell they might note, who crowd the chiefs’ courts to hear gossip and watch exciting cases concerning cattle theft and wifebeating. Small children with mud caking their bodies and snot running from their noses, who defecate and urinate freely around the compounds, are embraced by everyone (though told they are dirty). There are, of course, polluting forms of dirt, and purifying bathing in Botswana: the dirt of death, at funerals and cemeteries and as it clings to widows, for example. But for common bathing, contagion, where it is implied, happens not at the level of dirt, but in the ability of one person to affect the physical conditions of another, most notably, in the context of bathing, with care and love. The treatment of ordinary dirt does share some of the classic structural character of Douglas’s polluting dirt, which guards the boundaries of cultural categories. Baths (when taken) do help mark the move from night to day, domestic to more public space, production to consumption (as in washing hands before eating), physical labor to social labor, and an interesting study could follow these lines. But my purpose here is to discuss the civic logic of baths, their own statements about the political nature of the self as both dependent and independent. If baths are useful for ‘‘reflection on the relation of order to disorder’’ in categorical thought (Douglas 1966: 5), here I will explore the creation of the self in relation to political and social concepts. For Douglas, with her Durkheimian bent, social categories and relations are the a priori material out of which more shifty forms of categorization are built, and are the basic ground out of which contradiction and ambiguity emerge as problematic. Dirt, dangerous dirt, signals to Douglas confusion; acts of cleaning restore boundaries and structures. In Botswana, by contrast, social relations and the social categories one operates in are themselves ambiguous and shifty from the start. Bathing emphasizes the abilities of people to shift themselves socially,
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Did You Bathe This Morning? and signals more the inherent ambiguity of social life than its potential for clear-cut order and structure. Perhaps this was more evident in the context of Botswana’s liberalism in the 1990s, where (ideologically) the importance of individuals’ choices counterbalances the sense that overarching forms of power (gods, ancestors, kings, or class) are agents of people’s fortune.3 The role of selfdetermination was, ideologically, foregrounded at the expense of other social forces, such as poverty, unequal social geographies, and social connectedness, that do indeed constrain and limit, or enable, individual opportunity. My project here, then, has a kinship with others that have queried how dirt and cleanliness have figured in the making of classes of people and social relations of inequality. Elias (1978), McClintock (1995), and Stallybrass and White (1986) have in different ways examined how ideas about what is dirty and clean, appropriate and inappropriate, and disgusting and appealing have developed and changed with the history of class relations in Europe. Janice Boddy (this volume), Timothy Burke (1996), Jean and John Comaroff (1992, 1997), Anne McClintock (1995), and Lily Mafela (1993) have drawn out how ideas about dirt which policed borders between classes (and genders) in Victorian England were brought to the colonial context of Africa. The historical legacy of these discourses is easily observed. Sunshine all-purpose soap, Surf laundry detergent, body soaps, lotions and perfumes, household cleansers, and dust rags are among the most stocked items in the small ‘‘general dealer’’ shops scattered throughout the villages of Botswana today. Isaac Schapera (1940) found that soap and cleanliness signified in mid-twentieth-century Botswana what one might expect at that time: civilized, wage-earning, and cosmopolitan Africans distinguished themselves from those who resisted Western colonial society, including its soaps. But in the 1990s, these soaps and cleansers were significant to people as more than the unwanted burden of colonial (or neocolonial) domination.4 They figure into a more contemporary, complex calculus of person, politics, and place in Botswana. And it is against this contemporary context, as much as the (post)colonial inequalities of race, that the girls asked me as an American whether I bathed or not. Insofar as dirt and cleanliness became the markers of class in bourgeois Europe, these markers, and class itself, still remain somewhat obscure to the ‘‘urban villagers’’ of Mahalapye in Botswana. It seems clear to me that what we might recognize as a bourgeois class has been rapidly emerging at the end of the twentieth century in Botswana. Whereas from the 1950s through the early 1980s the opportunities to rise up in the changing social economy were widely spread across the country, through newly available schooling and employment opportunities in a rapidly expanding government, by the 1990s access to the means of self-improvement through education, business ventures, and politics was becoming more restricted.5 Tuition-demanding English-language schools, membership in certain urban clubs (what we would call ‘‘country clubs’’), the social capital of parents in the urban centers, the increase in consumer goods and consumer desires, and the proliferation of new forms of communication
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference now enable certain families to reproduce their advantages in important domains.6 Nonetheless, these emerging class lines were less clear when seen from within Mahalapye, where the population of around 30,000 had ATMs, fast food and chain stores, and winding, rutted village roads, complex compound households, headmen, and chiefs. The town is surrounded by arable fields and cattleposts, and lies on the main north-south road that links Botswana’s two main cities, Gaborone and Francistown. Certainly status difference was marked, as it had been since the nineteenth century, by quantities of things—amount of livestock and food, numbers of rooms, vehicles, clothes, and furnishings—but into the 1990s quantity was only thinly compromised by the distinctions invoked by Bourdieu (1984) in his study of class in France (such distinctions revolved around ‘‘white’’ foods and the cost of items). Many who were wealthy claimed to have ‘‘done it all themselves,’’ to have inherited nothing from parents, or to have been brought up in complete poverty. Many who were poor were said to have been given, by parents and other agencies, all the advantages that could bring success (cattle, higher education) and to have squandered them. People rarely attributed success to the privileges of class, clan, or lineage (though they sometimes acknowledged the support of determined mothers, teachers, or other mentors, and the ruling lineages of the Tswana polities were acknowledged to reproduce privilege). Instead of class, people noted other social characteristics, such as age, location (in a village or a rural area), independence, poverty, and industriousness. People moved back and forth between these places and characters: most Batswana shift often between rural hinterland, village, and town, from periods of work to periods of unemployment, from furnished homes to empty ones, even from being older to being younger (Durham 2004). These shifts are based, to the bathers of village Botswana, in the ability and determination to work—to work with the aim and effect of self-building, of expanding influence on others, of acquiring new and positive relations with an ever-widening circle (see Alverson 1978). The importance of negotiating relationships with others, both as kin and as nonkin, in hierarchical or egalitarian relations, is and has been a feature of social life in Botswana in many domains (see Comaroff and Roberts 1981; Durham 1995), and it is a feature that has meshed well with the idealized premise of liberalist democracy that the individual can shape his own fortunes. And, as I have remarked, it is not the dirtiness of the people involved but their undertaking to bathe, to make those shifts in social character and negotiate their relations with others, that is at issue. This possibility of ongoing negotiation of relationships and personhood, and the premised ability of the individual to achieve his own success, however, obscure the fact that many are better positioned to make themselves more positively impressive in civic matters than others. Not everyone makes her own bath; nor can everyone afford the soaps and lotions desired. While it seems that, with a little effort, everyone can and should bathe, much as everyone should be able to work hard and build up wealth, influence, and a dependent
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Did You Bathe This Morning? following, in fact it is easier for some people to bathe, and to accumulate power and wealth, than others. The roots of this inequality are visible in the home; there, too, we find most concretely ideas about how bathing shapes both one’s own personhood and also that of others around one, effecting relationships, influencing people.
The Snake in the Bath The intimate links between the domestic and the civic, and the personal and the political, are revealed in a story that grabbed the attention of Mahalapye residents in 1991. The story appeared in a private national newspaper and was reported on Radio Botswana. People hanging around the chief ’s court were laughing about it, and women in their compounds in Herero Ward were talking it over. The story involves powerful magical medications, and some of the gossip over the story discussed—often very skeptically, sometimes quite dismissively, and occasionally anxiously—whether they could have had the reported effect. (‘‘They’ll have to get a doctor from Malawi to undo it,’’ joked one young woman, invoking the ideas that medicines from further away are more potent, and that Malawians are less modern than Batswana.) But I think the story grabbed attention more for what people did not doubt about it: for the series of relationships that converged on a bath. I start, then, with this story, to discuss the domestic economy of the bath, and then move in the following section to address the civic morality of bathing. The Botswana Guardian printed the story as follows (I have retained the newspaper’s typographical errors):7 BELIEVE IT, OR NOT By Masupu Rakabane There is a rumour circulating around Francistown that a man turned into a snake whilst having a bath at Monarch North location. The man, according to the sources was given water for bathing by his wife who remained outside the house performing other domestic duties. She returned ony to fined the mystery. It is rumoured that the wife contacted a Zambian traditional doctor about her husband’s movements of fidling with other women. The doctor who is said to have disappeared after the incidence, is said to have given the wife some herbs to be used together with warm water when the husband is having a bath. But is said she did not follow the doctor’s instruction, resulting in husband turning into a snake. Although the rumour had it that the BDF [Botswana Defense Force] and Police assistance were sought, the Francistown-based station Commander Mr Tabathu Mulale denied any knowledge of such allegations. During the weekend, many vehicles (including this reporters), were seen moving up and down around Monarch North’s newest location called Phase VI, in a bid to locate the house where the incidence is said to have happened.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Meanwhile, roughly two years ago, a similar incidence took place in Francistown. Four ladies died mysteriously one after the other, after a snake was said to have been found in their private parts. The ladies were alleged to have stolen money amounting to P10,000 [about $4,000] from a Malawian driver.
While the phallic snakes invite a psychological reading, in both the West and Botswana, the wife’s story was recognizable locally on many other counts. Perhaps most obvious to all was the wife’s anxiety about her husband’s ‘‘fiddling,’’ which prompted her to seek to recapture his love and attention through magic. That this magic should be administered in the bath makes sense along several strands of the web of gender relationships and domestic labor.8 Baths are one of the sites around which love and labor, uneasy twins of conjugality, converge, and as such are a site where disturbances in these relations are acted upon. In 1989–91, I listened to doctors at the Mahalapye Hospital discuss cases in which women had poured scalding bath water over men. What struck these doctors was not only the severity of the burns, but the fact that this seemed to be a patterned form of action in Botswana, recurring with some regularity. Preparing her husband’s bath is part of a woman’s wifely duty. It is among the many domestic chores that she undertakes to promote the comfort and well-being of her husband, and some people attach special significance to it. I once chatted with a young university student as we took a minibus across the city of Gaborone. He proudly announced that he supported women’s rights and that he would share the housework with any future wife, including laundry and cooking. Except, he said, quite unexpectedly, for making the bath—of course! On another occasion a Herero in mid-level government service, teasing me with ‘‘traditional attitudes,’’ also insisted that his wife make his bath, no matter what else happened in the household. As much as duty, though, a wife’s services are symbolically anchored in the complex sentiment of love. Love in Botswana, as in other places, is a broader experience than the Western idea of an isolated lover yearning for a distant other. Love and its associated sentiment ‘‘caring,’’ like most other sentiments in Botswana, are intersubjective phenomena: they are experienced both in the lover and the loved.9 To be loved is to experience heightened well-being; to be unloved is to suffer physical and emotional decline. Those deprived of reciprocal love are said to grow thin, to be ‘‘bored,’’ and to ail generally. But those who are engaged in active love grow fat, are dressed well, glow with health and beauty, and are surrounded by comfort. This comfort is material. A woman knows that she is loved not by the (possibly duplicitous) words whispered by her lover, but by his gifts, his sexual attentions, and his material support of her needs. Women expect lovers to whom they are not married to assist them with their water bills, the monthly payments on loan-purchase furnishings, food purchases, and other such household financial obligations.
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Did You Bathe This Morning? They know they are loved by the gifts of lotion and soap, by the clothes that they urge their lovers to buy them, and by the physical pleasure they receive. Such love is continued after marriage: providing household supplies, clothing and food, sexual attentions, and money to pay bills are the duties of a husband, of which a Herero groom is reminded in the ‘‘admonitions’’ during the wedding ceremonies. Divorce and other disputes between husbands and wives are often argued in terms of whether each party is fulfilling obligations (see Griffiths 1997), but these terms reveal more than just rights and duties; they are also arguments about the physico-sentimental relations between those concerned. The Herero bride is admonished, on her side, to remain at home and not wander around, not to question her husband as to where he’s been, to prepare and serve tea and dinner swiftly when asked, to be generous to her husband’s guests, and the like. Like the husband’s, these duties are grounded in ideas about love. A woman’s love for her husband or lover also is experienced in his well-being, and made manifest through the acts she undertakes to enhance his comfort. Young men often bring their clothes to a lover to be washed and ironed, even though they might clean them themselves (young single men often did), or might expect sisters or dependents in their households to undertake the rather onerous task. When she willingly and promptly washes and irons the clothes, the woman makes a more convincing statement of her love than if she simply told him of it verbally. Preparing tea, cooking, and being gracious to his friends are similarly sensible enactments of love and caring, as are also the physical pleasures of sex. And, of course, preparing the bath. The dilemma faced by the unhappy woman in the newspaper article was that she tried to reestablish a loving connection with her husband by inflicting unacceptable discomfort on him. Mahalapye villagers explained to me that the woman was instructed by the dispensing doctor to mix the love medicines with cold water for her husband’s bath. But a cold-water bath would have been unpleasant, and such a seemingly hostile act might have reciprocally aroused her husband’s anger. So, attempting to instill love in and with the bath, she put the medicines into hot water, where they had the unfortunate (or perhaps exaggerated) effect of transforming the man into a snake. Some Mahalapye women suggested that the woman was afraid to use cold water simply because she didn’t want to be beaten by her husband, not out of love. While some marital relationships (and many nonmarital ones) do seem to conform to the ideal of loving care, very often marriages are contentious, and the positive physical interdependence of love and care is inverted to such destructive (and again intersubjective) sentiments as jealousy, anger, or selfish desire (see Durham 2002a). The possibility of selfish desire, consuming material comfort without giving in return, is pointed to in the news story’s reference to the four women said to have stolen money from a Malawian driver. The women received nonpleasurable sexual reciprocation for their having taken money without its accompanying sentiment of love or care, each act the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference inverse of the positive physical connections that can be built out of sentiment’s materiality. In the newspaper account, the wife leaves her husband alone in his bath where the medicine has its tragic effects, and goes about her household chores outside. While both men and women are expected to work (see below), within the household a woman’s labor is more visible, more constantly on demand, and more subordinated to her husband’s desire. The preparation of a bath is a significant undertaking. Most people in the village bathed in a large laundry tub, or with a small dishtub full of warm soapy water. This tub first had to be scrubbed clean for human washing. Water for this preliminary cleaning and for the bath itself had to be fetched. In Herero Ward of Mahalapye in the 1980s and 1990s, few people had water piped to the inside of their house, and only some had been able to afford to bring a pipe into their compound yard.10 Women carried buckets either to a standpipe in the corner of their compound, or to a public standpipe up to several hundred yards away, for domestic water. Some of the water would then be heated in a kettle, small pot, or old cookingoil tin. While many people had acquired gas stoves, and some could regularly afford the gas cylinders to use them, bath water was most often heated on a wood fire outside the house. Women took up dulled axes and chopped the rock-hard wood of the dried acacia trees brought in from the bush to cook and to heat water for various needs. They added the heated water to cold water to fill the bottom of the tub, in which the bather crouched with a washcloth and soap. After the bath, the water had to be dumped out and the tub scrubbed clean again. Water spilled around the bather also needed to be mopped up. A bath, one notes, involves a range of conventional wifely chores: cooking, cleaning, sweeping, and fetching. Preparing a bath is a time- and labor-consuming affair, and its status as labor was revealed in two ways. Women often did it slowly, much as they made tea slowly for their husband’s guests, or responded to demands made by clients in a market situation. Moving slowly was an index of self-possession and selfdetermination, and the often very long waits that guests had for tea, or men for their baths, were affirmations by women that their movements were their own to command (see Durham 1999b). Secondly, while women often did the final preparations and presentation, much of the work was delegated to a child or other subordinate household dependent, or an assistant. The young girls who asked whether I had bathed were such assistants; their remuneration was openended and overlapped with the kind of assistance a relative might give to a junior cousin when the cousin invoked the obligations of kinship. As in other parts of the world, such household (and agricultural) labor is not, however, considered ‘‘employment.’’ While people regularly refer to these activities as ‘‘work,’’ and while some of this work is in fact done on a contractual, remunerated basis, the government has so far refused to extend to domestic (and agricultural) labor the minimum wage it has imposed in other kinds of work. The government’s arguments for not doing so have included the notion
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Did You Bathe This Morning? that much of this work is exchanged for broader support than in other contractual hires, including food, housing, and other material provisions. Further, the line between treating these activities as simple chores, or ‘‘domestic duties’’ (the term used by the newspaper article to describe the activities of the woman), performed by people bound together by more complex ties, and thinking of them as remunerable work is often ambiguous. Housing, food, clothing, and other material provisions, as well as small amounts of spending money, are items provided within what Klaits (2002) has called the ‘‘housed relationship’’ of care and caring. Many of those who cut wood, cook, sweep, and launder are distant relatives, or children of dependents, who are neither part of the family ideally bound by love and obligation, nor independent strangers arranging to sell their labor for a specified return. Such ‘‘chore-like’’ labor is important for the operation of households in smaller rural and larger urban villages, most of which depend on a mix of agricultural and salaried income. The work of children, older grandparents, and dependents in the home frees men and women to take paid employment elsewhere, and to pursue the political and social negotiations in chiefs’ courts, church groups or other voluntary associations, and public affairs in general that are the staple of village status and an active civil society. Women attend meetings of the local crime prevention committee, church groups, and burial societies, while children and grandchildren prepare a mid-day meal. Men go to the chief ’s court to seek strayed cattle, engage in and judge legal cases, and debate policy initiatives with government ministers while women launder their clothes in the village and herdboys tend their animals at remote cattleposts. Distant cousins sweep and clean and cook for young women working as road planners or schoolteachers. While household work is prototypically a wife’s duty, and most women do engage in it, household labor is also prototypically the labor of dependents and subordinates, bound by asymmetrical and hierarchical obligations and not by the negotiable contracts of formal employment. Baths in the house, then, may be part of the care and love that bind people together, and they may be part of a self-making that is both intersubjective and connected and also independent, but they are also made out of labor and gender inequalities and expropriations.
The Bathed Public The uneasy relationship between domestic and political space is alluded to in the newspaper article, beyond the tensions between labor and love. Certainly the role of the government in the affair was of great interest to Herero in Mahalapye. According to the fullest version related to me, neighbors complained to the police about having a snake, and in particular such a large and mysterious snake, in the neighborhood. When the police refused to do something, neighbors brought the matter to the BDF (the army), which came to investigate.11 Perhaps the soldiers would have killed a snake, but in this
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference instance (or version of the story) they told the unhappy neighbors that they could not kill the man—for the creature still had a man’s head and torso above the snake’s body. Police rarely intervene in domestic strife, though individuals do bring some domestic issues to court. Nonetheless, the willingness of the neighbors to appeal to the government, and of the army to come and investigate the matter, reveal that issues of domestic relations—or of the manner in which relationships were negotiated, from the sentimental ones of love and jealousy connecting husband and wife, to the matter of the bath—were of public and political concern, even when the government refused to act. The two dusty young women who teased me may or may not have bathed that morning (they had probably given themselves at least a cursory cleaning). But if they wanted to go downtown, pick up mail, pay a bill, or buy a piece of meat for the mid-day meal, they would bathe again, rub themselves with glycerin-enriched lotions, perfumes, and deodorants, and put on better clothes before setting off downtown. I often sat and waited 40 minutes or more for a companion to bathe and dress before we went on an errand to have a shoe repaired, buy fabric for a dress, or simply walk around town. Indeed, it is likely that the girls were in part testing me to see if I was on my way downtown— kondoropa or komolo[ng] (‘‘to town’’ or ‘‘to the mall’’). Wim van Binsbergen, analyzing the symbolics of space in Francistown, Botswana’s second-largest city, also notes that people bathe, dress up, and put on perfumes, lotions, and cosmetics ‘‘just for the purpose of buying a few litres of paraffin at the Haskins filling station on Blue Jacket Street’’ (1993: 203). Van Binsbergen suggests that the routine is mainly ‘‘self-protective,’’ a defense against the humiliation of appearing lower-class African in a town center associated with whites and African elites. Mahalapye Herero visiting one of the large cities might have similar anxieties. But the mall and the downtown of Mahalapye were perceived less as someone else’s space to fit into than as an almost entirely African locale, familiar territory to be shaped by one’s actions. Instead of a place of alienation, Mahalapye’s downtown was a place for forging connections. While it may be that many of the values and spaces that shape downtown and one’s dress there are inherited from Western colonial and postcolonial hegemonies, Herero experience their downtown as their link with the rest of Botswana, and more widely with neighboring countries in southern Africa. Buses to cities where relatives reside, rides to remote cattleposts and nearby villages, newspapers, telephones, and people stopping for fuel, a snack, or a rest all pass through the mall areas; the shops and winding roads are filled by people from other neighborhoods in the village and surrounding agricultural lands, including former schoolmates, church members, contacts from business deals or government offices and programs. My sense was less that people dressed up to protect themselves from the strangeness of the setting than that they did so to create a self to take advantage of downtown as a place where connections could be made and relationships negotiated. One reason the girls’ question stuck in my mind was that it resonated with
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Did You Bathe This Morning? a comment by the Herero chief on my clothes, about the same time. He criticized me for wearing ‘‘housework’’ clothes—a dull-colored jumper-style dress over a t-shirt—downtown. ‘‘Do you want to scare the children?’’ he asked.12 The chief ’s comment and the girls’ question are significant beyond the obvious suggestion that one should be clean and well-dressed downtown. Both suggest that what one does to one’s body shapes the context and relationships one enters into. A disheveled outfit, belonging to a space of laundering, sweeping, and cooking, could deter people downtown from engaging with me in a positive, relationship-building manner. Bathed and dressed, I would attract people to engage with me, producing in them a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction. An unbathed person does not create this positive space of sociality: the conditions of her body do not influence people positively, and could possibly arouse distancing sentiments. Another context for which people assiduously bathe is also a space for negotiating new and positive relationships with others through one’s own bodily condition. Just before attending burial ceremonies, people bathe thoroughly and don their best clothes. It is not just death and the need to hold it (like a disapproving, elite, urban gaze) at bay that motivates this bathing, for people are in the presence of death repeatedly over the week or more of visiting ‘‘the death’’ and the wake over the corpse, and do not bathe specifically for these events. Deaths are, however, times when social relationships as a whole are being revised in the wake of losing a person who had knit those relationships together. They are also a time when the nature of sociality is being confronted, in both its positive and negative aspects. Sociality is experienced bodily, for good or ill, much as love has its experiential effect in the increased well-being of the loved one. A well-cared-for body, bathed and clothed, is reciprocal evidence both of being the object of positive sentiment and of creating that sentiment in others.13 Those who are at the center of mourning for the death, and the compound itself during the mourning period, remain distinctly unbathed and uncleansed, as the death and its negative effects on socially expansive self-making encompass them. For others attending the funeral, however, bathing for the burial ceremony allows, or rather is part of, the construction of a space around the grave in which moral personhood and relationships with others may be renegotiated and reshaped. Bathing, in the intimate space of the home and for the public arenas of downtown and funerals, is essential to the construction of a positive relational self. Those who do not bathe, or who have not donned cleaner clothing, perfumes, lotions, and other ornaments, may be indicating that they are not actively attempting to renegotiate social relationships or themselves as social persons. While they may not, indeed, ‘‘scare the children’’ or keep others from interacting with them, they are also not ‘‘developing themselves,’’ as Batswana are urged to do on an almost daily basis by politicians. They accept the position they are in, for a variety of reasons, including physical capability and individual temperament. Or, perhaps, their material and social circumstances make
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference bathing difficult for them. Many of those who don’t bathe cannot afford soaps and lotions, or do not have dependent or subordinate labor to prepare their baths—indeed, they are often the bath-preparers, the subordinate labor that supports the self-development of others.
Who Didn’t Bathe This Morning? It is not only white women who are suspected of not bathing. As noted, I was told that old people sometimes did not bathe daily, or even every other day. And small children hated bathing, though they were compelled to it by their caretakers, often in mid-day baths in a laundry tub in the middle of the yard. Dependent workers and those who lived and worked at cattleposts were suspected of not bathing regularly. Let us start with the last. The difficulty of finding, guaranteeing, and retaining good and reliable herdboys to care for animals at cattleposts is a constant topic of conversation and a serious one for the many men and women who spend most of their time in town or city. Before the massive project of school-building that began at independence (1966), and the increase in other vocational opportunities in the country, cattleposts were tended by young men and boys, along with dependent men and women who lived there for the milk, meat, and agricultural and veld products that are more available to the penniless there than in town. Elderly men and women also often spend considerable time at cattleposts. But with most children now in school, and with occupational aspirations in the country oriented toward more urban areas, many cattleowners must hire men, usually in their 40s through 60s, to care for their cattle, sheep, and goats, or rely upon male relatives who have no other means of support for themselves. (As with domestic help, the lines become blurred.) These herdboys were, by common agreement, shifty in their work habits, unreliable, and dirty. But one, at least, was not. Isak (a pseudonym) was a find, I was told by a young urban worker who was trying to build up a cattlepost and had hired a series of herdboys over the past couple of years. Isak woke every morning well before dawn, at 4:00 or so, and, I was told triumphantly, took a bath. After the bath, he went about the rather dirty work of the cattlepost—but it was the bath itself that marked Isak as a hard worker conscientious in his responsibilities. I took note, myself, of Isak’s domicile at the cattlepost. Like that of many herdboys, it was scanty, situated within the collapsed mud-brick walls of the young owner’s first house-building effort. None of the walls remained intact and two were entirely missing; sticks supported zinc roofing, and a single stretch of wire kept goats and sheep out of the living space. Nonetheless, the mattress, blanket, and trunk, along with a few personal items and clothes hanging from the rafter, were kept exceptionally neat, exposed as they were to the dust and goats undeterred by the wire barrier. And his clothes—when he returned to the village, Isak’s clothes were always neatly cleaned, if rather ragged and worn. These clothes were pointed out to me by his employer, to confirm what the
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Did You Bathe This Morning? baths had already told. Unlike the other herdboys he had hired, who had all left in spite of fairly high wages (by local standards), Isak, with his bathing, would do. Cattlepost work can be hard, although much of the mid-day and the evening might be spent in leisure. The belief that cattlepost workers are dirty, lazy (often spending large parts of their time drinking), and underemployed has grown up in an economy in which the most valued work is now whitecollar, administrative, and bureaucratic, or is located in urban areas (where construction, cleaning and stock work, and clerical, mechanical, and driving jobs are attractive to the less educated). However, the idea that cattlepost workers are dirty is not based on notions that the work there involves more dirt or closer contact with elements considered ‘‘dirty,’’ or on the idea that manual labor is itself contaminating or dirty. Women farmers who worked their own fields, or men who worked on their own cattleposts, were thought of as industrious, and their dirty farm clothes were never seen as indexes of their own failure to bathe or wash. The idea that cattlepost workers, and many of those who simply live at cattleposts, might be unbathed-dirty is rooted far more in the idea that those found as laborers on cattleposts are unambitious, not aiming at self-betterment. The Herero chief, telling me of the advantages of hard work and why Herero were failures, often pointed out the unkempt, unswept disrepair of the home of a man who had attained a master’s degree in Europe, but who now occasionally worked for others at a cattlepost and spent the rest of his time drinking.14 In this respect, the unwashed herdboys and cattlepost girls who showed up in the village to shop, to conduct court business, for family and social reasons, or to pester employers about pay, basic foodstuffs, water, or perhaps soap and glycerin were walking attestations to their own failure as workers. The esteem Isak garnered from his employer for his bathing habits was indeed mirrored, at least while I was there, by his reliability in animal care and attention to the other work of the cattlepost (which included gathering news, in night-time visiting and often considerable drinking, of wandering livestock). Children and the elderly, the other groups most frequently said not to bathe readily, are also associated with cattleposts. They are also often associated with not working in various ways. Many are considered withdrawn from a social world in which encounters with others involve negotiations of status and of reciprocal well-being. For example, a very old woman who was said to have been both a witch and a determined benefactor to younger relatives some twenty years before now lived at a cattlepost as she became senile and incontinent, no longer imposing her sensibilities on others, but only passively receiving care.15 Small children are often sent out to cattleposts to stay with their grandmothers, where they will ‘‘get fat’’ on the plentiful milk and meat of cattleposts. Children are prototypically unbathed, whether in town or at a cattlepost. Women are always exclaiming how dirty children were. Ao! o nandova! Ingwi
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ma panda okurikoha!—Oh, he is dirty; this one refuses to bathe! Children tried to run away, then stood shivering and unhappy, or struggling and complaining, blinking soap and lotions out of their eyes, as their mothers or caretakers scrubbed their bodies, faces, and scalps mercilessly, and then rubbed Vaseline hard all over their bodies. Children’s dirtiness was almost always pointed out as the result of play and not of the many chores that children might undertake— mud from fetching water, black grime from scrubbing iron pots that stand over wood fires, dirt from cutting and fetching firewood, dust from running to shops and carrying messages. Children were often said to be ‘‘just playing’’ (oku nyanda uriri) and to avoid working. But children’s chores were often not really understood as ‘‘work’’ (oviungura) proper, for these chores did little to advance a child’s social being in the world at large.16 As children grew up, their increasing willingness to bathe before going downtown or to a wedding, or to try to attend a funeral (where children are not welcome), showed their development as young men and women. In these sites, their concern with appearance reflected a concern with their effect on others, the connections they make with those outside the home. Along with herders, children, and subordinate dependents, the people most associated with cattleposts were the elderly. Old women and men often went to cattleposts for extended stays, and for many it was their primary residence.17 Most elderly women I knew were all hard workers, scrubbing the clothes of children and grandchildren and overseeing the chores of younger household members. Grandmothers caring for grandchildren were one of the most important supports for their own children’s enterprise. But as they got older, their work was visibly less productive, and some people began to view them as no longer engaged in purposeful industry oriented toward self-making, self-improvement, and increased accomplishment. People noted that many old people spent their time drinking—to Herero of the postcolonial generations, a decidedly unproductive, if not negatively productive, activity. While some old men and women still held considerable sway in their families, directing economic and social ventures, others were marginalized by the modern knowledge their grandchildren wielded and by the independence fostered in the liberal economy. Some old people lived almost alone—a cause for repeated public concern over the elderly ‘‘destitutes’’—and the young people who would have fetched water, chopped wood, or purchased soaps were not there on a daily basis. Older women gave up wearing the heavy underskirts that supported the Herero long-dress: their thin bodies echoed their social contraction (see Durham 1999b). And bathing is a health risk in the winter, a time when elderly deaths were thought to increase. One older woman often apologized for the dirtiness of the dresses she wore; she had spent all her time, she said, washing her grandchildren’s clothes (who then, she said, just ran out to play in them). But she related wonderfully vivid stories of the clothes she had worn, and reactions to them, when working for a white family in Mahalapye and in South Africa. For the elderly, stories of
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Did You Bathe This Morning? ‘‘work’’ and of triumphant accomplishments were often centered in the past, and not in the plans for the future younger Herero dwelled upon. To some extent, although these images are considerably mitigated by old people’s very real energetic participation in public disputes and public meetings, the elderly have already fashioned their social being: their statuses are sustained and recreated by people with whom their connections are largely already worked out. Many of the changes they experience involve unraveling rather than building connections: children and grandchildren leave the household or, in the age of AIDS and too-frequent car wrecks, die; divorces sever relations with affines; and siblings and parents are dead, senile, or unable to travel. (Countering this, children and grandchildren are having children or contracting marriages, to which the elderly contribute in many important ways.) The lovers with whom they used to meet secretly, and potential lovers they might meet, are now all too old. By and large, relationships centering upon themselves are not expanding, or in a creative phase. Instead elderly people are often struggling to maintain the ties that they developed in previous years.
Bathing and Democracy There are many ways to think about daily baths and bathing anthropologically. Many anthropological studies have considered bathing as part of ritual. Horace Miner’s (1956) playful analysis of the American bathroom as a ritual site rests on the fact that cleansing and bathing are so often part of ritual symbolism, and are often deeply revealing of cultural assumptions. More typically, studies of baths have looked at special baths, and not at daily ablutions conducted over small dishpans, hurried showers, or long soaks at the end of the day. Well done, symbolic analysis of ritual baths elucidates those dimensions of personhood that are featured in ritual performance. At the Japanese ‘‘ethics retreat’’ attended by Dorinne Kondo (1990), bathing and cleaning were enacted and emphasized to remind participants dramatically of the moral precepts of a good self and a relational personhood. Boddy’s (1989) study of women’s ritual, religion, and daily life in northern Sudan looks at bathing during the careful preparations for marriage, when women produce themselves as gendered beings whose gender needs periodic renewal and reconstruction. As part of classic rites of passage, baths may symbolically denote the removal of previous characteristics and the preparation of the body for new ones, as the subject of ritual is moved from one social state to another. In other words, baths, like other ritual practices, are practical as well as symbolic acts, undertaken to accomplish specific changes in the person and in the world. That baths in Botswana ought to be taken upon rising in the morning, and in the evening at the end of the work day, fits well in this perspective. Baths mark movement from the passive sleep period of night to the time when people are active, from a period of highly restricted, and occasionally intense, domes-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference tically centered social interaction to one of broader, possibly self-expansive, social interaction, and vice versa. Unlike classic rites of passage, however, daily baths in Botswana are thought to be undertaken by individuals. Most of the classic rites, such as initiations, agricultural ceremonies, and healing rituals, are organized by a community. Here, however, the motive and obligation to remake the self, on a daily basis, are spoken about as if they rest entirely with the individual, and as if they do not so much re-create a social structure as enable the individual to dynamically shape himself and his milieu. I couldn’t say whether the two girls teasing me had bathed or not that morning: I assumed they had, because they were struggling to be considered ‘‘youth’’ and not children, because they were working, and because it was expected that they would. Still, in spite of the pressures of social expectations that people should bathe, there are many who don’t (or don’t with the regularity expected), including others as well as children and elderly people. Isak could bathe or not, as could the impoverished middle-aged women who sat around mid-morning fires drinking cheap sorghum beer, or the young man who hung around his grandmother’s compound. The decision to bathe, to be a particular kind of person, seems, as Herero talked about it, to rest with the individual. That it is the individual whose personal rites re-create fundamental social values, and not society as a whole, is consistent with the public politics of Botswana today, and not a great change from political culture of the past. While today’s baths, with their soaps and perfumes and specific connections to class and labor, have certainly been shaped by the colonial encounter in many ways, they should not be reduced to an unfortunate effect of Western hegemony. Bathing and its role in ideologies of self-making are profoundly meaningful within a local social history, and within the local political economy of the present. Comaroff (1978) has described how ambiguities in kinship and in marriage practices in past Tswana society compelled people to ‘‘make themselves’’ in relation to each other as matrilateral kin, patrilineal kin, or nonkin. Arguments over who one was, or had been, characterized accession to office and property, death, and the public rituals organized by rank. One’s behavior to others shaped oneself as effectively senior or junior to them, as an egalitarian supportive (matrilateral) character or a hierarchical competitive character. Today, in the ethnically diverse population of Botswana, people are still negotiating themselves in relationship to others. In the yards and roads of Mahalapye, people playfully test each other to distinguish kin or (inter)dependents, with a priori hierarchical and reciprocal obligations, from nonkin, who are thereby independent and free to establish relations (see Durham 1995). The playfulness marks the convergence of the obligations on individuals to make themselves and their relationships, with the constraints of debt, need, and desire. Botswana’s national political discourse has repeatedly insisted across a variety of domains that individuals are responsible for defining and developing themselves.18 Botswana has been ‘‘neoliberal’’ in this respect since indepen-
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Did You Bathe This Morning? dence in 1966, and has successfully sustained multiparty liberal democracy for over 35 years. While the government has used its tremendous diamond wealth to provide many services and supports for its citizens (including some that critics argue are political favors for votes), the government’s most consistent public reminder has been that ‘‘Batswana must develop themselves,’’ or, as the government spokespeople sometimes phrase it, ‘‘Batswana must work hard to develop themselves.’’ Citizens are urged to make use of a variety of loan schemes to develop their farms into more productive or even commercial enterprises, improve livestock, and start small businesses. Nepotism and corruption, while they certainly exist, are vigorously attacked, and while ethnic groups’ rights have, since 2000, become an issue, debates about them circle around the idea that people ought to all have the same opportunities and that their success should derive from their individual performances. In 2000, the Botswana government proposed reintroducing school fees for grammar and secondary school. It is an index of the extent to which citizens of Botswana have accepted the ideology that individuals are responsible for their own development, and that hard work is at the root of it, that citizens across the country stood up in village courts in 2000 and 2001 to support the proposal as it was subjected to national discussion, saying that people should be responsible for their own self-improvement rather than relying on the government to ‘‘do things for them,’’ and that they should work to accomplish it. As with bathing, however, there are some people for whom preparing the way for self-making is more difficult than for others. While the school fee suggested was small, in terms of average income in Botswana, many families and individual students would find it difficult to raise, their hard work and motivation for self-development notwithstanding.19 The fee would certainly compound the problems many students already face in attending school, including affording school uniforms and shoes as well as paper and pens, walking long distances well before dawn (and after bathing) or finding lodging hundreds of kilometers from home, and calls upon poorer students’ agricultural and other domestic labor throughout the year. One might trace similar obstacles to ‘‘self-development’’ for many people outside of school as well: a lack of business management skills, including adequate numeracy, impeding efforts to start small retail businesses; lack of transportation, telephone service, and relations with reliable labor sources to complement a government loan for a small industrial enterprise; lack of auxiliary capital, such as goats or cows, to supplement a fence-building grant; lack of farm labor in the shape of willing relatives or hired employees to work the fields after a government-paid plowing or other improvement to agricultural undertakings. Baths, while seemingly highly personal acts embedded in a domestic sentimental economy, are intimately connected, then, with the larger political economy. Indeed, they can be considered a ritual of state, although taking place in small corners and huts, apparently on the initiative of individuals, on a daily basis. Maurice Bloch (1987) has analyzed the annual bath undertaken in
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference the past by the king of Merina in Madagascar and, after the king has bathed, by the heads of households across the kingdom. In his analysis, the bath serves to open a new, revitalized year, and also to present the contradictions of the Merina ruler as both violent conqueror and head of the national family. The king’s bath realigns the temporal and domestic cycles, organizing subjects’ lives from the top. Although the daily baths in Botswana are more mundane, and are initiated not from the political center but by common people in everyday spaces, they also serve to reinvent the political regime, and to unite domestic temporalities and structures with the larger political economy. And, like the royal baths, the daily baths manipulate contradictions in the hegemonic political ideology, so that, as Bloch puts it (1987: 296), ‘‘subjects can celebrate their own subordination as though it were their own reproduction.’’ Against these contradictions, the puzzle over whether Americans or Europeans bathed or not makes a good deal of sense, beyond the oddity that while soaps, lotions, and cleanliness were the known legacy of Western colonialism, foreign whites did not seem to make much use of them. Americans and Europeans were not, from the viewpoint of the young girls who queried me that morning, actively engaged in positive and relational self-making. They did not have to work for the status and wealth that was pervasive in their home countries, but which was constantly a matter for negotiation for citizens of Botswana. They came and departed again; the Batswana rarely saw them make long-term connections. Botswana bathers celebrate their own ability to make themselves, and to develop themselves, through work and through the bodily reciprocations of social life. They do so twice a day, moving from the broad public interactions that constitute self-making throughout the day, to the narrower circle of domestic interactions that constitute the self during the evening and night. In bathing, a person confirms the predominant civic morality in a double way: in enacting the much repeated concept that people must work hard to develop themselves, and also, by crafting a well body, ensuring that others will be positively influenced and will themselves thrive. Bathing, in fact, situates one, in Botswana, as the ideal liberal or neoliberal citizen of a stable democracy. At the same time, however, the ideology of the bath, much like the ideology of liberal democracy, is belied by the presence of nonbathers, and of large groups of people for whom constant, ongoing self-development is simply out of reach, not entirely by choice. As Janice Boddy’s and Katherine Frank’s chapters in this volume also demonstrate, the body is a site of social making, and not just mapping. In such making—in baths and beauty, and in the working on and watching of the body—asymmetries of gender and class are remade. NOTES This chapter is based on field research conducted among Herero in Mahalapye, Botswana, in 1989–91, 1994, 1995, and 1996, for a total of more than 30 months. Generous support has been provided by the Department of Education’s Fulbright-
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Did You Bathe This Morning? Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Sweet Briar College Faculty Grants. I would also like to thank Fred Klaits for his extensive suggestions and discussion of issues addressed in the paper, and Keith Adams, Jennifer Cole, Adeline Masquelier, Jackie Solway, and Dick Werbner for readings of versions of this paper. 1. Although Herero are often considered a ‘‘minority’’ in Botswana, the supposition that Botswana’s population is predominantly Tswana is wrong. Although Tswana maintain cultural hegemony over the state, the population is multiethnic. Herero share and participate in the dominant social and cultural life of the country. See Durham 1999a, 2002b for further argument of this point. I use the term Batswana (literally ‘‘Tswana people’’) to refer to citizens of Botswana, as is common in the country. 2. People born and bred to middle-class urban life may have had different sensibilities. I once observed a young woman from the city visiting her uncle’s cattlepost and torn between being ‘‘real Herero’’ and feeling uneasy with her surroundings; another city teen once spent the day inside her mother’s car during a visit to a cattlepost, for unclear reasons. 3. Douglas, following Robertson Smith and Durkheim, suggests that conviction that powers are active in the world, impinging upon individual agency, may be connected with social structures. 4. Herero were certainly aware that soaps and lotions were imposed on them by colonial powers and neocolonial economies. But they saw their use as continuous with precolonial beauty regimes. People often mentioned to me earlier ‘‘Herero cosmetics’’ and ‘‘African make-up’’ used to redden and brighten the skin. 5. See Werbner’s study (2004) of the newly retired elites at the turn of the millennium, who lived through and confirm this period of widespread opportunity. 6. See Jack Parson (1981), who critically examined the development of a dominant class around government’s ability to manipulate the conditions for livestock businesses, merging old and new forms of social relationships. He concluded that such a class had not yet fully emerged. Current class formation also centers on government, but the situation has grown considerably more complex. 7. Unfortunately, I do not have the date of the article. I had been packing up much of my belongings, and cut the article out of the paper without noting the date or page; I also failed to record the date in my fieldnotes. 8. Traditional medical treatments are often administered as a wash, in a bath, or as a drink—all water-immersed forms. 9. For more on love and other sentiments in Botswana as experienced mutually, see Durham 2002a; Durham and Klaits 2002; Klaits 2002. On intersubjectivity, see Munn 1986. 10. At cattleposts and on agricultural lands, water was fetched from wells in riverbeds or wells drilled for livestock at some distance from houses, or was trucked in barrels or other smaller containers. 11. This part of the story was also, to the villagers telling the tale, a commentary on the police and the army. Police were generally thought to be more inept than not; the army had considerably more respect. 12. The question was probably part of an effort to put me in my place. I had been teaching him English and he needed to reestablish his authority. A fairly young man for a chief (in his 30s), he was himself often criticized for wearing ‘‘work’’ clothes. He often
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference wore short pants in his household compound while making cement blocks for sale, doing home improvements, or returning from a cattlepost. Herero wanted him to shape the space of his compound into a more formal public space of chiefship, in part through his clothes. 13. For more on funerals in Botswana as arenas for confronting the nature of sociality, and as spaces that link the public domains with the more personal and private, see Durham 2002a; Durham and Klaits 2002. 14. See Durham 2002b, 1999a for a fuller discussion of how this ‘‘lazy Herero’’ fit into a moral landscape of industriousness, liberalism, and ethnicity, and how the Herero chief lost his own way in that landscape. 15. Elders become actively engaged with the well-being of their descendants in other ways, including spiritually cursing and inflicting illness for offences. See Lambek and Solway 2001; Livingston 2001. An actual visit to cattleposts will find a complex group of people there, including owners, relatives there for some project, visitors, and others. 16. A partial exception would be girls, whose diligence might be praised as attracting future suitors. 17. When I asked why they preferred to live there, they inevitably told me it was because food was more plentiful and better at cattleposts, where omaere, soured milk, and meat were more often available. To this stated attraction, I would tentatively add that older Herero spent more time at their cattleposts and working with cattle than the younger generation and feel more ‘‘at home’’ there, that there is a comfort too in living amidst the embodiments of wealth, and that at cattleposts they found more people of their own generation less encumbered by the demands of caring for children. 18. See Durham 1999a, 2002b; Motzafi-Haller 1998; Solway 1995. All of these works examine how the ideals of liberal individualism are engaged with parallel discourses of group identities and inequalities. 19. Income distribution in Botswana is highly uneven. The government promised to aid those who could not meet the fee.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Alverson, Hoyt. 1978. Mind in the Heart of Darkness: Value and Self-Identity among the Tswana of Southern Africa. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Bloch, Maurice. 1987. ‘‘The Ritual of the Royal Bath in Madagascar: The Dissolution of Death, Birth, and Fertility into Authority.’’ In Rituals of Royalty, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price, pp. 271–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burke, Timothy. 1996. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Comaroff, John L. 1978. ‘‘Rules and Rulers: Political Processes in a Tswana Chiefdom.’’ Man 13(1): 1–20. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1992. ‘‘Homemade Hegemony.’’ In Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, pp. 265– 95. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Did You Bathe This Morning? ————. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, John L., and Simon Roberts. 1981. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durham, Deborah. 1995. ‘‘Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency: The Spirit of Asking in Botswana.’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1(1): 111–28. ————. 1999a. ‘‘Civil Lives: Leadership and Accomplishment in Botswana.’’ In Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives, ed. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, pp. 192–218. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ————. 1999b. ‘‘The Predicament of Dress: Polyvalency and the Ironies of Cultural Identity.’’ American Ethnologist 26(2): 389–411. ————. 2002a. ‘‘Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death.’’ Ethnos 67(2): 155–80. ————. 2002b. ‘‘Uncertain Citizens: The New Intercalary Subject in Postcolonial Botswana.’’ In Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa, ed. Richard P. Werbner, pp. 139– 70. London: Zed. ————. 2004. ‘‘Disappearing Youth: Youth as a Social Shifter in Botswana.’’ American Ethnologist 31(4): 589–605. Durham, Deborah, and Fred Klaits. 2002. ‘‘Funerals and the Public Space of Mutuality in Botswana.’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 28(4): 777–95. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Griffiths, Anne M. O. 1997. In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klaits, Frederick. 2002. ‘‘Housing the Spirit, Hearing the Voice: Care and Kinship in an Apostolic Church during Botswana’s Time of AIDS.’’ Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University. Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lambek, Michael, and Jacqueline Solway. 2001. ‘‘Just Anger: Scenarios of Indignation in Botswana and Madagascar.’’ Ethnos 66(1): 49–72. Livingston, Julie. 2001. ‘‘ ‘Long Ago We Were Still Walking When We Died’: Disability, Aging, and the Moral Imagination in Southeastern Botswana.’’ Ph.D. diss., Emory University. Mafela, Lily. 1993. ‘‘Competing Gender Ideologies in Education in Bechuanaland Protectorate, c. 1840–1945.’’ Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Miner, Horace. 1956. ‘‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema.’’ American Anthropologist 58(3): 503–507. Motzafi-Haller, Pnina. 1998. ‘‘Beyond Textual Analysis: Practice, Interacting Discourses, and the Experience of Distinction in Botswana.’’ Cultural Anthropology 13(4): 522–47. Munn, Nancy. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Parson, Jack. 1981. ‘‘Cattle, Class, and the State in Rural Botswana.’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 7(2): 236–55. Schapera, Isaac. 1940. Married Life in an African Tribe. London: Faber and Faber. Solway, Jacqueline. 1995. ‘‘Political Participation, Ethnicity, and Multiparty Democracy in Botswana.’’ In The Politics of Change in Southern Africa: Collected Research Papers, 1992–1995, ed. Dan O’Meara, pp. 241–60. Montreal: Canadian Research Consortium on Southern Africa. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allen White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. van Binsbergen, Wim. 1993. ‘‘Making Sense of Urban Space in Francistown, Botswana.’’ In Urban Symbolism, ed. Peter J. M. Nas, pp. 184–228. Studies in Human Society, vol. 8. Leiden: Brill. Werbner, Richard. 2004. Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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eight
The Politics of Dirt and Gender Body Techniques in Bengali India Sarah Lamb
On my second trip to the village in West Bengal, India, where I was later to live for a year and a half, a girl met me by the roadside, crying. She had been the one to show me around the village on my first visit and had generously shared with me her and her sister’s egg curry. She reported that the other village girls had seen her washing my dish, and so she had become ‘‘untouchable.’’ She was a Brahman, member of the highest Hindu caste, but I was not even a Hindu. She would have left my dish on the ground and called later for someone of a low or untouchable caste to wash it, had I known to place it there (as I should have). But instead I had handed her my dish as she was gathering up the others, in what in ordinary U.S. etiquette seemed to me a helpful gesture. The untouchability this girl, Hena, thereby suffered was the kind that could be cleansed by bathing—and so she did bathe and resume normal relations with her peers and neighbors. But she cried when she saw me again because she liked me and didn’t want to hurt me and was eager to have a relationship with me, someone beyond the confines of her village. Yet she feared others wouldn’t accept me or our friendship, because of my deep impurity as a foreigner.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Later, people in this village, even many Brahmans, began to eat with me and even wash my dishes and wipe the place where I had been sitting, but not until or unless they found out two things about me: 1) that I didn’t eat cows, and 2) that I bathed regularly, particularly after defecating. I had learned to do both things, in my (perhaps natural human) desire to fit in and be accepted. So I found myself bathing rather frequently, and forging quite intimate relationships with many in the village. Much scholarly ink has been spent exploring dirt, pollution, and purity in South Asia. Louis Dumont, for instance, in his classic tome Homo hierarchicus, argues that the opposition between the pure and impure is fundamental to the entire organization of Hindu society and ideology, manifest most strikingly in a fixed vertical hierarchy of pure and impure castes. Material from India figures centrally as well in Mary Douglas’s well-cited work Purity and Danger, in which she makes the broader argument that dirt in general is matter out of place, illuminating both a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order (1966: 35). In India, Douglas suggests, elaborate notions surrounding impurity serve essentially to order and maintain the social hierarchy of Hindu castes (1966: 125). For ordinary people living in India, like Hena, the girl who washed my dish, practices and beliefs surrounding dirt and pollution are more complex than such neat structuralist models of caste hierarchy imply—as other scholars have variously argued before.1 Beliefs about dirt or impurity2 pertain not only to caste but to gender, class, nation, race, age, and visions of modernity and backwardness. Social-bodily conditions of dirtiness and impurity are, further, not neatly determined by or representative of fixed hierarchies, but rather are—like the broader social categories and hierarchies that define and constrain people’s lives—constituted and (re)negotiated in daily practice. Since my closest friends and informants in the field were women, and since much of the bodily training I received from Bengalis as to how to comport myself and manage my impurities pertained to my being a woman, I will focus this exploration of dirt on gender—particularly on the ways rural women’s lives and identities are made and constrained through elaborate daily practices pertaining to cleansing and dirt. I concentrate on the people in the West Bengali village of Mangaldihi, in northeastern India, where I lived for 18 months in 1989–90 and again for shorter visits in 2003 and 2004. Mangaldihi is a large, predominantly Hindu village of about 1,700 in the gently undulating terrain 100 kilometers northwest of Kolkata. Brahmans, whose neighborhoods are located in the village center, dominate Mangaldihi; they are numerous (although the Scheduled Caste3 Bagdis number about the same) and own the most land, and the village’s major religious festivals revolve around the Vaishnava deities (forms of Krishna) established in Mangaldihi many years ago by the Brahmans. Some lower-caste people emulate Brahman ways in matters of purity, seeking to raise their caste prestige. The Brahmans in the village, however, although respected for their high caste, and generally more finan-
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender cially secure than their lower-caste neighbors, are not at all wealthy by American or Indian standards. No one family owns more than ten acres of land, and most considerably less. Only a few households have televisions, phones, refrigerators, or cameras, which are much coveted. Most everyone in Mangaldihi thinks of him- or herself as quite poor, either by local standards or in terms of a broader global consumerism that daily confronts the local elite through newspaper and television ads.
Dirt and Distinction Dirt (in its various forms) has played a crucial role within India in the fashioning of persons and social distinctions, moral and political worlds. European observers in colonial India routinely depicted India and Indians as dirty, as they represented other nonwhite peoples of the empire (e.g., Boddy, this volume; McClintock 1995). Katherine Mayo’s horrified report, Mother India, is one of the most infamous depictions of public health and daily life in British India. Writing that Indians are ‘‘ignorant of the laws of hygiene, guided only by the most primitive superstitions’’ (1927: 23), she concludes that the whole society is stagnating in filth, inertia, and helplessness. The British hill station enclaves were built to enable British men, women, and children to periodically escape the ordinary India of the plains, viewed as dreaded repositories of filth, inhabited by teeming millions, cesspools of disease (Kennedy 1996). Swami Vivekananda, a well-known Bengali Hindu reformer,4 begins a 1901 article entitled ‘‘The East and the West’’ with a striking description of the ways Westerners see India: ‘‘A conglomeration of three hundred million souls, . . . full of ugly, diabolical superstitions, . . . without any standard of morality as their backbone, . . . swarming on the body of India, like so many worms on a rotten stinking carcase,—this is the picture concerning us, which naturally presents itself to the English official!’’ (quoted in Arnold 1993: 284). Against such pictures of filth and immorality, disease and decay, stood equally vivid Indian representations of Western degradation. Vivekananda, for instance, presented the Indian’s view of the Westerner as lustful; drenched in liquor, having no idea of chastity or purity, and of cleanly ways and habits; believing in matter only; . . . addicted to the aggrandizement of self by exploiting others’ countries, others’ wealth by force, trick and treachery; having no faith in the life hereafter, whose Atman [soul] is the body, whose whole life is only in the senses and creature comforts. (Quoted in Arnold 1993: 284)
Although Vivekananda saw some error and ignorance on both sides, he believed that the East and West were characterized by opposing concepts of cleanliness and purity. To Vivekananda, historian David Arnold recounts, ‘‘Westerners might have a scientific and medical understanding of what constituted pure or clean water, . . . but Indians possessed, and could give to the
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference world, a sense of spiritual health and purity which transcended any strictly medical or materialist definition’’ (1993: 285). Attitudes about dirt are equally powerful in contemporary middle-class constructions of appropriateness, value, social distinctions, and civility. Many Indians among the educated urban elite pride themselves on denigrating traditional caste-based purity rules and self-consciously define themselves as being free of ‘‘casteism.’’ Well-educated people of diverse caste and religious backgrounds dine in each other’s homes and chat intimately in cafés over tea. Many eat beef as a sign of cosmopolitanism (cows are the sacred animal of Hindus, and the eating or not of cow meat is a fundamental traditional way of distinguishing between Hindu purity and non-Hindu pollution). Yet it is difficult for most to completely abolish consciousness of and structures pertaining to purity and pollution. It is members of the Sweeper caste, for instance, who are routinely retained to clean up dirt and waste from the bathrooms of the middle classes and the outdoor public spaces where refuse is strewn. Indian sociologist Dipankar Gupta is one of many intellectuals who see such tenacious remnants of the caste system as preventing India from attaining a true modernity, one of the characteristics of which would be universal public hygiene—a rational, scientific standard of cleanliness, rather than culturally specific or traditionbased notions of purity and impurity: ‘‘There is no getting away from the fact that unless tradition is also kept in its place, it can spill over like dirt in all the wrong places. While the caste system has often been rightly criticized for its blatant inhumanity, it is also time we realized its resistance to notions of public health and hygiene’’ (2000: 37–38). In such representations, tradition itself— epitomized by a caste-based ritual, rather than scientific, management of purity and impurity—like dirt, soils the project of Indian modernity. Complex and competing notions of dirt and impurity are also central to the ways people in rural Bengal, such as those in Mangaldihi, create and dispute social distinctions and hierarchies, flows of value and meaning. Rural Bengalis distinguish three primary categories of what I have been glossing as dirt and impurity. First, there is dirt in the relatively surface and (at least in part) material, hygienic sense: in Bengali, mayala or nongra. The words are usable as nouns (dirt, filth) or adjectives (dirty, filthy). People (with the clothes they are wearing) can become mayala or nongra by going into a bathroom or to the fields where people defecate, stepping on animal feces, washing dirty clothes, sleeping in a bed (where saliva or sexual fluids have spilled), walking through a crowded city and past places where garbage has been dumped, or simply having grime or dust on their body and clothes. Such conditions of dirtiness can ordinarily be cleansed by bathing. A second form of dirt/impurity (asuddhata) is often (but not always) more deeply embedded in one’s bodily substance and nature, and is what scholars have commonly considered to be a more ‘‘ritual’’ form of impurity, contrasted with ritual-spiritual-bodily purity (suddhata). For instance, higher castes are more pure (suddha) than lower castes, and men generally more pure than
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender women. These are qualities that persons are, in part, born with. However, one can also become at least temporarily impure in this asuddha sense, by doing most of the everyday activities just listed above that make one dirty in the more hygienic sense (except that ordinary soil or dust on the skin is not generally considered asuddha/impure)5 —so these two categories of dirt/impurity are not entirely distinct. In general, to be very ‘‘pure’’ (suddha), one must be clean and freshly bathed (pariskar) in the more material, hygienic sense, as well as being born into one of the pure castes. (I will provide more on gender and purity below.) Such a state of purity would mean that one could, among other things, enter the inner sanctum of a temple to make offerings to deities. A third form of dirt pertains to shades of skin manifest on the visual surface of the body. Simply, Bengalis see two major categories of skin color, dark and light. The most common terms to describe dark skin are mayala (‘‘dirty’’) and kalo (‘‘black’’), while light skin is labeled pariskar (‘‘clean’’) and pharsa (‘‘fair’’). These three forms of dirt/impurity very often overlap, as do also the distinctions they demarcate, of caste, class, gender, race, nation, and modernity/ backwardness. For instance, Brahmans in Mangaldihi look upon Scheduled Caste persons as in general dirty and impure, in terms of their inborn bodily natures as well as their indiscriminate contact with daily material forms of dirt—as they labor in others’ homes cleaning wastes, and relieve themselves without access to the time, soap, and fresh clothing that bathing carefully would require. The Scheduled Castes also become easily ‘‘dirty’’ in skin color by working and moving in the blackening sun, unable to afford the lightening creams and protective umbrellas that the better off routinely employ. Their intertwining caste- and class-based social relations to labor are manifest in their bodily relations to dirt. Distinctions tied to forms of dirt and value, however, are not absolute or consistently neatly lined up. Whiteness of skin is good, for instance, but not (in present postcolonial and Hindu nationalist contexts) if it indexes a white (and non-Indian) race, as in the recent Hindu fundamentalist outcry against Sonia Gandhi as prime minister. A Brahman may be pure (suddha), but not truly if she is a woman.
Dirt and Gender: Bodily Training in Mangaldihi In the extensive scholarly and public discourse on purity and impurity in India, relatively little attention has been paid to gender.6 Especially overlooked have been the topics I wish to focus on now: the ways rural women experience, interpret, and help to fashion ideologies of female impurity/dirtiness in their daily lives, and how women also, in overt and subtle ways, play with, work around, and challenge such ideologies, for a variety of their own purposes.7 Discourses and practices surrounding women’s purity and impurity are salient in Mangaldihi. Much of my bodily training as an anthropologist learning to fit into the new sociocultural setting of the village centered around my
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference learning to bathe, dress, and guard my body the way a young married (as I was) Bengali village woman would. I ended up moving into a Brahman neighborhood, living in an abandoned mud hut with a thatched roof, simple yet comfortable, belonging to a locally wealthy family who had relocated to a grand three-story brick abode. Hena moved in with me (her parents and sister lived across the lane), as it would be inappropriate for a woman to live alone (and no one could imagine that I would be comfortable with that much solitude). Hena and the other neighborhood girls and women taught me to wear saris, to keep my legs and shoulders modestly covered (even when bathing), to keep my hair bound in a braid or knot, to wear the red vermilion of a married woman in the part of my hair, to bathe and change my clothes after doing or touching anything ‘‘impure’’ (asuddha), to wash my hands after eating (contact with saliva makes hands and dishes impure), and to refrain from wandering unaccompanied beyond the neighborhood. I found many of these practices difficult to master and trying, unaccustomed as I was to such forms of bodily discipline (though I am quite able to unconsciously comply with many of the expectations of my own culture, such as the requirements that women be thin and keep their legs together while sitting). Most striking and tedious for me were the frequent baths. Brahmans are the Hindu caste most finicky about matters of bodily purity, and I was living in a Brahman neighborhood in a Brahman-dominated village. If I did not want to be extremely impure (asuddha) and thus untouchable to those around me, I had to bathe and put on fresh clothes upon rising in the morning from an unmade bed (beds, unless covered with a bedspread that hasn’t been slept on, are impure), after defecating (which unfortunately could happen several times a day, especially if I was suffering from mild dysentery), after visiting a lowercaste or non-Hindu8 neighborhood (which I liked to do daily), after accidentally coming into contact with dog feces, upon returning from a bus trip (where people of many castes and backgrounds mingle), upon touching the external panel of a truck carrying a dead body and its mourners to the cremation ground, and so on. Sometimes I found myself bathing five or six times a day. Most of the other women around me did not have to bathe quite as often, because they had learned to regulate their daily rhythms and contacts more carefully. For instance, most could defecate just once a day, ideally in the early morning while still in their soiled sleeping clothes; and most Brahman women did not mix closely with many other castes. In general, Mangaldihi’s nonBrahman women, especially among the Scheduled Castes, were not so concerned about matters of purity and, at any rate, generally lacked the time and clothing to be able to bathe throughout the day. ‘‘Bathing’’ (snan kara) to remove dirt and impurity consists of changing one’s clothes or getting one’s sari and any undergarments thoroughly wet, and submerging oneself in a pond or dousing one’s head and body with water. If it is to be a true bath (snan) and if one wishes to be very pure, one does need to
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender get one’s hair thoroughly wet. A more minor bath, ‘‘washing hands and feet’’ (hat-pa dhoya), is accomplished simply by splashing water on one’s bodily extremities, and is done after urinating, before and after eating, and to refresh oneself a bit upon returning from outside. If one lives in a city or town with running water, one can do all this in a bathroom; but in the village, most women bathed in the plentiful ponds dotting their neighborhoods or in the corner of a courtyard with water carried in from a well or pond. For my first few months in the village, I am chagrined to confess that I was unaware that women were much more vulnerable than men to such impurities and thus much more frequently subjected to these bathing rituals. Then one day, quite by chance, I found myself in a casual conversation with a senior Brahman man who had set himself up as my teacher of sorts (he wished to instruct me about Hindu traditions and Mangaldihi history). He happened to mention that men do not have to bathe upon coming into contact with impure things. They can if they wish to—if it would make them feel more comfortable or if they were going to make offerings to a deity (when special purity is required)—but otherwise they could forego bathing without incurring any harm or fault (dos). I was astounded, not only because I had missed such a crucial dimension of local gender systems, but also because I realized that if I had been a male anthropologist, I would not have had to spend so many seemingly futile and frustrating hours bathing. I set out to talk with men and women about why it is that women are more vulnerable to impurity than men and more in need of baths. People’s answers led me to discover that most in the village viewed women as anatomically more ‘‘open’’ (khola) than men, and thus more exposed to mixing, or the flowing of things into and out of the body.9 Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger, proposed that ‘‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system’’ (1966: 115). She suggested further that matter traversing bodily boundaries by issuing from its orifices (such as spittle, blood, urine, feces) is very often viewed as polluting and dangerous (121). To Douglas, concerns over bodily margins really reflect anxieties surrounding the maintenance of social boundaries (such as distinctions between Hindu castes), and it is women who must be particularly vigilant about ‘‘boundary pollution’’ because it is through them that new community members are born (125–26). This classic model contains insights that seem close to some Mangaldihi village perspectives, but other aspects of it do not work so well. To begin with, Bengalis, as other South Asians, tend to view the body not as ordinarily bounded but rather as relatively fluid and open, made up of particulate substances that can be partly shared and exchanged with other persons, places, and things through everyday interactions such as touching, feeding and sharing food, living together, sexual intercourse, giving birth, nursing, even looking into each other’s eyes. McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden, who described the Indian social and cultural world as one of particulate ‘‘flowing substances,’’ suggested that Indians view persons in such a world as composite and hence
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ‘‘dividual’’ or divisible in nature. (By contrast, Europeans and Americans do view persons as relatively closed, contained, and solid ‘‘individuals.’’) (See Marriott 1976, 1990; Marriott and Inden 1977.) For those in Mangaldihi, the most insignificant kinds of contact (brief external bodily contacts) have effects that are ended with bathing. Others, such as eating regularly together, living in the same house, sexual intercourse, and marriage, have more permanent effects—they forge real substantial-emotional bonds of relation—samparka, ‘‘relation,’’ ‘‘bodily connections’’; or maya, ‘‘attachment,’’ ‘‘affection’’—among persons, who come to share something fundamental. Many such bodily exchanges are desired, the foundation of kinship and love (see Lamb 2000: 30– 37, 116–21; Trawick 1990: 83–87), and thus not at all exclusively dangerous or polluting. However, parts of Douglas’s model work better. Women’s purity concerns in Mangaldihi do involve anxieties over what goes into and out of the body. Women and men both define women’s bodies as being even more porous in nature than men’s, as well as more open anatomically: things (such as menstrual blood, sexual fluids, and children) flow into and out of women’s bodies in ways that men do not experience. For instance, a woman is especially open, and also impure, during her menstrual period. (In contrast, a pregnant woman is temporarily ‘‘closed’’ or bandha; older women who have stopped menstruating are permanently closed in this respect.) Sexual intercourse involves opening a woman, and virgins are sometimes described as bandha, closed. Intercourse, say Bengalis, takes place inside the woman and outside the man. Sexual fluids or semen leave the man at the moment of ejaculation to enter and permeate the woman. Once she has slept with a man, a woman contains some of his substance within her permanently, although a man can sleep with a woman with no lasting effect. The process of childbirth itself is said to make women impure and leave them dangerously open for a period of one month after they give birth or experience a late miscarriage or abortion. To remedy this condition—to close and ‘‘dry out’’ (sukote) her body and womb—a woman must undergo a drying, self-containing period of birth impurity (asauc).10 Women readily answered my questions about why they, and not men, must bathe so frequently. Subradi, a married Brahman woman, told me, ‘‘Women are always impure [apabitra], because everything happens to them [oder sab kichu hae]—menstruation, childbirth. These don’t happen to men. For this reason, if men touch a Muslim11 or defecate, no harm [dos] happens to them, and they don’t have to wash their clothes or bathe. But harm happens to a woman.’’ Hena offered similar comments: ‘‘Men are always pure [suddha]. [Especially Brahman men, she explained a moment later, but even Bagdi men are relatively pure compared to women.] They don’t menstruate or give birth. Women menstruate, give birth—all that happens to them. Men only defecate, and nothing else.’’ As Subradi and Hena both put it, things ‘‘happen to’’ women—menstruation, childbirth, defecation. As passive receivers, women
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender have a greater susceptibility to outside agents. They are also involved in more processes during which things (menstrual blood, babies) go out rather uncontrollably from their bodies. Hena later explained the difference between men and women this way: ‘‘[Men] can even come right back from defecating and touch the water jug to drink water! Could we [women] do this? Never!’’ Bani, a married Brahman woman and schoolteacher, replied with some sarcasm, ‘‘A Brahman man can even drink alcohol and sleep with a Muci woman [the lowest Hindu caste in Mangaldihi, of leatherworkers] and no harm happens. A woman never could! This is just the human [or ‘‘male’’] system [manuser bidhan].’’ As in English, the Bengali term for ‘‘man’’ (manus) can refer either to males in particular or to humankind in general; I am not sure which meaning Bani intended here, but her critical tone was clear. Another woman sitting with us added, ‘‘For men, mixing [misamise] is OK with all castes. No harm happens to them.’’ A common north Indian saying conveys vividly such visions of the relatively open and permeable nature of women’s bodies: Women are like unglazed earthen water jugs, which are permeable and become easily contaminated to such depth that they cannot be purified. Men are like impermeable brass jugs, which are difficult to contaminate and easy to purify (see Dube 1975: 163, 1988: 16; Jacobson 1978: 98). Other women and men explained female impurity by comparing women to Sudras, the lowest of the four varnas or major Hindu caste groups, including the Scheduled Castes. This is a comparison that is made in Hindu texts (e.g., Leslie 1989: 38–40, 251) and explained by those in Mangaldihi in several ways. Neither women nor Sudras go through the upanayana initiation ritual that upper-caste Hindu men undertake to become ‘‘twice-born’’ and invested with the sacred thread signifying their pure and elevated status. This means that women of the Brahman caste are not ‘‘really’’ Brahmans, for to be a Brahman one must wear the sacred thread. Like women, Sudras such as Bagdis (the major non-Brahman group in Mangaldihi) are also innately impure. Further, both are open and readily exposed to daily impurities—having things flow into and out of their bodies—in some of the same ways. Because most Bagdi men and women work outside of the home as field laborers and domestic servants, they are required to mix more indiscriminately with a diversity of people, castes, and substances, often cleaning the dishes and clothing of others, things impure from saliva, defecation, and menstruation. In their own households when servants are unavailable, it is Brahman women, especially daughters-in-law, who are the ones to launder the soiled clothes of others and clear away the household’s refuse. Most Bagdis I know, frankly, are not so concerned about matters of purity and impurity, although some find it hurtful when Brahmans make clear that their touch is defiling. So they do not (and cannot) bathe as often as Brahmans. Brahman women would then say to me with some disgust that touching a
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Bagdi is comparable to touching ‘‘shit’’ (paekhana). Yet they would also comment that they themselves are like Bagdis and other Sudras in some ways in matters of purity. What, then, is ‘‘impurity’’ (asuddhata)? Other scholars have noted that Hindus commonly attribute lesser purity to women. While Lynn Bennett (1983: 216) finds the cause of this attribution in a vague sense of sin and impurity attached to menstruation, Catherine Thompson (1985) adds that childbirth, like menstruation, is linked to female pollution, and that women are viewed as particularly polluting when they are not strongly identified with men. I. Julia Leslie (1989: 250–52) also mentions the impurity of menstruation, viewed in many Hindu texts as a mark of both a woman’s sexual appetite and her ‘‘innate impurity.’’ She notes, too, that women are often compared to Sudras, because like Sudras they have lost the right to initiation into ‘‘twiceborn’’ status (38–40, 251). Frederique Marglin, along with noting the impurity of menstrual blood and the ‘‘once-born’’ Sudra-like status of women, offers a more general interpretation of impurity that sounds very like Mary Douglas’s. Impurity, she suggests, has to do with violations of the boundaries of the body, as in menstruation and childbirth (as well as sexual intercourse, elimination, and wounds), with which women are presumably more involved than men (1977: 265–66, 1985a: 44, 1985b: 19–20, 63). I wish to offer a more precise analysis: Impurity does have to do with the flowing of substances into and out of bodies, but not merely with any ‘‘violation’’ of bodily boundaries. For many bodily crossings—such as ingesting the leftovers of a deity (called prasad) or sharing food with kin—are not considered impure at all. McKim Marriott (1990: 29–31, 2004) argues that analyses of purity and impurity in South Asia have generally been limited in their two-dimensionality, heeding only binary contrasts, whereas Hindu understandings are fundamentally multidimensional. Drawing from Marriott’s three-dimensional models (e.g., 1998: 283), impurity pertaining to gender and caste in Mangaldihi can be viewed as a state of being relatively 1) mixed (with diverse substances, rather than neatly self-contained), 2) incoherent or disordered (that is, the substances one is mixing with are not matched or desired, but rather messy, inappropriate), and 3) lacking in control (marked, disadvantaged). The final characteristic, lack of control, is one of the conditions that women and lower castes fundamentally share. They each have little control over exposure to substances because of the labor they must perform; and women further lack control over bodily ingests and outflows because of their more porous natures. Recall how Mangaldihi women explain impurity in terms of how things ‘‘happen to’’ women. As passive receivers of action, women have a greater vulnerability to outside forces; and as passive exuders, they have little control over what flows out. Both men and women say, then, that women must be vigilant about maintaining purity. It is women who bear and nurture children, cook, fetch water, and feed and care for household deities and ancestors. If they did not carefully regulate their mixings, they would readily absorb and then exude into
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender their households all sorts of unwanted substances. It is particularly vital that a woman regulate her sexual contacts, for once a woman sleeps with a man, his substance remains part of her forever, potentially contaminating her whole family. A few women told me that ancestors will not accept food offered by an adulteress, and if a woman becomes pregnant with another man’s seed, she threatens the continuity of the whole patrilineal line, for the child born will not be sprouted from the same male line of ‘‘seeds’’ (bij ).
Gender and Skin Another important gendered practice of sheltering and grooming the body, more focused on the body’s visual surface than on its permeable boundaries, involves the managing of skin color. The Bengali terms for dark (‘‘dirty’’) and light (‘‘clean’’) skin carry unmistakable connotations of value. Simply, it is considered much better in most contexts to have lighter skin. This is true for males, but even more so for girls and women, especially among the higher castes, who are taught to protect and perfect the surface of their bodies by keeping indoors, using umbrellas, wearing protective scarves and clothing, and (when they can afford them) purchasing and applying such widely advertised commodities as skin lightening creams and powders. One of the virtues of lighter skin is simply that it is considered to be physically attractive. People will say, ‘‘What an appearance! How beautiful! How fair!’’ of a desirable bride or groom. Skin color is also linked more broadly, in both articulated and less conscious ways, to a person’s general character (caritra) or stock. A lighter-skinned person is often considered (at least in the absence of other information) to be more refined, high, cultivated, pure. For instance, when a Bengali Fulbright director came from Kolkata to visit Mangaldihi, people marveled over her amazing character and quality as a person in the same breath that they admired her fair skin. Darker skin is commonly associated with such characteristics as having to labor in the sun and being lower caste and less refined. Although there is no direct link between skin color and caste, it is true that in general the higher castes tend to be lighter-skinned than the lower castes, partly because the higher castes tend to spend more time indoors, in their homes and in whitecollar jobs. (Caste rules, for instance, prevent Brahmans from cultivating their own land.) Some also tell of an ancient history of migration into India in which Indo-Aryans became the higher Hindu castes and the darker-skinned indigenous peoples the lower castes. The value of skin color becomes particularly significant in the marriage process, in which one of the most important features of a prospective bride is the shade of her skin. In Indian middle-class matrimonial newspaper ads, ‘‘fair’’ skin is probably mentioned more than any other attribute as desired in a bride. Two such from the Sunday edition of a major Bengali newspaper, Ananda Bajar Patrika (March 16, 2003: 11–13), read,
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference A worthy groom wanted for a girl who is fair, beautiful, Kayastha [caste], 25 [years old], 5%2&, M.A., computer knowledgeable, banker father. A fair, musical, domestic, worthy bride wanted for an only son, B. Com. in computers, aged 29, 5%7&.
In Mangaldihi, most use matchmakers or word of mouth to arrange marriages, and they advertise a prospective bride’s color through photographs and in-person inspections. Brides’ families prefer to send black-and-white photos, which can make the skin appear fairer. A Brahman girl in our neighborhood, Bandana, the eldest of four sisters, was a worry to her parents, whose income was meager, because of what was considered to be her ‘‘dirty’’ skin. Her parents had to get her married before they could arrange unions for their younger daughters, and darker skin generally means a higher dowry. When one prospective groom’s family came to visit, Bandana’s face, arms, and feet were covered with a lightening cream and powder; but the groom’s father had her pick up her sari to inspect her legs and found her too dark. Eventually her marriage was arranged with a boy who was also considered to be ‘‘black,’’ and his father warmly accepted Bandana at the inspection, stating that they were deliberately seeking a dark girl, who would be more honest and simple (saral ) and less arrogant, able to work better in their house. Why is fair skin even more significant in a girl than in a boy? One reason is that, as in the United States, Bengali women are objectified and defined in terms of their physical attractiveness more than men. Although many matrimonial advertisements do mention a prospective groom’s appearance—‘‘handsome’’ and ‘‘fair’’ are common attributes—a boy’s family background, education, job, and age are generally given more weight in marriage negotiations than is physical appearance. Further, in Bengal it is a bride who is coming into a male family line, rather than vice versa. A light-skinned bride promises to bear light-skinned children, thus preserving or enhancing valued qualities in the family line. In such ways, women and girls are pressed by senior kin, and then later come to teach their own juniors, to perform daily elaborate protective measures—key among them bathing, covering and clothing their bodies, and regulating their movements and contacts—to selectively close, contain, protect, and bind their bodies. We will see below that not all fully comply with or uniformly accept such strictures. Nonetheless, these body practices form a pervasive and powerful means by which village women forge themselves as gendered persons and strive to create and sustain systems of value within their families and communities.
Competing Perspectives: Everyday Forms of Resistance Although in Mangaldihi the kinds of ideologies I have been exploring are powerful and pervasive, it gradually became clear to me that women also
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender present diverse alternative visions and practices of the female body, working around and subtly challenging the more dominant ideologies, even as they often voice and acquiesce to them. I also came to realize that submission and silence do not necessarily indicate an unequivocal, fully internalized compliance or modesty; they may at times be conscious and expedient strategies deployed by women.12 So at the same time that I was taught by village women how to manage my body—by bathing, guarding what I touched, and so forth—I was also taught how to get around some of these restrictions in subtle or private ways. Although many women seemed meticulous about matters of purity, others appeared to observe these strictures just enough to avoid criticism, without having fully internalized or accepted notions about the perils of female impurity. For instance, on several occasions when I was returning with a companion from a Muslim or Bagdi neighborhood, she would whisper to me just before entering our Brahman area, ‘‘Let’s not tell anyone that we touched anyone there—then we won’t have to bathe.’’ I was very happy to go along with her plan. It should be noted, though, that mostly only unmarried women and girls ventured such suggestions, or married daughters who were visiting their natal homes. Wives appear to feel more obligated to comply with expected standards as they shoulder the responsibilities of caring for their households. On another occasion, my companion Hena (then still unmarried) suddenly had to defecate as we were heading off to catch one of the few daily buses for the market town. She stepped into the outhouse that my well-to-do landlord let us use (most in the village employed the fields) and suggested furtively, ‘‘If anyone sees me going in here, I’ll just pretend I went to the urinating chamber’’ (an action that would not require her to ‘‘bathe,’’ only to wash her hands and feet), for she did not want the hassle of bathing or to miss our bus. ‘‘Great idea!’’ I said, happy to know that some women played with the rules. (I had previously thought of that same trick with the outhouse myself.) I should note, though, that Hena would likely not have taken such a course if she were not already on her way out of the village, foreseeing a crowded (impure) bus ride and bustling venture through town. I encountered another woman who did not seem to fully accept public notions about the gravity of female pollution on a bus pilgrimage from Mangaldihi to the holy city of Puri by the ocean in Orissa. The dominant ideology in the region is that ‘‘impure’’ menstruating women are not fit pilgrims and should not enter temples. (Menstruating women are also theoretically barred from the kitchen at this time, and should not offer food or water to superiors or engage in sexual intercourse.) One morning, however, some used menstrual rags were found in the corner of the bathroom of the pilgrim’s guesthouse where we had stayed the night. Some older women began exclaiming, ‘‘Chi! Chi! What a great sin [mahapap] to go on a pilgrimage while menstruating!’’ The matter, however, was soon dropped. I later happened to find out who the menstruating woman was. She admitted to me that she knew her period might
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference start on the pilgrimage, but she had really wanted to go. She was of the age (around her late 40s) when she thought her periods should have stopped, and because of various life circumstances had not felt confident that she would ever have another chance to make the pilgrimage. She added that she believed that no harm (dos) would occur, because her devotion (bhakti) was pure (pabitra). Even those who appear to comply fastidiously with the strictures of female purity may be doing so for reasons more complex than a simple acquiescence to the official views of female bodies. For instance, one Brahman woman of our neighborhood is known for being excessively ‘‘finicky’’ or ‘‘fastidious’’ (khutkhute). She is almost continually washing her hands, bathing, and changing her clothes, and she requires her two daughters to bathe each time they return to the house from school or play. She resists touching other people and things, even her own daughters, except when necessary. Other women have told me, as a partial explanation, that her husband is having an affair with a very low-caste woman, and he spends much of his time with her in a small house that he has built for her on the outskirts of the village. Perhaps the khutkhute wife maintains an extreme state of bodily purity because it is one of the limited means she has to forge some sense of control over her body, and to close herself to the shame and contamination her husband and his lover are inflicting upon her life. I came to know as well of other Brahman women in the village and region afflicted with what people called the sucibai illness, or a ‘‘mania’’ (bai) for cleanliness or purity (suci). The two women I knew well with this affliction were both childless widows enduring the harsh circumstances inflicted upon Bengali Brahman widows—they must remain celibate, eat vegetarian diets, and dress in white; and they are considered perpetually inauspicious and polluted by death (asauc), tied forever to their deceased husbands’ substances (Lamb 2000: 213–38). By washing themselves and their environs even more than others think they must, they seem to be in some ways forging a sense of self-respect and control over the one dimension of their lives that they do have some control over—their own bodies. Other women, married and unmarried, thwart public expectations of purity and contained sexuality by seeking love affairs outside of marriage, often with no serious consequences. One young Brahman woman ended up living openly with her lover, because her parents could not afford the dowry his family was requesting for marriage. Years later when I returned to Mangaldihi they were still together and had had two children, after finally having gone through a curtailed dowry-free wedding ceremony. Another woman, whom I will call Keya, was married yet having an affair with a married man from the next neighborhood. I met her on my first afternoon in the village, shortly after I had deposited my few household belongings in my new home. Coming to greet me with another neighborhood woman on a short break from housework, she chatted just a bit and then, to my surprise, asked me with a grin how
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender to say the names of the male and female sexual organs in English. She then repeated them loudly, while laughing, for the rest of the afternoon. (I was mortified that people would think I was the source of highly inappropriate vocabulary; but no one else seemed to understand her.) I later guessed that perhaps her affair was the reason she was so keen to discuss sexual matters. Her own marriage, to a widowed man considerably older than her, had been arranged against her will, and her role in it consisted largely of caring for her husband’s children by his previous wife. One way that she could gain some degree of pleasure and agency in her life was through taking a lover. (Once, when her husband was out of town for a few days, she borrowed one of my lace American bras.) When an unmarried girl’s pregnancy became publicly known—seriously jeopardizing her and her younger sisters’ chances for marriage—it is significant that the village women criticized not so much her ruined purity or chastity but rather her and her mother’s unforgivable naïveté in doing nothing to terminate the pregnancy before it became public. Underlying the village women’s discourse seemed to be the notion that the virtue of a woman is tied not only or primarily to traditional notions of purity, but also to her strategic ability (or lack thereof ) to construct a virtuous public image or ‘‘name’’ (nam). There are also women who, later in life, come to see value in their ‘‘dirty’’ (mayala) skin, because they see it as having served to free them from a confining marriage and family life. Some women with dark skin from poor families end up not being able to get married, because their families cannot afford the large dowry often required to marry off a ‘‘black’’ daughter. Although in India’s urban centers many women of all social classes and castes now work out of the home in professional careers or as laborers, in rural Bengal it is still generally only women of the lower or laboring castes who take outside employment— except in the case of adult unmarried women. Two Brahman women from poor Mangaldihi families told me that they could not get married, because of their dark skin, and so they took up careers, one as a nurse and one as a schoolteacher, living some of the time in the village and some in town. Although they found it painful and humiliating to see their marriageable years go by, both now can look back on their lives from a mature perspective at 45 or 50 and say that they have been fortunate in some ways after all, for ‘‘marriage for Indian women brings so many burdens,’’ as Lata Pisi reflected. Another woman, Mita-di, whom I met at the Navanir Home for the Aged in Kolkata, told a similar story of being unable to marry because of her dark skin and a large birthmark on her arm. She spent her adult years as a schoolteacher, and now at age 80 is living in peace at the home. Mita-di says that her formerly married companions in the old age home sacrificed so much for their families and children, expecting to receive support and loving care in old age. ‘‘But they are not receiving back what they gave,’’ Mita-di observed, ‘‘and now they feel very unhappy and lonely,’’ never having learned to enjoy or expect independence.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Finally, as women grow old, many appreciate new freedoms: to bare their calves and even breasts on hot days, to enter temples or go on pilgrimages without worrying about menstrual impurities, to wander freely beyond the home unburdened by domestic concerns, and to sit unprotected in the warming winter sun. After her children are married and daughters-in-law come into the home, after menopause, and in widowhood, an older woman’s body, people say, becomes comparatively bound and pure, freeing her from most of the restrictions relating to impurity that had constrained her earlier in life.13 Many compare the bodily states of old women, in fact, to those of men, calling them both fundamentally pure (suddha) (Lamb 2000: 197–206). I cannot say that enjoying the natural freedoms and opportunities that open up to women as they age can be considered an active act of subversion, but it does demonstrate the significantly varied, nuanced, and changing nature of women’s everyday bodily practices and experiences, as they move through the different contexts and desires of their lives. I wish to close this examination of alternative views on the im/purity of female bodies by presenting briefly the much more radical perspectives of an unorthodox religious group known commonly as Bauls, found throughout rural Bengal. Bauls have received considerable attention and admiration in recent years from Bengali bhadralok middle-class intellectuals, but they are often maligned by more local rural folk, especially among the upper castes. Many Bauls articulate and practice explicit ideologies eschewing purity-based (and other) distinctions dividing mainstream society into ranked castes, religious sects, and genders. In fact, they regard women as naturally more whole, more complete, and more fully perfected as human beings (manus) than men, and it is through mingling intimately with and ingesting the bodily substances of their female partners that male practitioners aspire toward wholeness (Openshaw 2002).14 Menstrual blood itself is regarded as especially nourishing, a valuable gift, and a manifestation of overflowing abundance (216–24, 229). The three or four days of a woman’s period are of great importance, and during them the male partner worships the woman and especially her yoni, vagina (218). In intercourse during menstruation, the woman moves on top so that the man can ingest her menstrual fluids through his ‘‘lower mouth,’’ his penis (218). An elderly woman guru explains how the man also takes menstrual fluid in his upper mouth and gives some to his partner: ‘‘If I have something valuable and I love someone, I want to give it to them. And if I give someone something to eat, I must take it myself too, so that he knows it is good’’ (229). In his collection of writings, one Baul, Satis, argues forcefully against local conventional notions of woman as the gateway to hell: Woman is the creator of all, without her, and intercourse with her, nothing would exist. If anything, man is the woman’s gateway to hell. . . . Because of his lust, she suffers the pain and dangers of childbirth. Sometimes he even abandons her when she gets pregnant. She takes enormous trouble to rear
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender her child, feeding him, cleaning up his urine and faeces, etc. That very son whom she tended with such loving care grows up and proclaims ‘‘Woman is the gateway to hell’’! Men wrote the scriptures opportunistically, which is why men have all the freedom and women all the bondage. They dominate women and make them subordinate. If women had written the scriptures, they would similarly have framed the rules for their own convenience. (Openshaw 2002: 176) ***
Influenced by Mary Douglas’s powerful and suggestive model of dirt as matter out of place, many scholars have reasoned that dirt and pollution indeed index that which transgresses the social order. To Douglas, ‘‘uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained’’ (1966: 40), and Anne McClintock, citing Douglas, concurs that ‘‘dirt . . . is that which transgresses [a] social boundary’’ (1995: 152–53). One of the broader messages of this volume is, in fact, that ‘‘what is messy is often transgressive,’’ as Adeline Masquelier says in the introduction. In much of the material presented here, however, it becomes clear that dirt and impurity do not always transgress a social order; rather, dirt and impurity are often used precisely to constitute the social order, as potent signs defining fundamental social distinctions and systems of value. Some persons and groups are constructed essentially as more dirty than others, in their ordinary (not transgressive) state of affairs. Very often, therefore, women in Bengal who are ‘‘dirty’’ or ‘‘impure’’ are not so because they stepped out of place, but because they are in place, as women, who according to dominant ideologies are naturally more exposed to, threatened by, and generative of impurities than men. It is via debates over what constitutes cleanliness and dirt, and who has what forms of dirt, and why it matters, that profound social distinctions are negotiated and made. These distinctions pertain not only to caste (a topic that has received much scholarly attention), but also to gender, class, age, race, nation, and projects of modernity. In Mangaldihi, a Brahman-dominated village of Bengal, one encounters relatively little overt resistance to models claiming women to be impure; a few women furtively deposit menstrual rags in a pilgrim’s guesthouse or pretend to have urinated when they really defecated. Yet even these relatively subtle examples, along with the kinds of more overt debates in other Indian contexts briefly reported here, reveal that categories and social inequalities based on purity and impurity, dirt and cleanliness, are not rigidly fixed. Rather, practices and discourses surrounding the nature and management of dirt/impurity serve as a means by which many persons and groups have striven to challenge and rework, even as they are forcefully constrained by, existing systems of meaning, value, and inequality. In such ways, the body—its surface, inner depths, and internal and external flows—is at once a principal instrument of social control and a meaningful site of personal agency.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference NOTES Research for this paper was generously funded by Fulbright-Hays, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and a Mazer Award for Faculty Research at Brandeis University. McKim Marriott, Rebecca Tolen, Adeline Masquelier, and anonymous reviewers and editors for Indiana University Press provided valuable suggestions. My deepest gratitude is reserved for the people of West Bengal, especially the residents of Mangaldihi, who enabled me to live among and learn from them. 1. Critiques of Dumont’s Homo hierarchicus include Dirks (2001), who argues that caste in India is not a timeless single system reflecting core civilizational values but rather was complexly reconfigured under colonial rule; Marriott (1968, 1976), who finds that people’s daily transactions of substances (such as bodily leavings, foods, etc.— many of which are regarded, in certain contexts, as impure) are continually creative of caste ranks, rather than indexes of fixed hierarchies; and Raheja (1988), who argues that Brahmanical principles of pure and impure only matter centrally to some: in intercaste transactions of negative substances, caste rank is important, but relations of centrality (and peripherality) and mutuality are often more so. 2. I will examine Bengali terms for what I am glossing here as ‘‘dirt’’ and ‘‘impurity’’ in a moment. In Bengal, several mutually nonsynonymous terms approximate the English word ‘‘dirt,’’ but without having quite the same semantic range. 3. ‘‘Scheduled’’ is an official Government of India classification of disadvantaged castes and tribes, used widely now (along with Dalit) as a more socially and politically sensitive term for groups previously known as ‘‘untouchable.’’ 4. Swami Vivekananda is famous among other things for making an address to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. 5. Earth or soil from the ground (mati) is generally considered to be a neutral medium. 6. Important exceptions exist, however, particularly concerning textual representations of Hindu women (e.g., Leslie 1989) and ideologies surrounding menstrual impurity and female sexuality (e.g., Bennett 1983; Marglin 1977, 1985a, 1985b; Puri 1999; Thompson 1985). See also Marriott 1998. 7. I have explored some of this material as well in Lamb 2000: 181–96. 8. Mangaldihi is a predominantly Hindu village of 17 different Hindu castes, but it also contains a neighborhood of Muslims and one of ‘‘tribal’’ Santals. 9. Cross-culturally it is not uncommon to find notions about the relative openness of female bodies. Thus Carol Delaney (1991: 38) observes that in Turkish society the male body is viewed as self-contained while the female body is relatively unbounded. Renee Hirschon (1978: 76–80) discusses the ambiguous nature of female ‘‘openness’’ in Greek society, while Jean Comaroff (1985: 81) notes the relative lack of closure of female bodies among the Tswana of South Africa. 10. Asuddhata (the everyday impurities I have been focusing on) and asauc (impurity from birth or death) are recognized by Bengalis and other Indians as distinct conditions, although Indologists commonly gloss both terms as ‘‘impurity’’ (see Lamb 2000: 258 n. 3; Mines 1990). 11. Brahmans in Mangaldihi commonly use the example of ‘‘touching a Muslim’’ to describe how people become impure. The main reasons they give for this are that
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The Politics of Dirt and Gender Muslims eat beef and don’t have to bathe after defecating, the two major questions they had about my body practices when I first arrived in their village as a foreigner. 12. On strategic submission, see also Bourdieu 1977: 164–65; Raheja and Gold 1994: 11, xxiii, xxix. 13. Although many Bengalis seem to consider widows to be suffering from a perpetual state of death impurity (asauc), this condition is quite different from vulnerability to the kinds of everyday impurities (asuddhata)—stemming from menstruation, defecation, sexual fluids, etc.—that plague younger and married women’s lives. Older widows may, then, be distinctly suddha (one sense of purity) at the same time that they suffer from asauc (see Lamb 2000: 197–205, 229–33). 14. Although I am generalizing here due to space constraints, Jeanne Openshaw elucidates in rich detail the complex variety of ‘‘Baul’’ perspectives. She (and thus this discussion) focuses on the group calling themselves bartaman-panthis in the Bagri region of West Bengal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Lynn. 1983. Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Social and Symbolic Roles of High-Caste Women in Nepal. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Delaney, Carol. 1991. The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dube, Leela. 1975. ‘‘Women’s Worlds—Three Encounters.’’ In Encounter and Experience: Personal Accounts of Fieldwork, ed. André Beteille and T. N. Madan, pp. 157–77. Delhi: Vikas. ————. 1988. ‘‘On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India.’’ Economic and Political Weekly, April 30: 11–19. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Rev. ed. Trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds. New Delhi and New York: HarperCollins. Hirschon, Renee. 1978. ‘‘Open Body/Closed Space: The Transformation of Female Sexuality.’’ In Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society, ed. Shirley Ardener, pp. 66–88. London: St. Martin’s. Jacobson, Doranne. 1978. ‘‘The Chaste Wife: Cultural Norm and Individual Experience.’’ In American Studies in the Anthropology of India, ed. Sylvia Vatuk, pp. 95– 138. New Delhi: Manohar.
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference Kennedy, Dane Keith. 1996. The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lamb, Sarah. 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leslie, I. Julia. 1989. The Perfect Wife: The Orthodox Hindu Woman according to the ‘‘Stridharmapaddhati’’ of Tryambakayajvan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marglin, Frederique Apffel. 1977. ‘‘Power, Purity, and Pollution: Aspects of the Caste System Reconsidered.’’ Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s. 11: 245–70. ————. 1985a. ‘‘Female Sexuality in the Hindu World.’’ In Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, pp. 39–60. Boston: Beacon. ————. 1985b. Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri. London: Oxford University Press. Marriott, McKim. 1968. ‘‘Caste Ranking and Food Transactions: A Matrix Analysis.’’ In Structure and Change in Indian Society, ed. Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn, pp. 133–71. Chicago: Aldine. ————. 1976. ‘‘Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism.’’ In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, ed. Bruce Kapferer, pp. 109–42. Philadelphia, Penn.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. ————. 1990. ‘‘Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology.’’ In India through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim Marriott, pp. 1–39. New Delhi: Sage. ————. 1998. ‘‘The Female Family Core Explored Ethnosociologically.’’ Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s. 32: 279–304. ————. 2004. ‘‘Varna and Jati.’’ In The Hindu World, ed. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, pp. 357–82. New York: Routledge. Marriott, McKim, and Ronald Inden. 1977. ‘‘Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems.’’ In The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia, ed. Kenneth David, pp. 277–38. The Hague: Mouton. Mayo, Katherine. 1927. Mother India. New York: Harcourt, Brace. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mines, Diane Paull. 1990. ‘‘Hindu Periods of Death ‘Impurity.’ ’’ In India through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim Marriott, pp. 103–30. New Delhi: Sage. Openshaw, Jeanne. 2002. Seeking Bauls of Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Puri, Jyoti. 1999. Woman, Body, and Desire in Post-colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge. Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1988. The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Grodzins Gold. 1994. Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, Catherine. 1985. ‘‘The Power to Pollute and the Power to Preserve: Perceptions of Female Power in a Hindu Village.’’ Social Science and Medicine 21: 701– 11. Trawick, Margaret. 1990. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Corrupted Alterities Body Politics in the Time of the Iranian Diaspora Janet Bauer
The Dangers in Appearances The monster—in innocent womanhood— Standing upon a hill of dollars ... In her hand, a torch burning bright The Monster—in holy aura. . . .
In these lines from Mirzazadeh’s poem ‘‘Statue of Liberty,’’ Boroujerdi (1996) introduces the notion of ‘‘Westoxification,’’ an intellectual concept developed in the work of Iranian writers to describe the unexamined attraction to things Western (glossed as ‘‘non-Iranian’’). Here ‘‘Westoxification’’ is portrayed poetically as ‘‘gendered’’ female, embodied or disguised as a woman, and, perhaps because of this, also especially deceptive. Despite such cautionary tales, many Iranians have been forced to live in the midst of the dangers introduced through Western culture and capitalism, both at home and especially in the diaspora which followed the 1979 revolution. Women, in particular, embody the complications of this predicament. In one refugee community in Canada, the story is told of a young woman who was shunned by relatives at her own funeral because she had been in the habit of dressing ‘‘indecently’’ in
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference public, thereby endangering the family’s standing by ‘‘losing herself ’’ and ‘‘forgetting her culture.’’ These are expressions frequently used among exile men in referencing and attempting to control the behavior of women who engage in or take up lifestyle choices they label ‘‘Western.’’1 They make obvious reference to severing ties with or threatening the boundaries of a particular social and cultural community. How can an exile, particularly a woman exile, respond to, or through cultural means avoid, her own embodiment of the temptation and danger of the other without losing her self, literally and figuratively? The struggles against the ‘‘impurities’’ and ‘‘contaminations’’ that have threatened to penetrate women’s bodies and, thus, to expose or corrupt their communities in times of modernization and diaspora can be illuminated using ethnographic research. My own presence in an Iran then embroiled in revolutionary activism projected this very evil, and it is through my experience with the body politics of dissembling and reconfiguring that I will begin to examine both religious and cultural notions of purity and concealment of the self/body. I argue that, much as the enigmatic chador (or the more traditional Iranian veil) is thought to conceal and ‘‘purify’’ the gendered body, external appearances (zaher) conceal and protect the inner self (batin). These cultural concepts of zaher and batin, involving the notion of concealment of true form or belief, in some ways parallel Shi’ite concepts of dissimulation or the permissibility of hiding one’s religious identity in situations of danger. Although not all Iranians are Muslim or Shi’ites,2 the intertwining of these religious and cultural notions gives them broader salience for Iranian sensibilities. Following the experiences of the Iranian diaspora, I chronicle the changing significance of, or way in which, the gendered body is crafted and performed through women’s appearance (dress and skin) and mannerisms (encounters and ritualized forms of politeness) to protect the individual and communal self, in policing the altered cultural boundaries of halal (or pak), the pure, and haram, the forbidden. The circumstances of exile have altered the effectiveness of the rituals of social relations for mediating the dangers of the West and maintaining the boundaries of the self, while also exposing the ambiguities of purity, concealment, and self-control.
Aspiring to Purity: Performing Concealment As a non-Muslim arriving to do fieldwork in Iran,3 I immediately confronted the dilemmas of being considered a potentially polluting ‘‘other’’ and quickly learned some things about concealing and revealing body and soul in a culture inflected with Islamic notions of purity and propriety. To address our status as dangerous, polluting female outsiders, we female anthropology students were encouraged at the time to assume roles and mannerisms characterizing purity. We were advised to find an acceptable niche using fictive kinship and demeanor to become good daughters, and to act like good Muslim
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Corrupted Alterities women, much as Lamb describes doing in her fieldwork in India elsewhere in this volume. In effect, we were being taught to dissemble in both appearance and behavior. As individuals who often traveled alone from house to house, we could easily be made suspect as ‘‘sexually dangerous’’ beings. By trying to enact proper roles in other ways (not talking to those we passed on the street, for example) or by adopting hejab (some kind of covering considered Islamically appropriate), we might be able to transform or ‘‘cover’’ these transgressions. However, we still needed to learn the ‘‘grammar of purity’’ and the process by which it could be achieved. According to Khuri (2001: 29ff ), spiritual impurity and various forms of pollution, in the context of Qur’anic prescriptions, are associated with conditions of the body. Women’s bodies are considered especially impure, as are those of strangers ‘‘outside the boundaries of the community,’’ perhaps because they lack the knowledge of how to purify their own defilement.4 When I arrived in Iran, concerned acquaintances informed me that in the migrant neighborhoods and rural areas of the country, devout (and mostly workingclass) people would refuse to sit down or to eat with me because, as a nonMuslim and a woman, I would be seen as ‘‘unclean,’’ embodying religious contamination. Indeed, I was considered inept in my knowledge of how to offer the prescribed purifying prayers for menstruation, of how to properly enter an outhouse with my new necklace boasting some Qur’anic inscriptions, of how to keep my chador from slipping off my head and exposing my hair, and of how to relax on the floor without stretching my legs inappropriately (in a way that gestured sexuality). Contrary to the warnings, however, my embodied impurities did not seem to interfere with my interaction with ‘‘traditional’’ urban and rural families; I could eat alongside and even touch them. While a few old aunties would continue to say ghosl (purifying prayers) to distance themselves from me, or would not come to the sofreh (the table setting) while I was eating, for most of them my inability to conform to their expectations for acceptable bodily purity did not render me contagious. As Khuri notes, the sinful body and its shameful gestures can be cloaked, altered, or even purified through prescribed rituals after coming into contact with impure substances (2001: 39), although he also remarks on the importance of bodily hygiene to Muslim clerics and the confusion this may evoke. Indeed, popular cultural notions of how to apply concepts of taher or pak (ritually cleansed) versus najes (ritually unclean) in controlling others can be complicated by notions of hygiene and appearance, on the one hand, and competing religious injunctions to be hospitable to strangers, on the other. Thus, one village headman who kissed me on the cheek, believing I was the daughter of his nephew, rushed to wash his face after my identity was revealed; yet I remained as a guest in his house over a period of a week, where I did not seem to be treated differently from any other guest. In another village, where the mullah had proclaimed me najes, my host, Hasheem’s mother, observed I had impeccable hygiene (bathing and brushing my teeth almost daily) and ap-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference pearance. Her questioning of me and my research assistant about these matters worked to negotiate and control my presence in her house. As she set about to uncover the contradictions among religious, physical, and even social conceptions of cleanliness or to uncover what I was (as she told my assistant, she sensed that I was a good person), she also confronted the dilemmas involved in viewing the individual physical body as the locus of ritual impurity and corruption and in deciding whether she was required to do anything more than perform her own ‘‘rituals,’’ as I was probably not capable of performing them on myself. Concerns about women’s bodily and behavioral purity, transgression or protection of boundaries or orifices, and the blurring of distinctions between dirtiness and impurity are not unique to Islamic or Iranian cultures. Binaries that develop out of these divisions are used to organize or surveil social life. Consider the impurities of hair and bodily fluids as they are used to control women’s behavior in West Bengal or, in an inversion, used to excite men in the exotic dance industry in America (as described by Lamb and by Frank in this volume). Much as they suggest with their examples, understanding of what purity and its management entails cannot be essentialized but is part of a process that unfolds for individuals as they try to make sense of it in different situations. Moreover, as Mary Douglas has noted in her classic work Purity and Danger (1966: 163), the imposition of ‘‘strict patterns of purity’’ is likely to lead to irritating contradictions. Perhaps for such reasons, in discussing the power of bodily rituals in Islam, Khuri (2001) does not clearly distinguish between the use of ritual performance to conceal impurities and its use to ritually transform them. Do prescribed rituals like wearing certain clothing or washing before prayers, for example, offer protection by transforming the impurities of the individual body or by concealing them, or perhaps even by creating a protective distance from others who embody danger? Menstrual or impure blood (natural flows which cannot be stopped) can be transformed or mediated through intentional cultural alterations—like purifying prayers, for example—while, in a gendered context, covering the body might either conceal such potential impurities or protect the purity or goodness of character within. Moreover, simply altering body postures does not conceal the body itself, but rearranges it and alters or deflects the meanings it conveys. Immodest displays (such as ornaments and wealth, or postures and gestures—affects, not parts or attributes, of it), which can signify sexuality or subvert intention and goodness, may be altered to ‘‘cover’’ or create social distance. Khuri’s discussion unavoidably points to a connection between nakedness of form and intention (or truthfulness) and the need to alter or cover it, suggesting that the body’s surfaces themselves (in contrast to its coverings) may be able to protect and contain the interior self and its motivations. Could modest behavior itself be a sufficient cloak for protecting the self ? In the Iranian constructions of Islamic womanhood modeled after Fatimeh, the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, emphasis is placed as much on women’s modest demeanor and inner
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Corrupted Alterities purity as on the outer form which protects it. Thus, no matter how bad my hejab was, it was not taken as an indication of my inner goodness or worth. What, then, is being concealed or purified—the body (social or individual) or the self ? For Reinhart (1990: 19), humans, try as they may, cannot control certain impure bodily conditions or their release of certain impure bodily substances. Thus Islamic rituals of the body, in his view, are necessary to undo this loss of control over bodily processes and the person/personality. Reinhart suggests that the process of ritual washing involves (first) ‘‘the distinctive features of the person: face (and beard), mouth, ears and nose and (second) circumscription through ritual of the entire body’s boundaries. . . . In effect, these rituals coat the orifices of the personality—mouth, nose, ears— which together with the beard form the edges of the self, and the cardinal points of the body. . . . The self is addressed first, then the boundaries of the body,’’ and the logic of ritual washing is in providing ‘‘an envelope that symbolically brings it back under control’’ (1990: 20). In Reinhart’s view (1990: 23), the performance of the ritual itself, rather than the actual transformation of inner states or the ontology of the beliefs, is what’s important. Thus, in contrast to Mary Douglas’s formulation of the need to ritually contain potentially polluting outsiders (1966), Reinhart argues that within the logic of narrowly circumscribed Islamic purity laws, which focus on substances out of place within or on the body, impure persons are not necessarily dangerous or contagious to the community because impurities are transient and can be transformed or concealed through the performance of ritual acts by the individual believer—and performing such acts is a matter of selfcontrol. The logics of theological texts and culture aside, popular notions of women’s hejab suggest that women occupy an ambivalent position with respect to exercising their own wills and to the need for others to control circumstances for them. Like the plastic coverings used to ‘‘protect’’ the purity of Qur’ans and other religious and sacred commodities traded in Egyptian marketplaces (Starrett 1995), women’s hejab is often presumed to protect the purities within. Yet unlike a Qur’an, women are not presumed to be inherently pure.5 As Ortner observed in 1974, women’s bodies (and menstruation) seem to be treated as naturally more ‘‘unclean’’ than men’s bodies (and semen) across cultures, and consequently, perhaps, incapable of being transformed or purified.6 The problematic of women’s so-called impurity (and its cultural power) involves the social imperative to conceal (and control) women’s behavior in order to protect others or distance them from the danger posed by women. However, Persian cultural notions of zaher (the exterior life of appearances) and batin (the inner life or true self ) are a further means by which the inner self and its motivations (perhaps its purity) can be protected from defilement or disclosure by the concealing zaher. In this way the rearrangement of the Iranian body and its mannerisms or postures, like rearranging the legs, wearing the veil when necessary, and so forth, can become the cultural cover-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference ing for inner life. The clever person discerns others but protects herself from discernment and revelation. Appearance does not represent reality but can deflect from the truth or inviolability of the inner self or states. Body affectations became a ritualized vehicle for protecting the inner self, for mediating or protecting what is inside by recrafting the exterior surfaces, but they also involve managing or colluding with social others or networks of social relations. I had in fact tried to cover my body appropriately, modeling my behavior after that of the young women in my neighborhoods, not speaking to those I passed on the street, and avoiding contacts that might suggest najes behavior or behavior that would be considered dirty in all the ambiguity of that term, but particularly behaviors that might suggest sexual contact. In effect, I was trying to conceal my own self from those around me, deflecting notions of my own impurities. Once, asked about my own sexual history, I commented that not every girl in America lost her virginity at 15, as my interrogators supposed. I took my cues from what I witnessed around me, as women made use of their veils to conceal things about themselves.
Body Tactics: Disguising the Body/Self Especially in working-class areas of Tehran, there was much to conceal or reveal. For much of the twentieth century, migrants have streamed into the city from the provinces, strangers living next door to one another. In these neighborhoods, women have been expected to mark their bodies and behaviors in ways that may both conceal and reveal gender, class, and sexuality. Costuming is still one of the most common means of cloaking the female form, disguising behavior, posture, and intent. It is one of the first things women learned upon moving to the city before the revolution and one of the first things visitors and returnees must address. Emphasizing a performative aspect, Alison Wearing (2000: 4) notes, ‘‘when we neared the border coats and scarves were pulled down from bags and the costuming began.’’ In the hands of women, the veil does embody much about the arts and possibilities of concealment and selfcontrol. Associated as much with cloaking acts of defilement (sex work, secret liaisons among students) as with displaying purity, on the street it did not simply suggest the image of the ritually pious. Both before and after the revolution, I was reminded that women engaged in prostitution would cover themselves in hejab. Like the women Wearing describes returning to Iran from abroad after the revolution, many of the women in areas where I lived wrapped their chadors in their book bags while they were in school outside their neighborhoods during the time of the revolution. Veils were useful for hiding when one did not want to be seen (passing notes and weapons during the revolution, for example), for being demure when trying to attract a particular boy, or for going where one was not supposed to be.7 It sometimes camouflaged me, a non-Muslim, when I was taken on pilgrimage to religious shrines. And yet its fabric and the style or
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Chaste challengers: these two young Iranian women posing by the lake in haphazard hejab, with hair showing, are known to their friends as spirited challengers of sanctioned codes for women’s behavior.
manner in which it was worn could reveal something about its wearer’s class, profession, individual resistance, and even nationality. Many could readily detect that beneath my chador was a non-Iranian. There were other ways of deploying the body. Visits to the public bath, particularly to prepare for weddings, both exhibit and purify the body in some respects as well as concealing it and its interior contents. The filmmaker Elizabeth Fernea told me that working-class Moroccan women wanted to reveal their bathhouse secrets to her on film when she was making the 1976 documentary Some Women of Marrakech. Their desires, which lead to others’ concerns about orientalizing them, only underscore the ambiguities inherent in revealing and concealing bodily purities and impurities. The women’s public bathhouse or bathing space in Iran has remained a public social space intimately associated with the private female form, one which conceals from without but reveals within (see Buitelaar 1998). Still found in many parts of Iran, the women’s public bathhouse was the site for scripting the refinements of revealing and concealing the body, of grooming, displaying, and presenting oneself (removing facial and pubic hair, dyeing head hair, and washing the body), of establishing social presence, of negotiating marriages or other relationships, of enacting the rituals (prayer and bathing) that purify the work of women’s bodies (menstruation, childbirth, and sexual contact), and of learning the aesthetics of zaher and batin. Women’s public baths were nonprivate sites of the most intimate kind. There young girls accompanying their mothers learned to display their bodies in certain ways for
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference the impending marriage market—perfecting the bodily form or refiguring it, applying henna and removing hair—culminating in the one perfect exterior created for a girl’s wedding night.8 After the bath, wedding preparations might include other rituals of making over the girl’s body for her marriage, often to a man with whom she had had little contact before the wedding.9 Heavy make-up might be put on her, and her hair adorned. A new set of clothes, often white wedding finery, transformed the bride for this one celebration. As she sat carefully, so as not to crack her exterior, there would be little hint of her inner self or normal appearance (beautiful or not), of her true feelings for her groom. One such young woman came to my room in private to confess her disappointment at her impending marriage to a man with whom she shared few dreams, but sat unmoved on the day of her wedding feast. She concealed her feelings from her family and proceeded with her transformation for the wedding. Even the illusion of virginity (quite often seen as the embodiment of women’s respectability and purity) could be effected through hymen repair or, in the villages, through the assistance of older women who could prepare chicken blood to be exhibited on the sheets, much as funeral masques of profuse and ritual crying and displays of emotion conceal intimate grief beyond the reach of more public intrusions. For example, Jamileh, a divorcée in south Tehran, who by virtue of her solemn demeanor and veiling was considered quite respectful, was advised by colleagues to surgically restore her virginity and obtain a new shenasname (an identity card which notes major events in one’s life), one which would erase any record of her marriage, in order to increase her chances of remarrying. Similarly, in exile, arus posti (‘‘sent-for brides’’), who come from Iran to marry refugee men living abroad, have often reconfigured their bodies as virginal. Through such means, a woman’s appearance could be ‘‘purified’’ and transformed, an illusion that can be maintained only with the assistance and willingness of significant others in her networks. A woman named Feri arrived in Germany without revealing to her new husband that she had been previously married, only to be undone by an ex-sister-in-law who had knowledge of her previous experience. Some insisted that her otherwise circumspect behavior indicated the goodness of Feri’s person, advising the sister-in-law against exposing her to the husband. In these ways women could redefine or resignify their bodies in order to reimagine their futures. As the revolution was unfolding, I was made even more familiar with various ways of concealing and revealing, of deploying body alterations to cloak inner intentions, not only through the actions of the girls who unveiled once they left their neighborhood and those who had their hymens repaired but also by those who were politically active, living away from home, protected by the veils they did not normally wear and by sympathetic strangers who did not condemn them for bodily transgressions. Politically active women often took on ‘‘appropriate’’ relationships (as sisters or wives) with those unrelated men with whom they shared housing, or were hidden by sympathetic support-
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Corrupted Alterities ers. The bodily tactics of concealment were possible only through the illusions (or protections) of proper social relationships—one woman was able to travel by herself and engage in all kinds of activism on behalf of women, because, as neighbors reported, ‘‘she was a good woman,’’ and another got an abortion (without her husband’s knowledge) through the support and financial assistance of her husband’s sister. Various embodied strategies thus become ways of disguising the self, deflecting attention, protecting the inner self by performing and sometimes negotiating through a web of relationships. The body itself can become a covering, but one that is negotiated through the perceptions or misperceptions or even deceptions of others around one’s performance of purity. In this way, learning modest behavior or covering oneself can be a way of deflecting attention from one’s actual intentions or behavior. Prostitutes, remember, sometimes wrapped themselves in the veil. Conversely, immodest behavior may protect or preserve bodily purity or the inner self, much as gypsies (Roma) are said to do when they publicly project defilement, while maintaining codes of ritual purity and honor among themselves. Thus the batin can be protected both through the rituals of body alterations and through those of managing social relations. Ritualizing (or altering) one’s body may be less inherently meaningful (or effective) than ritualizing the relationships which contain or generate concealment of it. Is it individual ritual acts on the body that effect control, or is it transformation of social relationships? Khuri (2001) clearly links the purity requirements of covering the body or altering postures to the presence of certain social others, in front of whom this concealment or performance of ritual control does or does not need to take place. Both Lamb and Frank (in this volume), as well as Turner in his discussion of the Kayapo (1995), underscore the social basis of our notions about and management of acceptable bodily presentation. Among the cultural means Iranians have perfected for managing these relationships are the language of ta’arof or excessive, ritualized politeness, which keeps ‘‘strangers,’’ in front of whom one is ‘‘unsure,’’ at a safe social distance, and the practice of sigeh (technically, contracts, which typically involve rituals that transform relationships—particularly between men and women—into halal or proper, sanctioned ones, for example as marriage partners of companions on pilgrimages; see Haeri 1989). In addition, even in working-class and rural areas of revolutionary Iran, women devised means to present themselves in acceptable ways.
Staging Purity and Belonging: The Rituals of Social Order One day during the month of Muharram (when Shi’ite Muslims commemorate the martyrdom of Hossein and Hasan, the grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed), I was whisked away from my friend’s house to ‘‘prevent my being stoned.’’ I was told that a neighbor, learning I was not a Muslim, had com-
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference plained to others that the ceremonies would be made najes by my presence because she was jealous that they were being held at my friend’s house and not her own. In Douglas’s classic formulation, defilement and penetration of the social order can be controlled through rituals which create ‘‘unity in experience’’ and protection from outsiders (or strangers). Containment of the polluting person (or substance) is achieved primarily through avoidance or rejection rather than inclusion (Douglas 1966: 97). However, in the cases of the Gur Hasidim, who both depend upon and avoid the secular state of Israel (El-Or 1994), and of elementary school boys who confront contamination by ‘‘cootie’’-infested girls by touching them (Thorne 1992), containment occurs both through avoidance of the other, on the one hand, and transgression of the boundaries through contact, asserting group borders and managing relations across them, on the other. In fact, most of the participants in the Muharram ceremonies were not so troubled by my presence, partly because of the relationships I had previously established with some of the families. Through rituals of social politeness (ta’arof ) and hospitality, I had been approached and accepted as an anomaly that could be controlled and neutralized through links of social interaction and reciprocity, by which not my ritual purity but my substance or trustworthiness could be ascertained. These social relationships transformed my position in many ways. Once their city relatives had left, the women in Hasheem’s village advised me to abandon my careful veiling; at that time, they adopted such practices only when their ‘‘socially dangerous’’ city kin, who, they presumed, believed that veiling was required for propriety, came for a visit. Years later, when I caught up with Nouri in exile in Europe, her fundamentalist husband, whose hand I mistakenly tried to shake, worked to transform his relationship with me (a woman categorically considered defiling) by giving me gifts and befriending my husband—purifying himself and controlling his contact with me. These acts may support Reinhart’s view (1990) that rituals of purification are significant in reestablishing control and will, first of all over one’s own body and second in the exercise of social relationships. Nouri herself had been the one very pious chadori (one who wears the Iranian-style veil) in her family. This pious image or reputation, some said, had allowed her to travel alone to and from school and throughout south Tehran to various activities without consequences. On the other hand, her student sisters-in-law and even I were also able to do so, on the basis of the reputations we had established for trustworthiness among those who knew us by the consistency of our behavior and presence, as well as our respectful demeanors. The role of social relations in concealment and control problematizes women’s agency, particularly under the conditions of modernity and exile. The rationale for women’s veiling has been variously located in Qur’anic prescriptions concerning personal modesty and control and in the Sunna (what is called the traditional knowledge of Islam) regarding the protection of
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Corrupted Alterities the Prophet Mohammed’s family behind a partition around the inner sanctum (Khuri 2001). This complicates the question of whether women are subjects or objects of the ritual control over their bodily purity. Do women guard their bodies and behavior out of their own interest or that of their families? In other words, does the family or community protect a woman’s purity, removing her own control over ritual performance? Lamb characterized this struggle over control of the body earlier: ‘‘the body—its surface, inner depths, and internal flows—is at once a principal instrument of social control and a meaningful site of personal agency.’’ As a reflection of the ambiguity surrounding women’s agency and control, people often told me that because women’s gestures and form (for example, seductive dress or pose) could be responsible for leading men astray or causing them to become so distracted on the roads that they would wreck their vehicles, women must cover themselves.
Altered Modernities: De-ritualization of Social Order As in Mirzazadeh’s poem, the ‘‘West’’ and modernity have often been characterized in gendered imagery as defiling intrusions, and women’s bodies are the lens through which communal changes have been represented and negotiated (see Thaiss 1978). Women’s comportment has often been deployed as a symbol of the condition of family, community, or nation. Female bodies, dress, and appearance have been used as a means to organize and control relationships and forces deemed ‘‘dangerous’’ to the community. In Iran, female religious teachers in the working-class areas of Tehran where I lived portrayed ‘‘Westoxified’’ women (women who assumed the clothing or lifestyles associated with Europe and North America) as ‘‘dangerous.’’ However, notions of purity of form were being corrupted or challenged by the changing social order of both the rapidly industrializing prerevolutionary milieu and the revolutionary milieu itself, as young women carried messages and more under their chadors during the revolution (much as Frantz Fanon [1967] describes Algerian women doing in the resistance). The conditions of modernity produced corruption and resignification of bodies and spaces, transformed (or at least raised questions about) the aesthetic grammar of clothing and manners, and undid the protective cloak of familiar relationships. It was clearer than ever that the veil was a covering that belied interior meaning or intentions. For example, in the urban world, full of ‘‘strangers,’’ more and more of my friends were pelted with pebbles by small boys as they walked the streets, and village friends complained of young ruffians who harassed them—as I had been harassed—on visits from the city. Yet in some quarters, the body and skin themselves had become resignified as the main protective veil, which could be remodeled through hymen repairs (one of the most requested gynecological procedures in urban places) and other cosmetic surgeries. Foreigners like me certainly complicated the grammar of purity. I was the haram (ritually unclean) ethnographer, who bathed constantly, leaving home with wet hair
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference (which also signified the pollution of sexual activity, prompting the need to bathe and purify the body) almost daily, even though school personnel and village families knew that I had no access to sexual activity and that I was otherwise clean; I wore religiously inscribed jewelry into contaminated places, disrupting the binaries of halal and haram and inner and outer, zaher and batin; and, like the young South Asian Americans who were ‘‘totally Americanized’’ outside the house while wearing Pakistani clothes and eating curry inside the house (Mohammad-Arif 2000: 73), I wore the chador in south Tehran but not necessarily elsewhere. With the increasing transformation of public baths from communal spaces to private shower stalls, young women used these places for performing social resistance. During the Iranian revolution, the urban public baths continued to provide concealment when young women met to engage in clandestine political activities. Both revolutionary secular women and prostitutes donned religious clothing, continuing to cloak their intent, while many respected, ‘‘weighty,’’ and ‘‘clean’’ women refused the covering. Young women renamed themselves, concealing their identities and political activities, as they moved through the city, sometimes living in safe houses with their fictive husbands.
Diaspora Life: The Dislocating of Impurity and Concealment The conditions of exile (particularly in Europe and North America) in which many Iranians found themselves following revolutionary events and war with Iraq enhanced the need to cloak and protect batin. The process of claiming refugee status, for example, depends upon presenting a convincing zaher, performing one’s fear of persecution in a grammar acceptable to caseworkers, and not necessarily on revealing the mundane details of daily terror. Diaspora life also places Iranian refugees and immigrants in the arms of what has been characterized as the ‘‘dangerous’’ West. On the other hand, in the popular imagination of receiving countries the immigrant is herself a polluting other, threatening the social order—after 9/11, this is especially true of the Middle Eastern or Muslim immigrant. Under the conditions of diaspora life, the ‘‘dirtiness’’ of others often becomes the ritual through which ‘‘difference’’ is controlled, much as Tutsi refugees constructed their own ‘‘purity’’ by describing the uncleanliness of the Hutus (Malkki 1995). Westerners often transform this otherness into a kind of exoticization and Islamicization of Iranian women, not all of whom are Muslim and most of whom are not narrowly pious. My refugee friend Sheema came to the U.S. to stay with my family briefly and take up her college studies. Her family had had no in-home shower until shortly before she fled Iran. So when she began showering several times a day, I was puzzled. I thought perhaps she was subconsciously purifying herself of the contamination of American society, or worse, perhaps, of the contamination of my house. However, as I learned more of her anxieties, I realized that what she
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Corrupted Alterities was encountering and removing or altering were the racialized American notions of refugees and immigrants, which work to maintain ‘‘pure’’ categories that exclude newcomers, like Sheema.10 Or, as Iranians in exile generally describe it, the abuse heaped upon kale siyah (heads of black hair, a reference to their darker complexion and skin). She just wanted, she told me, to learn to be an ‘‘American girl.’’ Perhaps these lines from Laleh Khalili’s poem ‘‘Disassociation’’ best capture this dilemma—‘‘We define the boundaries of Our Souls / by the accepted notion of / Our image in the Public looking glass of another’s society’’ (1999: 52–53). In this context—particularly after 9/11—where both the self and the other are perceived as ‘‘corrupted,’’ what ‘‘rituals’’ can women engage in (or by what means can they alter their zaher) to envelop and protect the inner self, in negotiating altered moral orders? They might engage in mimicry of body language and performance, much as Ferguson (2002) describes, subverting the meaning of the performance to their own purposes—perhaps Sheema could adopt forms of student clothing and demeanors (like drinking beer and going to clubs) as a way of reconstructing social relations and transgressing community boundaries while protecting her personal passion for Persian poetry. While Sheema could try to alter herself, Americanize her notions of hygiene, and appear as young as her undergraduate colleagues, she could not perform the rituals for transcending these boundaries of pollution without carefully crafting sets of social relationships. Her closest friends became those who appreciated her unique aesthetic style, mostly older students or campus workers. In arguing that the ‘‘space between the ritual and ordinary spheres . . . [has] helped Muslims accommodate to societies with markedly different indigenous personal cosmologies,’’ (1990: 21), Reinhart asserts that concern with purity is confined to certain restricted spheres of activity, most specifically affecting one’s control of one’s own body/self. However, it is that very control of one’s inner self that is jeopardized in the interstices of cultures, as relationships and surfaces change and are stretched over space, into new places where the effectiveness of body markings and demeanors may be compromised or read quite differently. Some normal ‘‘covers’’ are easily misread, and this misreading may be glossed onto an entire community. When Sheema and I hold hands (a normal gesture between women friends in Iran) we are perceived (in a homophobic environment) as sexually dangerous. Sometimes we like being read that way. However, it incenses her boyfriend and his friends, who fear that the entire Iranian community will be seen as undesirable.
Body Politics in the Diaspora: Mediating Identities, Reveiling the Self Diasporans, with new opportunities for controlling the boundaries of zaher, are marking themselves in performances directed to those back home as well as those closer at hand. In mannerisms and body presentations, women
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference reflect the changing boundaries of the community and of belonging. Through Internet contacts and e-mail, Sheema routinely displays her smiling form (more typically American) on her computer, as a screensaver that she also sends to friends, and her solemn form (more Iranian in style) as her webcam still shot, denoting some adeptness in configuring herself for particular audiences, assuming different aesthetic ‘‘covers.’’ However, the impurities of exile geographies (particularly of race and gender) further complicate woman’s place as the embodiment of the imagined diasporic community, as a marker of boundaries (see Gedalof 1999). In a global culture of consumerism, appearances are ‘‘fabulized’’ (in the jargon of one popular fashion commentator) and there are plenty of opportunities for ‘‘repackaging the self,’’ for reshaping, altering, or concealing the body, to deflect the self—through weight gain or loss, surgical modifications of different parts of the body, body piercings, and hair dyeing. This is made obvious to refugees like Sheema by their interaction with North Americans and North American culture, by television shows like Extreme Makeover, and cafeteria talk at school. To presumably (in their own words) deflect attention from body form in this highly sexualized marketing of the body, some women choose the veil of religious piety as a cloak for a self that makes otherwise nontraditional choices (like professional careers, speaking out in the community, or verbalizing sexual desire) in what becomes a unique and distinctive costume in the context of diaspora. This is evident in the testimonies of some of the women interviewed in Under One Sky, a video which documents Arab Canadian immigrant women making decisions about clothing and outward presentation. These women describe the ways in which hejab helps them establish their identities. Even the stereotyped emblem of Muslim pious purity and religious commitment, the hejab, has been commodified—promoted and sold online at special Muslim sites—for everything from casual occasions to more formal ones like weddings. A doll called ‘‘Razanne the Muslim Girl,’’ which can be purchased in costumes reflecting a cosmopolitan lifestyle—Prayertime Razanne, Girl Scout Razanne, Inside/Outside Razanne (with an outfit for each setting)—has been featured on the websites of Yahoo, CNN, and the Islamic business Astrolabe. However, unlike Islamic immigrants of other nationalities, few Iranian refugee and immigrant women choose to assume the religious mantle, because of its association with their own oppression back home. While ‘‘taking care of oneself ’’ was also important in Iranian society (Adelkhah 2000), in exile the focus of body alterations, particularly for women, shifts somewhat from a fixation on the face to concern with the rest of the body, perhaps reflecting the greater attention paid in the West to different body boundaries. Refugee women often make use of plastic surgeries (nose and breasts), liposuctions, commercial hair dyes, skin lightening products, new techniques of hair removal, and excessive bathing (in response to charges they
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Corrupted Alterities are ‘‘letting themselves go’’), while at the same time being accused of ‘‘losing’’ their culture by changing their legal names on passports and identity cards, becoming intimate with their host societies (in transgressive relationships and contaminating encounters such as intermarriage, new friendships, testifying in court cases, and staying in hotels or motels), and otherwise refashioning themselves. Some craft new ‘‘bodies’’ and identities via the Internet, where external form is scripted by textual conversations, spending hours online in chat rooms using pseudonyms. Fataneh, from a modest family background, officially anglicized her name to Nina after becoming a citizen. She liked her new name and she thought it was easier to pronounce. However, as Ritivoi suggests in Yesterday’s Self (2002: 157), ‘‘immigrants often change their names to make them appear more familiar to the locals or at least easier to pronounce. The change is also intended as a cover; its purpose is to protect and to allow them to withdraw in their privacy, to no longer exhibit themselves to the others’ gaze.’’ Others have urged Nina to have a nose job, but so far she has refused to do so, though several of her sisters and brothers have already had the surgery back in Iran (where beauty standards are not unaffected by the colonial gaze).11 Shireen altered her nose and breasts as part of a midlife crisis. Having divorced her husband several years earlier and despondent about her failure to find personal satisfaction, the single mother decided to refashion her form. She also cut her hair short— something that drew more attention than her other alterations—to signal her determination to seek more satisfying personal relationships, to renew her involvement in political and feminist activism (purifying herself, by exerting her will, of years of dalliance in that regard), and to liberate herself from social constraints: such as dependence on her ex-husband and from the disapproval of those who criticized her for the way she allocated her time. The subtle transformations deflected attention from her inability to find sexual pleasure or the enjoyment she had expected in her diaspora life. While exile spaces perhaps present increased possibilities for perfecting and purifying zaher and concealing motives and manners from their own community’s inspection, women’s entry into hybrid space also threatens to reveal or expose the ‘‘purity’’ of the community (its reputation or public image), producing the inevitable tensions in gender relations. Thus intermarriage and sexual liaisons outside the community can appear to transgress the boundaries protecting group appearance or identity. Women who, like Sheema, have summoned the police to protect them from abusive partners threaten those boundaries as well, and are often subject to castigation from within the community. Refugee men in these situations have sometimes succumbed to social pressures to send for brides from back home, who are presumed to embody (and perhaps renew) the imagined essence of the community. Often, however, they are (like Feri, who was brought to Germany) found to have mis-presented their purity or their ability to contain it.
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Diasporic Citizens: Belonging outside the State Although questions of citizenship might once have been seen as primarily a matter of cultural adaptations, May Joseph (1999) suggests that the body (gendered and racialized) increasingly insinuates itself in the performance of citizenship, signifying belonging or nonbelonging. Certainly recent notions of participatory citizenship, and even cultural citizenship, include those who are physically present in the daily interactions of a community, regardless of their legal status. Joseph describes her own aspirations to acquire the body movements and accents through which to authenticate her own (postcolonial) Tanzanian citizenship (1999: 2).12 Writing about ‘‘modern primitivism’’ in the form of contemporary scarification and body piercing, which are modeled after the forms associated with simpler societies, Rosenblatt suggests that ‘‘the body serves as both an expression of that relationship [with society] and a way of altering it’’ (1997: 317). Their bodies, then, become one medium through which refugee women assert their selves, their sexuality, their gender, as well as their citizenship. Are the body markings and transformations effected by diasporic Iranians a way of shaping relationships with society or a way of altering them, and which of the refugees’ societies are implicated? Is this a form of mimicry or resistance that subverts the anticipated consistency between zaher and batin? Rosenblatt (1997: 325) points out that the other ‘‘primitives’’ engage in forms of bodily alteration to mark membership in a community, while similar contemporary markings on Western bodies are forms of rebellion or resistance to normativity. Is the altering of bodies for concealment (of zaher and batin) a form of resistance or a sign of membership—and toward which community is it directed? Was Shireen’s hair-cutting some form of mimicry or rebellion? Do her actions protect the community’s position or do they threaten its consistency? Or do they protect her personal self ? In times when negotiation of the self occurs across diasporic sites or communities, this may be difficult to discern. One complication in asking these questions in the Iranian case is the increasing popularity and availability of facial surgeries for both men and women back home in Iran, as well as the proliferation of what Adelkhah describes as ‘‘beauty treatment and sporting services . . . such as body building and gymnastic halls’’ (2000: 155), demonstrating again the global impact of ‘‘Western’’ standards of exterior surfacing. Zarah, a teenage Iranian refugee, sports electric shades of Rasta hair, numerous body piercings (lip, tongue, navel), and punk clothing, something akin to the body performance of young natives of similar social and political inclinations who are resisting or rebelling within their own societies. Yet, much as Ferguson (2002) reminds us of the cultural cloaking within postmodern mimicry, Zarah’s exterior protects facets of cosmopolitanism that are con-
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Outrageous purity: this spirited young Iranian refugee girl is quietly taking up a university course on religious studies.
sciously critical of both the communities with which she affiliates herself, much as Courtney Love’s sexualized behavior conceals the messages of resistance to patriarchy contained within her music (Burns and Lafrance 2002). Zarah is, moreover, self-consciously reflecting on her own notions of identity— commenting to me that her nose rings were probably a shock to her grandmother visiting from Iran, who had only observed such adornments on cows.
A Return to the Body Recounting the story of Pnin, a Nabokov character who decides to have his teeth pulled and replaced with dentures, hoping to be accepted as American with his new ‘‘sparkling white smile,’’ Ritivoi (2002: 141) explains that this character is looking for a home ‘‘to contain and assign meaning to his identity.’’ Are diasporic Iranians similarly rearranging bodily adornment or form without necessarily integrating their identities and selves? The complexities of the relationship between zaher and batin, of controlling the self through willfully altering exteriority, demonstrate the need to transcend binary categories and the limitations of much of the current diaspora research, which in attempting to explain the construction of refugee subjects fails to enliven our sense of their
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference agency by exploring more fully the interior experiences of refugees and the choices they make (see Brah 1996). In Yesterday’s Self (2002), Ritivoi examines interior self-construction in the immigrant experience and considers the possibilities of achieving a ‘‘narrative unity’’ between a personal identity that is immutable and a self that is contingent upon shifting cultural (and therefore social) contexts. If the personal identity (or some core batin) remains protected and controlled, how can it be penetrated by or open to the changing self, experiencing new environments? Achieving narrative unity (or finding or rediscovering oneself ) must somehow incorporate the various facets of the self, transgressing the embodied boundaries of community (not just returning to the memories of past community, nor abandoning them). Perhaps this is what Shaw (2000) alludes to when she comments that the hidden Temne self is exterior—a self that is not necessarily known or apparent to others but is still located in a social and relational context. However, unlike Shaw or others (Ahmadi and Ahmadi 1998), I would avoid contrasting European conceptions of self (as individual and private or interior) with non-European conceptions (as social, relational, or exterior) in a simple binarism. The extent to which the self can be seen as composed of individual or relational aspects is located in circumstances which support or inhibit autonomy of action and self-conscious reflection. Rather than considering traditional Iranian identity as stable and non-individualistic (as Ahmadi and Ahmadi do), I would remain open to discovering how individuals and communities in different and changing situations encourage or shape the project of narrative unity, as Shaw points to in her discussion of the impact of slaving and colonization on Temne identities. In other words, neither so-called traditional nor diasporic identities are devoid of the dilemmas of narrative unity. This is particularly evident in the case of Iranian (and other) women, who embody and reveal the ambiguities of purity and control. In the interstices of these paradoxes, women may conceal the desires of self from their communities, in various guises and with varying success. As Turner observes, ‘‘the body serves as the paradigm not only of individuality, but of the limitations of individuality’’ (1995: 145), as well. While both Frank and Lamb (in this volume) demonstrate the importance of bodily surfaces (like the color of the skin) in negotiating women’s status and self-control, what remains unaccounted for here is how the (racialized, gendered) embodiment of the self may present a formidable boundary in reconfiguring (both community and personal) belonging in the diaspora and may confine the space of ambiguity in which one can deflect or protect the inner self. Zarah, for example, like many Iranian diasporic teenagers, has become aware of the problems of successfully performing citizenship on the racialized (‘‘polluted’’) body. She is involved in the activities of anti-racist groups in Germany, while maintaining a fondness for her parents’ friends. Her own negotiations of citizenship and belonging are partially mediated by her parents, for whom purple
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Corrupted Alterities hair is a covering no more outrageous than hejab—something which underscores the sociality of performativity, and the paradox of social relationships in both protecting the boundaries (of zaher and batin) and supporting their transformation. By contrast, Parvane, the woman who was hit and killed by a bus while wearing shorts, made the ultimate bodily transgression across diasporic spaces, ‘‘loosening’’ some ties (with her brother and family) while not clearly securing, or being protected by, others. NOTES 1. Drawing on traditional Persian poetry, Alishan links the suspicion of change that underlies these concerns to ‘‘masculine Persian culture,’’ suggesting that ‘‘perhaps it would not be too dangerous a generalization to state that masculine culture in general and the Persian male in particular have always been inclined favorably towards that which does not change, is constant, and, ontologically, belongs to the world located above and beyond the sublunary region’’ (1988: 106). 2. Shi’ism, which predominates in Iran, is often distinguished from Sunni Islam as the branch of Islam which recognizes the genealogical descendants of the Prophet Mohammed as the rightful leaders of the community and which accords a special place to the first twelve such figures, or imams. 3. I began anthropological fieldwork in Iran during the revolutionary period of 1977–79 in rural areas and urban migrant neighborhoods of Tehran and Tabriz. Since the early 1990s, I have conducted repeated, controlled life history interviews with several generations of Iranian refugees and immigrants in different locations in Canada, Germany, and Turkey. Again, although not all these refugees are Muslim, Islamic notions, as well as the ‘‘Islamic Revolution,’’ have permeated much of Iranian popular culture in ways that affect the life experiences of most exiles. 4. Khuri (2001: 39ff ) describes the impurity of the male body as lying somewhere ‘‘between the navel and the knee,’’ in contrast to that of women’s bodies, which are more fully impure. Sabbah (1984) expands this contrast to explore some of the associations made between women’s bodies, chaos, and disorder in Islamic texts and the Muslim imagination. 5. In traditional Persian poetry, too, women and mothers have been associated with the body and the earth, while men and fathers have been associated with heaven and the spiritual (see Alishan 1988). These connections are represented in these lines from the eleventh-century poet Naser Khosrow: ‘‘The lowly Earth is mother to your body. / That’s why you have become evil like your mother’’ (in Alishan 1988: 107). 6. Although she does not focus on the gendered aspects of disgust, Martha Nussbaum reiterates this concern with impurity and ‘‘nature’’ in her recent essay on disgust and the law in the Chronicle of Higher Education—‘‘Disgust concerns the borders of the body: the possibility that an offensive substance may be incorporated into and debase a person. The core objects of disgust are animals or their secretions—above all feces, bodily wastes, and corpses or creatures who have (or appear to have) related properties (ooziness, sliminess, decay). To put it very briefly, it would appear that disgust embodies a shrinking from animality and mortality, which if taken in, would contaminate the human being who has a stake in rising above the merely animal’’ (2004: B7). 7. In the words of Rumi, ‘‘the world is a decrepit old woman under a new chador, from without, full of coquetry, from within, dishonored’’ (in Alishan 1988: 108).
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Dirt, Undress, and Difference 8. Even in the diaspora, before a bride is sent out of Iran to join her husband abroad, female relatives of both the bride and the groom continue to play a significant role in either cloaking or trying to penetrate the bride’s exterior in a series of visits or outings with her. 9. Traditionally, the wedding consists of at least two events—the ceremony of signing the contract (aghd) and the celebration on the occasion of taking the bride to the groom’s house for consummation of the marriage (arusi). These two events may be separated by days or years; rituals of preparation may be associated with both, or just with the arusi. 10. See Stolcke’s (1995) discussion of a new European racism based on essentialist notions of cultural belonging. 11. Some immigrants, like Mabubeh, who return for visits to Iran, prefer to have their surgeries back home. Mabubeh, on successive visits, altered her breasts, eyes, and nose. Others back home in Iran are able to undergo such surgeries because of remittances from refugee family members living outside the country. 12. As Joseph writes, ‘‘Despite the anti-Asian graffiti present in the streets on the route home, I was determined to prove that I had assimilated. . . . Clearly, more was needed than speaking perfect Swahili’’ (1999: 2).
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adelkhah, Fariba. 2000. Being Modern in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press. Ahmadi, Nader, and Fereshteh Ahmadi. 1998. Iranian Islam: The Concept of the Individual. New York: St. Martin’s. Alishan, Leonardo. 1988. ‘‘Forugh Farrokhzad and the Forsaken Earth.’’ In Forugh Farrokhzad: A Quarter-Century Later, ed. Michael C. Hillman, pp. 105–30. Austin: University of Texas at Austin. (Special issue of Literature East and West 24.) Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. 1996. Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. New York: Routledge. Buitelaar, Marjo. 1998. ‘‘Public Baths and Private Places.’’ In Women and Islamization, ed. Karin Ask and Marit Tjomsland, pp. 103–23. Oxford: Berg. Burns, Lori, and Mélisse Lafrance. 2002. Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity & Popular Music. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. El-Or, Tamar. 1994. Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish Women and Their World. Trans. Haim Watzman. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove. Ferguson, James. 2002. ‘‘Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World Society.’ ’’ Cultural Anthropology 17(4): 551–69. Gedalof, Irene. 1999. Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms. New York: Routledge. Haeri, Shahla. 1989. Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Joseph, May. 1999. Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Corrupted Alterities Khalili, Laleh. 1999. ‘‘Disassociation.’’ In A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans, ed. Persis Karim and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, pp. 52–54. New York: George Braziller. Khuri, Fuad. 2001. The Body in Islamic Culture. London: Saqi. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mir Hosseini, Ziba. 1996. ‘‘Women and Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran: Divorce, Veiling, and Emerging Feminist Voices.’’ In Women and Politics in the Third World, ed. Haleh Afshar, pp. 121–41. New York: Routledge. Mohammad-Arif, Aminah. 2000. ‘‘A Masala Identity: Young South Asian Muslims in the US.’’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 20(1–2): 67–87. Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. ‘‘Danger to Human Dignity: The Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law.’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, August 6, pp. B6–B9. Ortner, Sherry. 1974. ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’’ In Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 67–87. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reinhart, Kevin A. 1990. ‘‘Impurity/No Danger.’’ History of Religions 30(1): 1–24. Ritivoi, Andrea. 2002. Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Rosenblatt, Daniel. 1997. ‘‘The Antisocial Skin: Structure, Resistance, and ‘Modern Primitive’ Adornment in the United States.’’ Cultural Anthropology 12(3): 287– 334. Sabbah, Fatna Aït. 1984. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Pergamon. Shaw, Rosalind. 2000. ‘‘ ‘Tok Af, Lef Af ’: A Political Economy of Temne Techniques of Secrecy and Self.’’ In African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Ivan Karp and D. A. Masolo, pp. 25–49. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Starrett, Gregory. 1995. ‘‘The Political Economy of Religious Commodities in Cairo.’’ American Anthropologist 97(1): 51–69. Stolcke, Verena. 1995. ‘‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe.’’ Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24. Thaiss, Gustav. 1978. ‘‘The Conceptualization of Social Change through Metaphor.’’ Journal of Asian and African Studies 13(1–2): 1–13. Thorne, Barrie. 1992. ‘‘ ‘Girls and Boys Together . . . but Mostly Apart’: Gender Arrangements in Elementary Schools.’’ In Education and Gender Equality, ed. Julia Wrigley, pp. 115–30. London and Washington, D.C.: Falmer. Turner, Terence. 1995. ‘‘Social Body and Embodied Subject: Bodiliness, Subjectivity, and Sociality among the Kayapo.’’ Cultural Anthropology 10(2): 143–70. Under One Sky: Arab Women in North America Talk about the Hijab. 1999. Directed by Jennifer Kawaja. Presented by the National Film Board of Canada. Wearing, Alison. 2000. Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey. New York: Picador.
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contributors
MISTY L. BASTIAN is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College. She has published widely on gender, popular media, and religious practice in southeastern Nigeria and is co-editor (with Jane Parpart) of Great Ideas on Teaching about Africa. JANET BAUER is Associate Professor of International Studies and Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Trinity College in Connecticut. She has written extensively on gender and identity in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. JANICE BODDY is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is author of Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan and co-editor (with Virginia Barnes) of Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl. She has published numerous articles on gender, female circumcision, and spirit possession. DEBORAH DURHAM is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sweet Briar College. She has published extensively on Herero cultural identity, citizenship, and democracy in Botswana, on youth in Botswana, and in anthropology. She is co-editor, with Jennifer Cole, of a volume on age, experience and globalization, forthcoming from Indiana University Press. KATHERINE FRANK is a Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Faculty Associate in Cultural Anthropology at the College of the Atlantic. She is author of G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. SATSUKI KAWANO is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on ritual, family, and aging in Japan. Her book Ritual Practice in Modern Japan: Ordering Action, People, and Place is forthcoming.
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Contributors SARAH LAMB is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She is author of White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India and co-editor (with Diane P. Mines) of Everyday Life in South Asia (Indiana University Press, 2002). ADELINE MASQUELIER is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. She has published extensively on bori spirit possession, Islam, modernity, and the historical imagination in Niger, and is author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. MARGARET WIENER is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published widely on Balinese history and society and is author of Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali, which won the 1995 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing.
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index
Aba Commission of Inquiry (Nigeria), 46–47 Ableman, Paul, 107, 116 Adornments, bodily, 34, 39, 43–44, 97, 107, 109–110, 150–151, 163, 249 Advertisements, 179–182, 184 Agency, 107, 118, 128; personal, 229; of refugees, 249–250; women’s 242–243 Alterations. See Body surfaces, alterations of Anxieties, 116, 200, 244; Islamic, 144; and purity, 219–220 Appearance, 238, 246; alteration of, 115, 176, 237, 240; concerns about, 134, 204; external (zaher), 234, 239, 245, 247, 249, 251. See also Body surfaces Ashcroft, John (Attorney General), 4 Attire, 43, 61, 130, 135, 178. See also Clothing; Dress Authority, 41, 184; female, 47 Bali (Indonesia), 18–19, 61–66, 68–69, 70, 72–73, 77, 79; and Balinization, 75 Bali Bra, 70–71, 73, 87 Bali Darma Laksana (Balinese organization), 78 Balonwu, Chief Patrick O. (Senior Advocate of Nigeria), 54, 55 Barthes, Roland, 111, 112–113 Basden, George T., 35, 36, 40, 42, 48 Bataille, André, 143–144 Batavia (Dutch colonial state), 65, 78 Bathers, female, 152–153; as sexualized objects, 155–156 Bathhouses, public, 6, 149–150, 152–155, 162–163, 164n11, 244; regulations on, 156; women’s, 239–240 Bathing, 21, 25n10, 67, 190–191; and children, 203–204; and elderly, 204; frequency of, 214, 218–220, 243, 246; and magic, 195–196, 197; mixed, 152–156, 160, 163, 165n17; and purification, 213,
216–217, 244–245; and purity, 217, 220, 226; reasons for, 192–193, 200–201, 206, 244; rituals of, 200, 205, 218–219; as selfdevelopment, 201–203, 208; symbolism of, 207–208. See also Baths; Cleanliness; Soap; Washing Baths, 14, 191, 199, 207; as boundary markers, 192, 205; daily, 206, 208; preparation of, 196–198 Baul people (India), 228–229 Beauty, 10, 65, 70, 114–115, 192, 209n4, 223–224, 247 Behavior, 128, 206; civilized, 183; female, 236–237, 239; modest, 236, 241; proper, 238; public, 37–38; regulation of, 106; sexual, 43, 249 Beidelman, T. O., 9 Bengal, West (India), 21–22, 213–214, 216, 229 Berger, John (art critic), 3, 15, 67, 80, 88 Body, 8, 22, 35, 54, 123, 128, 240, 243, 246; bourgeois, 170; control over, 226, 245; covered, 87, 132, 138, 156–157, 238 (see also Dress); as covering, 241; fluidity of, 219–220, 222; and gender, 220, 234, 237; human, 2, 7; management of, 214, 217–218, 225; naked, 2, 63, 66, 107, 131; non-Western, 9, 15, 18; nude, 100, 106, 109; representations of, 3, 15, 37, 105; sexualized, 151, 163; uncovered, 35, 67, 84, 88, 110, 144, 150 (see also Undress); veiled, 25n9; Western, 15, 34, 53. See also Body surfaces; Exposure, bodily; Female body; Gaze; Male body; Nude, artistic Body markings, 6, 57n7, 108–109, 248. See also Body surfaces, alteration of; Tattoos; Tooth painting Body politics, 16, 23 Body surfaces, 2–3, 88, 97, 99, 223, 236–238, 250; alteration of, 108–109, 185, 241,
257
Index Body surfaces (continued) 246–249; and cleanliness, 10; concealment of, 160; and dirt, 6; politicization of, 21, 170; significance of, 5, 7–9, 14, 17– 18, 22, 66, 151, 163; viewing of, 35. See also Body markings; Circumcision, pharaonic; Cosmetic surgery; Hymen repair; Skin; Tattoos; Tooth painting Body types, 106–107, 109, 115 Bori (Niger), 19, 124–126, 130–132, 142. See also Possession, spirit; Possession ceremony Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, 233 Botswana, 21, 190–192, 194, 196, 206–208 Boundaries, 7, 12, 105, 132; bodily, 35, 219, 222, 237, 246; community, 170, 234– 235, 242, 245, 247, 250–251; cultural, 192, 234; markers of, 192, 205, 246; moral, 5, 22, 144–145; social, 4, 11, 23, 137, 185, 219 Brahmans, 21, 25n12, 214, 218, 220, 221, 229. See also Castes; Hierarchy, caste Brassiere, 70, 88, 130. See also Bali Bra Breasts, bared, 19, 35, 40, 61–63, 66, 68–72, 77–78, 87, 88, 90n4, 91n14, 161; concealment of, 73–76, 80–82 British troops, 171–173, 181 Burlesque, 111; campaigns against, 103–104 Burqa (Afghan Islamic dress), 4 Burton, Sir Richard, 174, 176 Bush, Laura, 4 Carey, Joyce (British author), 51 Castes, 213, 216, 219, 221–224, 227, 230n1; Scheduled, 214, 217–218, 221. See also Brahmans; Hierarchy, caste Cattleposts, 202–204, 210n15 Ceremonies, 242; funeral, 201, 204; wedding, 197, 239–240. See also Possession ceremony; Rituals Chador (Iranian Islamic dress), 234, 235, 238– 239, 242, 244 ChevronTexaco (Nigeria), 16, 47, 55 Childbirth, 220, 222, 239 Childhood, 39 Children, 38, 135, 137–138, 202–204, 206 Christianity, 2, 10, 21, 43–44, 66, 181; evangelical, 37. See also Missionaries, Christian Churchill, Winston, 169 Circumcision, pharaonic (female), 21, 170, 183–185, 187n16 Citizenship, 248, 250
258
Civil service, 81–82 Civility, 9, 20–21 Civilization, 7, 20, 66–67, 162, 170, 172, 177–178, 181, 184. See also Mission, civilizing Clark, Kenneth, 34 Class, 156, 193–194, 209n6; bourgeois, 193; middle, 6, 12, 88; social, 76, 115, 152, 154; upper, 150, 154; working, 149–151. See also Castes Cleanliness, 15, 183–184, 208, 215–216; and boundaries, 7; meanings of, 6, 10, 13, 169–170, 236; politics of, 20; rituals of, 26n17; and workers, 202–203. See also Bathing; Soap Cleansing, 14. See also Bathing Clitoridectomy. See Circumcision, pharaonic Cloth, 41, 91n19 Clothes, 1–2, 102, 150; cleanliness of, 190, 202, 204; and purity, 218, 226; types of, 82, 178, 201, 240. See also Dress Clothing, 2, 14, 51, 102, 184, 244, 246; appropriate, 61–62; and gender, 37, 45; meaning of, 15, 124–125, 133, 137, 144; provision of, 135–136; regulation of, 17–18, 20, 38, 132; removal of, 15–17, 44, 130– 131 (see also Undress); types of, 10, 53, 244; uses of, 3–4, 39, 129–130, 238. See also Dress Clothing styles. See Dress styles Coast, John (English resident of Bali), 81 Colonialism, 5–6, 16, 35, 40, 46, 76–77, 208 Columbus, Christopher, 1 Commodification, 246 Commodities, manufactured, 169–170, 177– 179, 181 Community, 4, 5, 246–250; moral, 7, 144– 145. See also Boundaries, community Concealment, 10, 22, 98, 118, 234–242, 244, 247–248, 250 Consumerism, 246 Contact, 242; bodily, 220; physical, 106, 118n3; sexual, 223, 239 Contagious Diseases Acts (England), 14 Contamination, 117, 251n6. See also Contagious Diseases Acts; Disease Control, 2, 222, 226, 237, 242, 244–245, 250; male, 141; social, 229 Cosmetic surgery, 22, 108, 243, 246, 248 Cosmetics, 41. See also Body markings Costumes, 97, 109–110, 124, 246; and concealment, 238; oriental, 174
Index Counterculture, 66 Covarrubias, Miguel, 72, 74, 90n9 Crapanzano, Vincent, 126 Cullwick, Hannah, 24–25n5 Cultural capital, 115 Cultural policy, 75 Culture, 9, 66–67, 103; commodity, 181; consumer, 4; and diversity, 8; masculine, 251n1; national, 84; political, 206; popular, 160, 235; production of, 87; traditional, 75, 77; Victorian, 168–176, 178– 179, 181; Western, 102 Customers, strip club, 19, 98–99, 102–103, 111, 113–117, 119n7 Dan Ganda (Tuareg female spirit), 124–125, 127–129, 132–133, 139–145, 145n7 Dancers, strip, 116, 118; appearance of, 106– 107, 109–110, 115; bodies of, 107–108; strategies of, 111–114. See also Strip clubs Darwin, Charles, 174 Death, 55, 201 Decay, 25–26n13, 175 Decolonization, 76 Defecation, 214, 218, 220, 221, 225, 231n11 Defilement, 117 Degeneration, 174–175, 176. See also Racism, scientific Democracy, 207, 208 Depravity, 66; sexual, 103 Desire, 16, 197–198; sexual, 153, 160 Deviance, 10, 17, 54–55 Diaspora life, 234, 244–248, 250 Dirt, 3–5, 8–9, 191–192, 203; attitudes toward, 24–25n5, 25n11, 214, 216; categories of, 216–217; forms of, 192; language of, 23; meanings of, 6–7, 10, 13, 215, 229; politics of, 11; and transgression, 22; and virtue, 13; as weapon, 7; and witches, 26–27n24. See also Cleanliness; Impurity; Pollution; Purity Dirtiness, 244 Discipline, bodily, 25n10, 217–218 Discourse: colonial, 25n8, 170, 185; political, 206; scientific (see Science); sexualized, 151, 160 Disease, 25n13, 183; venereal, 14, 26n13. See also Contagious Diseases Acts Disguise, 172–174, 176–177. See also Concealment; Costumes Display, bodily, 44, 132, 150–152, 156, 239.
See also Exposure, bodily; Seeing, ways of; Stripping; Wrestling Disputes, domestic, 197, 200 Disrobing, 16; spirit, 20, 123–124, 126–129, 131, 139, 141–144. See also Stripping; Undress Dogondoutchi (Nigerien town), 122, 124, 125, 129, 134, 137 Douglas, Mary, 3, 11–12, 21–22, 57n8, 119n8, 125, 177, 192, 209n3, 214, 219, 229, 236, 242 Dress, 4, 8, 16, 76, 79; and authority, 51–52; bori, 129–130, 133; children’s, 137–138; female, 40–41, 43–44, 46–47, 57n11, 72, 79, 134–135; forms of, 65, 74–75, 78–79; and generation, 18, 35, 37, 43, 44–45, 53; Igbo, 37, 41, 43; Islamic, 4, 20, 81; male, 35, 48–53; meaning of, 50, 54, 62–64, 77, 130; norms of, 19, 82, 84– 85, 88, 138, 190; proper, 2, 44, 83–87, 89; regulation of, 1–2, 74–75, 80, 83–84, 132, 162; and respect, 87; symbolism of, 83, 129; traditional, 82; Western, 84, 150. See also Clothes; Clothing; Dress styles; Undress; Veil Dress codes, 17, 152, 154; changes in, 63, 83– 85, 151; ritual, 85. See also Dress Dress styles, 35, 41, 64, 82–83, 134, 152, 170, 245; changes in, 62, 74, 76–81, 88–89, 150, 154; male, 47–48. See also Costumes; Uniforms Dumont, Louis, 25n12, 214 Dutch East India Company, 65, 78, 91n19 Dutch East Indies, 68 Duty, marital, 196–198 Economy: moral, 7, 191; political, 207 Eden, 2–3, 66; Bali as, 63, 65, 69 Education, 63, 81–82, 185; missionary, 41, 43, 45, 50; opportunities for, 76, 207. See also Midwives Training School Egypt, 176 Elderly, 202, 203, 204–206, 228 Empire, 7, 76, 170, 174; creation of, 177, 179, 181; visions of, 168–169, 171, 215. See also Civilization Empowerment, female, 98 England, 13–14 Enlightenment, 178, 181. See also Civilization Entertainment: adult, 98, 100, 111; sexualized, 103–104. See also Strip clubs
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Index Epidemics. See Disease Epidermis. See Skin Eroticism, 4, 7, 19, 66, 110–113; of female body, 161; and genitalia, 117; and nudity, 143, 153; varieties of, 115–116 Eugenics, 175. See also Racism, scientific Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 9 Evolution, 169; social, 184 Exile, 244, 246. See also Diaspora life Exotic dance, 99, 116. See also Striptease Exotic dancers, 19, 98. See also Dancers, strip Exposure, 20, 112; bodily, 67, 100–101, 103– 104, 106, 111, 117, 138–139, 150–151, 153, 155, 157–158, 162; public, 17, 130– 131. See also Stripping
Gender, 3–4, 15, 35, 229; and bathing, 219; and dirt, 214; and dress, 17, 37, 45; and modernization, 79; and purity, 216–217, 221; and skin color, 224 Gender relations, 35, 247 Genital cursing, 45–46, 140–141 Genital mutilation, 183, 186n3 Genitalia, 66, 116–117; exposure of, 40, 46, 140, 144 Gezira project (Sudan), 182–183 Gordon, General Charles, 168–173, 174, 176–177, 179, 181–182 Gramsci, Antonio, 75, 176 Graves, Robert, 34 Guatemala, 15
Fantasy, 69, 70, 117; cultural, 109; imperial, 181; male, 79; pornographic, 114; romantic, 66; transgressive, 103 Fashion, 4, 20, 22, 35, 43, 53, 152. See also Dress styles Fatimeh (Prophet Mohammed’s daughter), 236 Female body, 35, 98, 104, 161, 225; bare, 64, 67, 69, 83; concealment of, 125, 238; fluidity of, 220–221; and purity, 21, 220, 235, 237, 239; and sexual desire, 20, 153; symbolism of, 4, 25n9, 135, 144, 219, 243; viewing of, 100, 103. See also Breasts, bared Female circumcision. See Circumcision, pharaonic Femininity, 70, 108 Feminism, 88 Fertility, 13, 39, 41 Filth, 6, 10–11, 170. See also Dirt; Impurity Fleming, Waldo, 51, 52 Fluids, bodily, 117, 219, 228, 236 Foucault, Michel, 13, 23, 64, 75, 151, 160– 161, 169 France, 4, 8, 10, 13, 25n13 Freud, Sigmund, 67
Hair, 13–14, 108, 159, 165n16, 235, 236, 239, 243, 247, 251 Harassment, sexual, 153 Hejab (Iranian Islamic dress), 235, 237–239, 246, 251 Henty, G. A. (British author), 171–174, 176, 177–178 Herero people (Botswana), 21, 190, 196–197, 204, 206, 209n1 Hierarchy, 206; caste, 13, 216–217, 221–222, 227; racial, 175; social, 174, 214, 216 Hijabi (Nigerien Islamic dress), 134, 136, 146n16 Hindus, 10, 75, 216–217, 219. See also Brahmans; Castes Hives, Frank, 48–49, 51 Hollander, Anne, 1, 56n1, 101 Hygiene, 7, 10–11, 21, 169–170, 183, 185, 191, 216, 235. See also Cleanliness; Purity Hymen repair, 240, 243. See also Virginity
Gandhi, Sonia, 217 Garments, 10, 129–130. See also Clothing Gauguin, Paul (artist), 66 Gaze, 100, 155, 163; colonial, 247; foreign, 156–157; immodest, 161; male, 15, 35, 70; sexualized, 20, 80, 151, 156, 160; tourist, 63–65, 68, 69, 77. See also Seeing, ways of Geishas, 161
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Identity, 15, 143–144, 177, 244, 249–250; and bathing, 192–193; and dress, 130, 246; gendered, 22; moral, 126; personal, 145, 250; shaping of, 62, 76, 247, 249; social, 9, 14, 23, 38, 137, 141, 152 Igbo people (Nigeria), 16–18, 35–37, 40–44, 50, 53 Ijaw people (Africa), 16, 55 Images, 64–65, 171; gendered, 63, 243; public, 11 Imagination, 174, 244. See also Fantasy Immodesty, 4, 155 Immorality, 9, 44 Impotence, 17
Index Impurity, 10, 22, 214, 229, 251n4; and death, 231n13; female, 217, 220–222, 225, 228–229, 237; ritual, 216–217, 236; spiritual, 235. See also Dirt; Pollution India, 1, 13, 17, 21, 91n19, 213–215 Indiscipline, 37–38 Indonesia, Republic of, 62, 81. See also Bali Inequality, 191, 193, 195, 229 Infibulation. See Circumcision, pharaonic Initiation, 39; ritual of, 7–8, 221 Innocence, 2, 110 Insanity, 17, 137 Interaction, 115–116, 118, 119n7, 208; community, 248; interpersonal, 111–112; social, 206, 242 Intercourse, sexual, 220, 225, 228. See also Contact, sexual; Intimacy, sexual Intermarriage, 247 Intervention, state, 4, 150 Intimacy, sexual, 153 IRA prisoners, 7 Iran, 22, 235, 238, 243, 247 Islam, 75, 79, 81, 124, 134, 140, 175, 236, 242 Israel, 15 Itsekiri people (Africa), 16, 55 Iwakura Delegation (Japan), 158 Izala (Nigerien reformist anti-Sufi association), 132, 134, 135, 140, 143 Japan, 20, 149–150, 153–155; Meiji, 151– 152, 153–163, 163n4; Tokugawa, 152– 153 Java (Indonesia), 68, 75, 79 Jibba (Sudanese dress), 173, 176–177 Judaism, 2–3, 15, 26n21 Kamben (Balinese dress), 64, 79, 82–83, 85, 87, 92n28 Kebaya (Javanese blouse), 75, 78–79, 80–82, 87–89 Khartoum (Sudan), 168–169, 170, 172–173, 177 Khuri, Fuad, 235, 236, 241 Kimono (Japanese dress), 152, 154, 157 Kingsley, Charles, 2 Kitchener, 169, 173, 177, 178 Knowledge, 3, 13 Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM) (Indonesian Shipping Company), 68 Krause, Gregor (author on Bali), 63–65, 66– 67, 80, 90n4; photographs by, 67–68, 71–72, 82, 90n9
Labor, 101; and baths, 191, 202; domestic, 196, 198–199; shortages of, 183 Language, 11, 23, 53, 111, 185; body, 245 Le Mayeur (Belgian painter), 80 Leisure, 101 Leith-Ross, Sylvia, 41, 44, 50, 53 Liberation, female, 4 Literacy, 141 Loincloths, 39, 48–50, 149–150, 152, 154, 160, 163–164n5; regulations on, 156– 157 Love, 196–198 Madness, 17, 37–39, 53, 54–55 Magic, 196 Mahalapye (Botswana village), 190, 193–194, 195, 197, 199–200, 204, 206 Mahdi (Sudanese rebels), 168–169, 171–173, 176–177, 179, 181, 184 Malawi people (Botswana), 195, 197 Male body, 49, 53, 57–58n14 Mangaldihi (Bengal village), 213–218, 221, 224, 229 Marriage, 9, 50, 226–227, 239; practices of, 43; and purity, 225; and skin color, 223– 224, 227 Marriott, McKim, 222 Masculinity, 49–50, 52, 57n13 Mason, A. E. W., 174, 176 Mawri people (Niger), 122–123, 127, 134– 136, 138–139, 143, 145n1 Mead, Margaret, 9, 90n9 Mediums, spirit, 122–133, 141–145. See also Disrobing, spirit; Possession ceremony Menopause, 228 Menstruation, 7, 12–13, 220–222, 225–226, 228, 235, 237, 239 Mexico, 17 Midwives, 182–183, 185 Midwives Training School, 182–183, 184 Migration, 238. See also Exile Mirzazadeh (Iranian poet), 233, 243 Misdemeanor Law (Japan), 20, 150–151, 156–157, 160, 162; reactions to, 158– 159 Mission, civilizing, 5, 177, 179, 181, 184. See also Civilization Missionaries, Christian, 2, 5, 35, 37, 41, 45, 47, 75, 91n16, 182; and Missionization, 44. See also Christianity Modernism, 70
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Index Modernity, 20, 77, 154, 157, 216, 229, 243; European, 62–63; nationalist, 79; Victorian, 177 Modernization, 75–76, 79, 82–83, 162 Modesty, 142, 145; bodily, 151, 153, 154, 155– 156, 158, 164n11; and clothing, 4, 144; norms of, 24n2, 128, 130–131, 133; personal, 242–243; protection of, 129–130 Modifications, bodily. See Body surfaces, alteration of Money, 101 Moral order, 5, 21, 99, 158 Morality, 6, 13, 22, 24n2, 56, 84, 91n14, 98, 145; civic, 208 Morse, E. S., 161 Mortality, 48, 183 Motherhood, 175 Munby, Arthur, 24–25n5 Muslims, 9–10, 132–135, 140, 170, 220, 234– 235, 246 Naked, 4, 110–111. See also Nakedness; Nudity; Truth, naked Nakedness, 2, 57n8, 112, 139, 150; associations with, 6, 127; attitudes toward, 1, 10, 15, 56, 65–66; and deviance, 144; meaning of, 1, 3–5, 7–9, 17, 34, 66–68, 88, 97, 107, 124–125, 131, 137, 143–145; power of, 127, 145; public, 37, 129 (see also Nudity, public); and shame, 24n2, 123– 124; and transgression, 16, 127, 131– 132, 162; as weapon, 16–17, 20, 47, 54, 55–56 Nature: bodily, 217; female, 3; state of, 66 Naturism, 70, 90n6 New Order (Indonesia), 83, 92n26 Niger, 19–20, 124–125, 134 Nigeria, 16, 35, 37–38, 46–56 Nude, artistic, 3–4, 15, 56n1, 66–67, 110– 111, 114, 132 Nudity, 8–9, 15, 19, 110–111, 132; and aesthetics, 34–35, 150; and art (see Nude, artistic); contexts for, 118n4, 138–139; female, 47, 104, 154, 162 (see also Female body); male, 35, 48, 49; meaning of, 2–3, 5, 26n15, 67–68, 88, 97–99, 101–102, 126, 139, 143; and power, 103; prescriptive, 139, 146n12; as protest, 140–141; public, 54–56, 56n3, 102–104, 113, 116, 158–159; regulation of, 102, 105, 117, 118n3, 158–160; social, 39, 45, 46. See also Nakedness; Undress
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Nwaobiala (Nigerien women’s resistance movement), 44 Obscenity, 111, 144 Omdurman (Sudan town), 181, 182 Orientalism, 175 Oto. See Undress Pakaian adat (Balinese dress), 82, 83, 85, 87, 88 Parinda (Indonesian political party), 78 Penis, 228 Performances, 100, 112, 114, 178, 250–251; bodily, 245, 248; gender, 234; public, 103, 241, 244; ritual, 39, 205, 236–237; spirit, 142; strip, 98–99, 107 Performers, female. See Dancers, strip; Mediums, spirit Perniola, Mario, 101–102, 110, 112 Photography, 67, 70, 78; ethnographic, 40–42, 50; of women, 35–36, 62, 67, 70, 78, 161. See also Krause, Gregor Plastic surgery. See Cosmetic surgery Pollution, 4, 7, 10–13, 214, 216, 234–235; boundaries of, 242, 245; and women, 12, 222, 225. See also Dirt; Impurity; Purity Pornography, 100, 104, 119n8, 143 Possession, spirit, 12, 122–123, 127–129, 130–132, 139, 141–142, 144. See also Dan Ganda; Spirits Possession ceremony, bori (wasa), 122–127, 132–133, 140–142; and clothing, 129– 131, 138; performance of, 142–143. See also Disrobing, spirit; Possession, spirit; Spirits Powell, Hickman (author), 74 Power, 3, 7, 88; colonial, 49; relations of, 4, 74–75; women’s, 46 Pregnancy, 227 Prestige, 78, 214 Primitives, 9, 24n1, 78; images of, 178–179, 180, 181, 182 Primitivism, 9, 19, 66–67 Prince Philip, statue of, 132 Privilege, 98, 115, 194 Progress, 174, 177, 184–185 Propriety, 3, 75, 84, 125, 128; norms of, 11, 88, 98; Islamic, 140, 234, 242; Western, 150– 151, 161. See also Behavior Prostitutes, 13–14, 25–26n13, 91–92n22, 161, 164n6; and dress, 80, 238, 241, 244 Prostitution, 13, 100, 103; stigma of, 116
Index Protection, 173, 238, 244, 250 Protests: dirty, 7; women’s, 16–17, 26n23, 44– 47, 142–143 Purification, 6, 13, 235, 239; rituals of, 152, 162, 236, 242 Purity, 2, 12–15, 22, 185, 234–236, 250; and age, 228; bodily, 21, 185, 218–219, 235, 236, 241, 243; concerns about, 218, 245; construction of, 244; female 220, 222– 223, 225–227, 237, 243; and gender, 219–220; Hindu, 215–216, 221–222; images of, 11; Islamic, 234, 237; language of, 243; obsession with, 15, 226; performance of, 241; racial, 170; rituals of, 12, 152, 169, 216–217, 242; protection of, 12, 237; sexual, 169; significance of, 229; and skin color, 223–224. See also Cleanliness Queen Elizabeth, statue of, 132 Queen Victoria, 169 Qur’an, 13, 235, 237 Qur’anic prescriptions, 235, 242–243 Race, 174–175, 217, 250 Racism, 252n10; scientific, 6, 175 Railway, 169, 179, 181 Reform: cultural, 83; moral, 145; Muslim, 125 Refugees, 10–11, 22, 244–246, 248 Regulation, bodily, 118 Reinhart, Kevin A., 13, 237, 242, 245 Relations, 112; domestic, 197–198, 200; proper, 43 Relationships, 194; gender, 196; social, 201, 205–206, 241, 243, 245 Resistance, 2, 16–17, 20, 162; nationalist, 75; social, 244. See also Protests Respectability, 4, 114 Responsibility, 129, 207 Revelations, 110, 113, 122; bodily, 103, 116; self, 112 Revolution: Iranian, 244; Islamic, 251n3; and women, 243 Riis, Jacob, 6 Rites, 14, 205–206. See also Rituals Ritivoi, Andrea, 249–250 Rituals, 10, 20, 39, 122–124, 242, 245; bodily, 236–237, 241; state, 207–208; temple, 85. See also Bathing, rituals of; Purification, rituals of; Purity, rituals of; Transformation, rituals of
Saliva, 221 Sari (Indian dress), 218 Schweitzer, Dahlia, 98 Science, 3, 21, 176. See also Degeneration; Eugenics; Racism, scientific Seclusion, female, 125, 140 Seduction, 20, 139, 143, 144 Seeing, ways of, 17, 100, 150–152, 155–156, 160, 163, 248 Self, 101, 112; concealment of, 238, 241; conceptions of, 201, 250; control of, 237– 238, 245; development of, 207–208; fashioning of, 192, 246–247; improvement of, 203; inner (batin), 234, 237–241, 244– 245, 249–251; protection of, 234, 236 Self-determination, 193 Sex industry, 98, 100, 115. See also Strip clubs Sex workers, 45. See also Prostitutes Sexuality, 13, 56n1, 66, 84, 78, 98–99; female, 13–14, 92n26, 175, 185; male, 102, 104 Shame, 2, 5, 44, 80, 111, 116 Shi’ites, 234 Singaraja (Bali), 80 Skin, 1, 5, 7, 14, 67, 108, 149, 243. See also Body surfaces; Social skin Skin color, 1, 61, 69, 172–173, 175–177, 178, 250; and beauty, 223–224; and marriage, 227; and purity, 217 Snakes, 195–197, 199–200 Soap, 6, 20–21, 24n4, 169–170, 177, 178– 183, 185, 193, 202, 208; as gift, 197 Social categories, 9, 192 Social difference, 23, 229. See also Hierarchy Social order, 178, 229, 243 Social relations, 37, 39, 41, 192, 241–242, 251; rituals of, 234 Social skin, 5, 10, 23, 41, 137, 138, 139 Spirits, bori, 122–132, 138, 140–142; Zaki Sarki, 127, 139, 142. See also Dan Ganda; Possession, spirit Status, 6, 194; social, 152 Sterility, 183 Strip clubs, 96, 98, 99–100, 110–111, 113; as places of employment, 101, 114–115; regulations on, 104–106; types of, 104– 107, 114–115, 118. See also Customers, strip club Stripping, 1–2, 16, 19, 20, 39, 98, 101–102, 143–144; public, 49, 53–55, 138–140 Striptease, 98; and eroticism, 112; history of, 103; Parisian, 111, 112–113; regulations on, 103–104
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Index Striptease culture, 106 Sudan, 20, 176, 182–183 Suharto (Indonesian leader), 82, 83, 84, 89 Sukarno (Indonesian leader), 81, 83 Sumo wrestling, 152, 156, 160, 163 Surfaces, bodily See Body surfaces Surveillance, 150, 175; bodily, 35, 88; police, 105 Table dances, 99, 111, 116. See also Strip clubs Taboos, sexual, 26n20 Taliban (Afghanistan), 4 Taman Siswa movement (Indonesia), 76, 82 Tattoos, 109, 115, 150 Theosophical Society (Bali), 76 Thompson, Lydia (burlesque star), 103 Titillation, 40, 47 Tooth painting (Japanese), 150, 154 Tourism, 18–19, 61–64, 68, 72, 76–77, 90n9; mass, 82–84 Touristic practices, 100, 101, 119n7 Tourists, 65–66, 68, 70, 77, 87; and dress, 61– 62, 83–84, 85, 89 Tradition, 75–77, 79, 82, 144; Greek, 3, 66; Christian, 2, 66 Transformation, bodily, 67, 195, 197, 240, 247, 248; and impurity, 236–237; rituals of, 2, 7 Transgression, 17, 22, 125, 177, 229, 250; bodily, 3, 6, 21, 240, 251; and nudity, 103, 162; and undress, 16, 128, 154 Treatments, medical, 195–196, 209n8 Truth, 3–4, 10; naked, 102 Turner, Terence, 5, 107 Turner, Victor, 26n19, 39, 132 Undress, 3, 6, 35, 37–39, 40–41; acceptability of, 149–150, 152–154; attitudes toward, 66, 87, 149, 153–156, 158–159, 162– 163; and deprivation, 137; eroticized, 34; forms of, 39, 54–56, 74, 111, 149, 155, 162; male, 53, 55; meaning of, 1–2, 8, 15, 18, 23, 62, 65, 84–85, 89, 160–161; as protest, 16, 45–47; public, 150–151, 154–155, 157, 160, 162; regulation of, 150–152, 156–160, 162; and spirit possession (see Disrobing, spirit); tourist, 63, 85, 89. See also Dress; Nakedness; Nudity Uniforms, 38, 83; chiefly, 47–48; school, 50, 207; Western-style, 37, 157. See also Costumes Untouchables, 25n12, 213, 230n3. See also Castes; Hierarchy, caste
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Unveiling, 3, 4, 240 Urry, John, 64, 69, 100 Vagina, 228 Values: cultural, 83; imperial, 185; Islamic, 141; system of, 224; Victorian, 171, 174 Veil, 3, 4, 134–135, 146n10, 237, 243, 246, uses of, 238–239, 241. See also Burqa; Chador; Hejab; Hijabi Veiling, 143, 242–243. See also Concealment Violence, political, 7 Virginity, 240. See also Hymen repair Vivekananda, Swami (Bengali Hindu reformer), 215 Vogue, 70 Voyeurism, 9, 68, 90n4, 100, 118n3, 153 Wadia, Ardaser, 69–70 Washing, 15, 237. See also Bathing; Cleanliness; Soap Waste, bodily, 7, 183 Wealth, 215 Wearing, Alison, 238 Western Europe, 12, 193 Western Europeans, 1–2, 7, 9–10, 24n1, 65, 150–151, 154–155, 174 Westernization, 150 Westoxification, 233, 243 Widows, 226, 231n13 Witches, 17, 26–27n24, 137, 203 Wolff, Mabel, 183, 185 Womanizers, 133 Women, 12–14, 16, 98, 140, 250; and activism, 240–241, 244; Arab, 25n9; and authority, 46–47; Balinese, 63–64, 71, 78–79, 90n4; bodies of (see Female body); choices of, 246; control of, 234; duties of, 175; images of, 62–63, 78, 104; and marriage, 41, 43, 227; Muslim, 4, 135, 184; and protests (see Protests, women’s); and purity, 22, 220–222, 229, 237, 243; strategies of, 225, 241; as symbols, 22; views of, 228–229 Women’s War (Ogu Umunwaanyi), 44, 45–47 Work, 101, 192, 194, 198–199, 202–204, 207–208 Workers, 202–203; control over, 183, 184 World Bank, 82–83 Wrestling, 49–50, 138–139. See also Sumo wrestling Yates, Eva, 70
