Download The Changing Landscape of the Human Body

READING 1
Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “Crucibles of Change:
Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Life after 1500,” in In the Balance:
Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 656–64.
Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which cultural transformations
were expressed on the human body. In particular, it focuses on the outward
appearance of bodies—scarification, tattooing, and dress—as well as on
patterns of consumption for foods and drinks such as tea, potatoes, and
chocolate. In each case, it explores patterns of similarities and difference
across time and space, and highlights changes that resulted from cultural
interaction.
The Changing Landscape of the Human Body
The most intimate site of cultural transformations was the human body itself.
The human body’s physical shape and requirements constituted the common
experience of the human species; at the same time, the body was in some
ways the site of the most profound cultural differences. Through such things
as diet, dress, and sexual practice, the human body changed in response to
transformations in the material world while displaying continuities with
inherited cultural practices.
The Body as Commodity
Prostitution, which began to appear in major Southeast Asian cities in the late
sixteenth century, was slave prostitution and may have been stimulated by
demand from Europeans and Chinese who were not familiar with the custom
of temporary marriage as practiced among Southeast Asians. It may also have
been a response to Muslim concern over the impropriety of temporary
marriages with foreigners and nonbelievers. Women who engaged in
prostitution were unmarriagable.
In West and Central African urban centers, during the era of the transAtlantic slave trade, prostitution increased dramatically, a direct result of the
commercialization of values and the demands of a European-driven cash
economy. The mentality of the cash economy in which goods and services
became commodities that could be bought and sold infused a widening realm
of economic and social transactions. By the end of the eighteenth century, the
effects of slavery devalued human worth and stereotyped Africans as
different from Europeans. These two effects in turn contributed to the birth of
myths concerning the sexuality of Africans and to some extent all nonEuropeans. But Africans, as slaves, were particularly subjected to the most
invidious bias and distortion based on contemporary European beliefs in the
inferiority of blacks. Travelers’ tales of promiscuity and lasciviousness among
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Africans became firmly entrenched notions that condoned and encouraged
exploitation — both sexual and economic.
Cultural Modifications of the Human Body
Cultural differences in food, clothing, and body art fascinated Europeans and
other world travelers. Some voyages of exploration carried with them artists
who recorded the fantastic sights they encountered. For example, sketches
and paintings of Polynesian life by the artist John Webber, who visited Tahiti
in 1777, included the portrait of a Ra’iatean chieftainess Poetua, whose body
was covered with delicate tattoo patterns and traditional bark cloth.
Tattooing
Tattooing, body painting by surgically introducing dyes under the skin, was
also widely practiced in Southeast Asia, where some scholars believe that the
influence of Islamic prohibitions on the practice led to it being replaced by the
technique of batik, or cloth painting, as a religious statement and status
indicator. European travelers copied the practice of tattooing, and some
exhibited themselves in circuses and fairs. One of the first Europeans to do so
was Jean-Baptiste Cabri, who had jumped ship in 1799 in the Marquesas and
whose tattooed skin was preserved and exhibited in Europe after his death.
Scarification and Dress in Africa
Africans used various means to enhance their natural beauty: scarification
(intentional cuts in the skin, said by the Yoruba to be like the civilizing lines
of patterned agricultural fields); chipping or filing of teeth; piercing and
stretching of lips, nose, and ears; body painting; tattooing; and elements of
dress and coiffure. Dress marked ethnicity, gender, status, rank, occupation,
accomplishment, and age. Certain hairstyles were worn only by slaves.
Certain dress or cloth patterns were appropriated by persons of wealth and
power and prohibited to others of lower status.
The European traveler John Barbot (1732) described the clothing of
Senegalese noblemen as consisting of a shirt, wide breeches, and cap.
Commoners wore a loincloth or wraparound skirt and at times draped a
cloak or mantle around one or both shoulders. It is likely that then as now the
individual cloth patterns were named and associated with proverbial
meanings. The successful merchant traders of West and Central Africa wore
layers of imported cloth and sometimes feathered top hats and canes to
express their distinctive, albeit intermediary, cultural position. More hidden
expressions of personhood such as circumcision or pubic beads worn below
the waist also contributed to individual identity and helped to sustain
tradition amidst the overlay of imported textiles.
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Dress and Identity in Japan
In Japan dress defined a person’s identity geographically and historically and
linked that individual to a specific community. People of all ages wore the
same basic shape and style of Japanese robed garment known as the kosode,
but drastic variations in the fabric’s inward-facing pattern represented subtle
reminders of distinct gender, social status, and cultural values.
During the Tokugawa period, large pictorial patterns became associated with
women’s garments, and men’s robes became increasingly subdued and
limited to stripes or small, patterned geometric figures. Wealthy people with
high status had large wardrobes, and each class in the social hierarchy was
distinguished by certain dress patterns. The widespread value placed on
literacy for seventeenth-century women resulted in the incorporation of
written characters, literary allusions, and riddles into the design of their inner
garments, a practice that suggested that women should express their learning
with subtlety and indirectness.
Dress in Southeast Asia
To early European travelers, Southeast Asians appeared practically naked,
since both men and women often left their upper bodies bare. This condition
was natural because of climate, but it also reflected the belief that the body
itself was a work of art and needed little adornment. Southeast Asians did not
find it necessary to create artificial markers of gender through dress,
hairstyle, or speech patterns, unlike many other societies which stressed such
distinctions. An unsewn strip of cloth wound around the body was used by
both men and women for clothing. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth
centuries, this basic pattern of dress was transformed partly by the influence
of Islam and later by European customs. A frequent innovation was the
wearing of a jacket of European or West Asian design over an expensive cloth
used as a sarong, the traditional draped garment.
Dress in India
Religious ideology and practice in some cultures dictated certain standards of
dress and decoration of the body. In India, Sanskrit religious law
(dharmasastra) was presented in the eighteenth century as a manual for
orthodox Hindu women in the form of a text titled Guide to the Religious Status
and Duties of Women (ca. 1720–1750). This wide-ranging digest of rulings
included prohibitions against the nakedness of women during the day and
against the wearing of heavy earrings during lovemaking. The rulings stated
that a woman should not show her breasts or navel and that her clothing
should reach her ankles (obviously directed at women who did not work in
the fields). Women made a distinctive forehead mark (tilaka) with saffron as a
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sign of marital happiness; by this it was suggested that a woman’s religious
devotion should be directed to her husband.
Dress in Industrial Europe
In a similar vein, Christian European urban dress bound female forms,
restricted movement, and represented increasing levels of male control after
1500. Tight sleeves on women’s apparel “protected” the wearers from kitchen
hazards. Men’s dress emphasized their military role. Until the seventeenth
century female dress was linked to devotional and virtuous roles and
meanings, with sexuality hinted at but not expressed. An important part of
dress included the use of lace made by women in convents. By the early
seventeenth century, the secularizing influence of commerce on class and
gender was visible, French necklines had plunged, and fashion, even that of
the king, used abundant lace.
Differentiation of dress in Europe was also determined by status, position,
and rank. Women and men who labored dressed very much alike: their
clothes were of sturdy fabric (usually woolen) in somber colors, and their
wardrobes were limited. The privileged could be recognized by their
elaborate, colorful fabrics, embroidered gold and silver threads, and jeweled
embellishments. Privileged men and women wore padded clothes and
corsets; wigs or elaborately coiffed and powdered hair; and carried
handkerchiefs, fans, canes, and purses. Both genders were fashion-conscious
consumers of textiles in the global marketplace.
Changing Dress in the Americas
The textile trade established important economic and technological
connections between parts of the new global order. Sometimes the arrival of
new goods set up new patterns of consumption; sometimes a new conceptual
framework was needed. Among the peoples of the Inca Empire, for example,
cloth had a cultural meaning and was used as a political statement. The cloth
(aqsu) that wrapped the female body was believed to be a second skin and so
was directly associated with self-identity and genealogy. This cultural
concept of cloth was used to legitimize political authority, which was
believed to descend from the first people who had emerged into life fully
clothed. After the Spanish invasion, dress styles changed as the Incans lost
political and cultural autonomy.
Altering the Human Body: Changing Diets
The availability of new foods and attendant changes in diet also significantly
transformed human physiology, identity, and well-being. The global
exchange of foods and crops altered traditional patterns of consumption.
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Travelers’ Diets
Some of the first dietary changes were experienced on the very ships that
transferred the new crops from one continent to another. From their earliest
voyages, European sailing ships carried their own supplies of foodstuffs,
relying on dried, unleavened bread (“biscuit”), which was subject to weevils,
and dried, salted cod and other preserved meats, some of which became so
dried that sailors carved them as souvenirs rather than challenge their teeth.
The uncertainties of long sea voyages such as those across the Atlantic
occasioned the need to eat shark meat or seabirds or to buy rats at exhorbitant
prices from the ship’s rat catcher. More than half of Vasco da Gama’s crew
died of scurvy, as did countless other sailors, until seafarers recognized the
link between deficiency diseases and citrus fruits and greenstuffs. By 1601 the
East India Company ships were stopping in Madagascar to obtain citrus
fruits for their voyages.
Consuming Cultures
Alcoholic beverages, such as fermented wines, ales and beers brewed from
grains, and distilled liquors, and other drinks from fruits, flowers (such as the
Arabic rosewater), and grains, were found in various forms wherever they
were not outlawed by religious law. Some drinks, such as West African palm
wine, were tapped fresh from the source and then allowed to ferment into an
alcoholic beverage. The manufacture of palm wine was no doubt common in
ancient times in West Africa as elsewhere, since the theme of drunkenness runs
throughout historical tales and is even found in creation myths of the Yoruba.
Foods and drugs used for religious experiences and medicinal cures
constantly circulated between cultures. Whether an item was considered
medicine, foodstuff, or recreational drug largely depended on its availability
and use, as is illustrated by the changing available quantity, value, and use of
opium, which was once a women’s tonic, or by similar changes in the status
of sugar, which was originally considered a spice. By the 1670s the Dutch
were willing to trade New York to the British in exchange for the sugarproducing territories of Surinam.
Columbus carried tobacco, originally a substance cultivated by indigenous
peoples of the Americas for use in religious ceremonies, to Europe, where its
use as a cure for migraines and its initial condemnation by King James I in
1604 and by Pope Innocent X in 1650 were soon overcome by exceedingly
popular recreational use, though this indulgence was a male prerogative.
European trade spread the knowledge of (and vocabulary for) tobacco from
Lapland to Africa, where both men and women smoked pipes and inhaled
other substances for recreation and for the hallucinogenic and religious
experiences that resulted. By the 1790s tobacco and opium were routinely
smoked together in China, despite prohibitions of the Ming era. The Spanish
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began to use other substances, such as quinine, extracted from the bark of the
South American cinchona tree, against malaria by 1638. The resulting
protection and curative effects subsequently enabled Europeans to expand
into more tropical parts of the world.
Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
The era between 1500 and 1800 introduced new foods and beverages,
including coffee from Africa and the Ottoman Empire to North Africa and
Europe. The first coffeehouse in Constantinople was established in 1554 and
in Oxford, England, in 1650, both parts of the world relying on beans from
Mocha, near Aden, at the southern tip of the Red Sea, for their supplies. In the
eighteenth century, the Dutch began to grow coffee in Java, as did the English
in the Caribbean. Chinese tea was known for some time before it was eagerly
adopted in Japan and Russia and first sold in England in the mid-seventeenth
century. One pound of tea leaves could produce almost 300 cups of the drink;
by the end of the eighteenth century, 1.8 million pounds of tea were
consumed annually in England.
From the opposite direction, chocolate traveled from the Americas to Europe,
and its trade was initially monopolized by Spain and Portugal. In Aztec
society, cacao was a luxury item; the beans were used as currency and
prepared in many different ways. In sixteenth-century Mexico cacao beans
were dried, roasted, and then pounded to a paste with water; spices were
added, and the mixture was shaken into a froth. The concoction was offered
to early Spanish visitors at a banquet; they confronted the mixture with
apprehension and fear. However, popular European opinion soon agreed
with Bernardino de Sahagun, a Jesuit observer, who stated that “it gladdens
one, refreshes one, consoles one, invigorates one.”
Foods from the Americas
The increasing populations of Europe, Africa, and Asia selectively embraced
other crops from the Americas: the potato, the tomato, and maize. The potato
reached England via Drake’s voyage from Colombia, and it was immediately
put into cultivation, though at first as an ornamental plant rather than as a
food. As late as 1774, Prussian famine victims of Kolberg refused to touch a
wagon load of potatoes sent by Frederick the Great. The potato, which
originated in the Andes, enabled a huge population expansion to occur in
Ireland after it was accepted there. The Irish reliance on the potato as a staple,
however, created a devastating dependence, as nineteenth-century famines
made abundantly clear.
Population in China increased dramatically thanks to the introduction of
maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts after 1500. In West Africa the
introduction of the groundnut (peanut), chili pepper, cassava, tomato, and
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maize from the Americas provided the basis for agricultural production on
marginal lands and population expansion and supported diets during the
transshipment of slaves. By the end of the eighteenth century, these foods had
become defining staples of local cuisine and were demanded by slaves on
trans-Atlantic voyages, even while eschewed by their European masters.
Changing Asian Diets
Similarly, the story of flat noodles originating in China is an example of Asian
foods introduced through overland commercial connections. The noodles
were carried by Indians and Arabs to the Mediterranean trade cities of
Venice, Genoa, and Florence. By the fifteenth century Chinese-influenced
Mongols working in Italian kitchens served the fare.
South Asian diets were also significantly transformed after 1500. The
establishment of Mughal rule in India brought new everyday foods and
methods of food preparation. Kebabs made of bite-sized meats grilled on
spits, pilafs (dishes of rice with shredded meat), fruits served with meats,
nuts (sweetmeats), and the wrapping of foods with delicate sheets of
hammered gold and silver (easily absorbed by the body) all created a
sumptuous and distinctive cuisine. The introduction of peppers from the
Americas forever altered the taste of curry blends of spice mixtures, which
were in turn carried from the Indian subcontinent to the markets and cuisines
of Africa and other parts of Asia, and eventually back to the Caribbean.
Ironically, while certain foods became common to multiple regions, they also
came to be used more and more distinctively as forms of cultural expression.
One aspect of a diverse city life was its embrace of sojourners and the
opportunities for eating out. In India, buying food on the street was rare, but
elsewhere streets and compounds catered to visitors. In eighteenth-century
Qing China, city restaurants served banquets for all levels of clients and
catered to Muslim diets by excluding pork or by taking into account the
Central Asian preference for beef and lamb. Regional tastes and dietary
practices continued to be expressed. Only the world’s urban elites
participated in anything like an international cuisine, as their access to global
connections allowed.
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