Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
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people, body hair was both readily removable and remarkably idiosyncratic in its rate of return. Hair’s unusual visibility and malleability allowed numerous, conflicting interpretations. In the midst of violent contestation over Indian policy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those conflicting interpretations loomed large in American racial taxonomies.
It is worth emphasizing that these taxonomies are the product of European and Euro-American points of view. The few extant written accounts of Native attitudes toward hair, such as Jefferson’s (“They say it likens them to hogs”), are filtered through imperial lenses. Moreover, although the writers described here often mentioned both female and male hair removal, most of the debate over Indian depilation focused on male bodies, and specifically male beards. The absence of prolonged discussion of other parts of the body—such as the female pubic region—suggests an intriguing feature of early American natural history: with regard to body hair, at least, Indian men were the object of naturalists’ most meticulous deliberations. Given the partial nature of these accounts, they might best be approached not as conclusive descriptions of so-called Indian bodies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but as a window into the perceptions, anxieties, and curiosities of the dominant culture. Through that window we may observe a set of questions about the nature of difference that persist to our time: What explains variation in human bodies? How do particular environments influence the expression of heritable traits? What, in the end, is “race”?
THE USE OF hair as an index of political capacities has roots in Enlightenment natural philosophy. When Linnaeus introduced his famous system of taxonomical nomenclature in 1735, he began by asserting four distinct “varieties” of Homo sapiens. Hair color, type, and amount (“black, straight, thick,” “yellow, brown, flowing”) were the leading indicators of each variety, followed in turn by each group’s alleged political characteristics, such as “regulated by customs” or “governed by caprice.”16 Buffon similarly joined body hair to capacities for reason and civility when claiming that the absence of body hair on “the American savage” reflected a deeper lack of will and motivation. The Indians’ efforts represented not the deliberate exercise of reason but rather “necessary action” produced by animal impulse. “Destroy his appetite for victuals and drink,” he declared, “and you will at once annihilate the active principle of all his movements.”17 The political implications of this physiological inertia were clear to Buffon: “[N]o union, no republic, no social state, can take place among the morality of their manners.”18 Hairlessness was thus thought to indicate whether indigenous peoples might be treated as equal subjects, or whether some inherent “feebleness” precluded incorporation into “civilized” modes of life.19
These hierarchical distinctions were themselves steeped in humoral theories dating to the classical age. Humoral theory proposed that bodies were not bounded by the envelope of the skin but were instead profoundly permeable to diet, climate, sleep, lunar movements, and other external influences. Maintaining appropriate constitutional balance among the four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—necessitated careful exchange between inside and outside, hot and cold, wet and dry. One’s resulting “complexion,” including body hair, was thought to reveal the balance of humors within, a balance as much moral as physiological.20 This humoral vision was racialized as well as gendered: for European women, a pale, porcelain complexion was particularly prized; while for men, lush beard growth was thought to imply a healthy constitution. Although fashions in white men’s whiskers varied across time, region, religion, occupation, and military status (Jefferson himself was generally clean-shaven, as were most U.S. presidents before Lincoln), most eighteenth-century naturalists echoed Galenic medical theory in equating thick beards with philosophical wisdom.21
Hence the moral and physiological question, Was the Indian’s seemingly smooth skin similarly subject to external influence? If so, which influences, exactly? Given the weighty political implications of their conclusions, European and Euro-American writers energetically debated the extent to which Indian complexion might be affected by food, weather, and mode of life. In a 1777 book used as a standard reference on Indians in both Europe and the United States until well into the nineteenth century, Scottish historian William Robertson concluded that the answer was no: the hairless skin of the Americans instead provided evidence of “natural debility.”22 “They have no beard,” he wrote in his History of the Discovery and Settlement of North America, “and every part of their body is perfectly smooth,” a “feebleness of constitution” mirrored in their aversion to “labour” and their incapacity for “toil.”23 Robertson insisted that the “defect of vigour” indicated by the Indian’s “beardless countenance” stemmed not from rough diet or harsh environment but from an inherent “vice in his frame.”24 Although “rude tribes in other parts of the earth” subsist on equally simple fare, he maintained, Indians alone remained “destitute of [this] sign of manhood.”25
Robertson was challenged on exactly that point by Samuel Stanhope Smith, later president of Princeton University. In the influential Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, Smith argued that apparent differences between white and Indian bodies were overblown. “The celebrated Dr. Robertson,” Smith chided in 1787, joined “hasty, ignorant observers” in claiming that “the natives of America have no hair on the face, or the body,” thus binding him “to account for a fact which does not exist.” Although “careless travelers” saw a “deficiency” of hair and presumed a “natural debility of constitution,” Indians were no different “from the rest of the human race” in this regard. As Smith concluded, the “hair of our native Indians, where it is not carefully extirpated by art, is both thick and long.”26 In Smith’s perspective, the “common European error” that “the natives of America are destitute of hair on the chin, and body” was vile not simply because it revealed a striking observational ineptness but more importantly because it ran counter to Genesis. Smith stressed the influence of diet, grooming, and other habits on perceived differences in hair growth as a way to affirm scriptural teachings on the unity of creation.27
As Smith’s essay on the causes of human variety suggests, lurking in descriptions of hair removal was a pressing concern: whether purposeful activity might effect lasting changes to physical form. From where did apparent differences between races, sexes, or species arise, if not from separate creations? The great German natural philosopher Johann Blumenbach, for instance, proposed that the “scanty” hair typical of “Americans” could indeed result from daily grooming. Repeated “mutilations” such as “extirpat[ing] the beard” and “eradicating the hair in different parts of the body,” he claimed, could result in more permanent differences in form.28 For Blumenbach, Indian hair removal exemplified how human variation might be “occasioned by . . . artificial means.”29 The English naturalist James Cowles Prichard flatly rejected this perspective. Declaring variation in the “quantity of hair that grows on the human body” (particularly the “deficiency” of hair “ascribed to all the American nations”) to be one of the “well-known differences between races,” Prichard scoffed at the idea that such persistent differences might be acquired by plucking and shaving.30 Where Blumenbach and others “conjectured that the habit of pulling out the hair through many generations” may produce distinct varieties of people, hairlessness was far too general a trait “to be ascribed to so accidental a cause.”31 Instead, in a passage that augured Darwin’s controversial theory of sexual selection, Prichard argued that an “instinctive perception of human beauty . . . implanted by Providence” helped “direct” men in their marriages, ultimately shaping the divergent appearances of the human form. This providential love of beauty (which Prichard assumed to favor denuded skin) acts “as a constant principle of improvement,” akin to man’s selective breeding of particularly fine animal specimens. Prichard thus explained the relative hairlessness of humans through reference to a divinely implanted aesthetic preference.32 Prichard offered no indication of how Providence might account for the fact, as Blumenbach put it, that some parts of the human body, such as the armpit or groin, were evidently “more hairy than in brute animals,” or the equally confounding idea that Europeans might be hairier than Indians.33 Smooth, hairless