Hairdos and don'ts: Hair symbolism and sexual history in Samoa

Frontiers, 1996 by Mageo, Jeannette Marie

This culturally fantasized sexuality is, as Leach further argues, an integral part of social communication systems and in its communicative aspect may be used to contest more concrete social realities. Obeyesekere's Sinhalese female celibate ascetics began as social victims. Their fantasized sexuality, however, amounted to a contestation of this real disempowerment and an effective contestation at that. These women used their "calling"--represented by their long

matted hair--to forgo marital duties in bed, exerting a sexual "freedom" they would not otherwise have had. In turn, this control over their sexuality signified a control over their lives. In Obeyesekere's view, it was through their manipulation of social symbols--their hair foremost among them--that these ascetics won themselves prestige, an income, and a degree of liberty. Here again the management of hair is a symbol for the control of sexuality, and the control of sexuality is a symbol for other forms of social control; again it is women who are at issue.

It is in light of the cultural body that Leach's argument, rather than Hallpike's, seems the more encompassing. Loose hair signs social freedom while bound or lost hair signs a lack of social freedom; however, these conditions are represented by the body and by its sexuality. Probably this is because it is our sensory experience--our bodily experience--that provides our earliest conceptualizations of self and others. 103 It is, therefore, constitutive of our earliest memories, and these remembered images provide a basis for the part of the mind that fantasizes, the part that Jacques Lacan calls the Imaginary. 104 This basal position in fantasy life gives the body symbolic primacy so that it becomes the root metaphor for all others.

Personal Hair?

So much for the symbolic roots of hair, but what of the personal versus public character of its significance? Once again Leach holds that while body symbols, like hair, may be psychogenetic, when they become a part of public culture they lose unconscious motivational significance for those who employ them in public social life. While in basic agreement with Leach, Obeyesekere adds that public body symbols may become articulated with deep personal significance for certain individuals, as they are among female Sinhalese ascetics who wear long matted hair. 105 This articulation occurs because, when personal history alienates the individual from the social order, linking public symbols with personal complexes provides an avenue of reintegration.

The rule by which one can judge if this articulation has occurred, according to Obeyesekere, is that public symbols are involuntarily employed. 106 Sinhalese ascetics do not purposefully grow matted locks but believe their locks to be generated by the deity they serve. In contrast, when body symbols are institutionalized and when their use is voluntary (as in the case of shaved Burmese Buddhist monks), they cannot necessarily be said to have personal significance. For the possessed Sinhalese priestess, body symbols are intercommunicative (social) and intracommunicative (psychological). For the Burmese Buddhist