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

Frontiers, 1996 by Mageo, Jeannette Marie

The "Hair" Controversy in Anthropology

Leach's argument in "Magical Hair" has two strands. First, Leach suggests that cross-culturally the head represents the penis and head hair, semen. 8 Extending the logic of these associations, Leach argues that long hair expresses unrestrained sexuality and that removing the hair expresses sexual restraint, as in celibacy or castration. A decade later C. R. Hallpike rejects Leach's equations (between loose hair and sexuality, and between hair removal and castration) because women as well as men sometimes shave their heads during funeral rites and because celibate ascetics may adorn themselves with long hair. 9 Contra Leach, Hallpike proposes that long hair symbolizes freedom from social regulation and short or bound hair, subordination to social authority. Later still, P. Hershman agrees with Leach as to the general cultural significance of hair but argues that in its ritual uses hair may convey more local meanings. 10 Recently Anthony Synnott has criticized Leach and Hallpike for offering interpretations of hair that involve "one-on-one equations of symbols and meanings.11 In a structuralist vein, Synnott suggests that hair makes oppositional meanings, for example, meanings differentiating men and women.

Returning to Leach's argument, the second strand is that, when symbols like hair are public and shared, they constitute a form of social communication and exist apart from private complexes and from the unconscious motivations

associated with these complexes. Studying the hairdos of Sinhalese female ascetics, Gananath Obeyesekere rejoins that, while Leach is right that the primary function of public symbols is communicative rather than psychological, individuals may borrow public symbols to conceptualize and express private complexes.12 Doing so provides them with an avenue whereby their complexes can be integrated in public cultural understandings and whereby the alienated individual can be reintegrated into society. Cultural meaning systems are continually reinvented by this integrative process, since the articulation of private complexes with public symbols results in the creative adaptation of the pertinent public symbols.

In contrast to Melford E. Spiro, Obeyesekere makes a sharp distinction between symbols that are involuntarily employed by the individual and those that are voluntarily employed or that are institutionalized. Spiro had anticipated the idea that public symbols can be used to express private complexes in his work on hair in Burmese Buddhism. 13 Spiro studied monks who shave their

heads, a public symbol of their celibacy and asexuality; however, Spiro also believed that their shaved heads, eyebrows, and eyelashes (which make them resemble a newborn infant) express unresolved dependency needs. Obeyesekere counters that Spiro's argument--which applies to all Burmese Buddhist monks--is too broad, since it cannot be established that monks generally shave their hair as an expression of unresolved dependency. Shaving one's hair is merely a requirement, voluntarily undertaken, of joining a monastery, which an individual may do for a host of reasons. 14