Cultural Biography of a Comb - Research Paper Example

CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY OF A COMB (Object Biography and its Social Life) Introduction The idea that objects, just like people, can have specific biography of their own is quite an amazing assertion. It ascribes to objects what is normally associated only with living things, in particular, only with people. It is therefore a bit startling to realize how objects can acquire a biography, since the very word itself denotes something that is alive, from the prefix of bio or life. Biography is an account or history of a person's life and in this regard, object biography details the oftentimes surprising life of an object, but in this discussion, it connotes something is wonderful about an object as it goes through its so-called “social life” as it moves through people who made it, acquired it, exchanged it for value or gave it away as a gift. Along this line, objects become imbued with a life of their own, accumulating a series of values and symbolisms which a person can give to it, depending on whether it is seen as a commodity within a certain context or time period but then re-incarnates itself as a certain kind of thing from a cultural perspective, that is, something which is very unique to make it a singular object different from other things. Common things normally are viewed as mere commodities that in the view of economic theory is just a thing that has a use value and therefore allowed to circulate in a capitalist market because people ascribe value to it in terms of its exchange value, as determined by an objective measurement or criteria, usually its monetary value. However, certain things as commodities will quite oddly defy easy classification of being a commodity and acquire so much value to render it something beyond exchange. This is because an object may have acquired or embedded itself to a certain extent within a society as something extremely valuable, or to a certain individual as more than being an ordinary everyday object; in other words, it has acquired a life of its own. Discussion The cultural biography that will be discussed in this paper is that of a common comb. It details how an ordinary but somewhat “extraordinary” comb acquired an interesting life history as it went along in the various cultures in which it first originated, made out of one of the most durable natural materials in the world, how it passed from one culture to the next, and how it still is imbued with too much meaning and significance even in today's modern world of plastics. The comb I am talking about is one made out of turtle shell, one of the hardest-occurring materials in the world such that it endured from one generation to the next with hardly any dents on it. Material Qualities – there are many kinds of combs today and it is incidentally also one of the oldest things mankind has ever made or invented. Both sexes use a comb to disentangle their hair and to make themselves more presentable, to themselves and to other people. It can be used likewise to arrange their hair in whatever fashion they like it, and to also hold hair in place. There are combs made out of materials such as wood, bone, metal or in more modern times made out of either hard rubber or the common material used today, plastic, which is a recent invented material from the technology of crude oil extraction. A comb is generally speaking a flat device used to disentangle, arrange or straighten out the hair on a person's head. It is a device used for a very specific purpose like smoothening the hair to give it a glossy appearance. The shape, appearance and size of a comb can vary considerably but the more common ones are those which are flat with a series or rows of small teeth precisely set to straighten hair. Everyday combs are pocket combs, small combs designed to put inside a pocket for convenience, and there are loose combs or fine-toothed combs, the teeth set close very near together. Artifacts excavated from anthropological digs around the world attest to the comb as a vital object even in ancient times. Various cultures worldwide had made combs of many shapes and sizes, depending on the whim of the users but at the same time pointing out to practicality. It can be said ancient women gave much importance to their personal appearance, especially those women who belong to the royalty and upper levels of society. Combs recovered from tombs and burial sites showed how people attach value to their combs, even in death and in the afterlife. But the comb I am talking about in this paper is not your ordinary comb. It is made out of turtle shell, one of the hardest but also pliable materials around that can be found in nature. It is the shield that protects the vital organs of a turtle, including its head, and is made out of bony elements from both dermal and skeletal bones of the turtle. In fact, it is hard enough to be found in fossils dating back thousands of years, the only like part of a turtle that will survive. Scientific name of a turtle shell is its carapace and is used to identify different species based on its patterns. A key component is keratin, which is a fibrous protein, just like human outer skin, hair and nails. It may just be a pure coincidence that keratin in turtle shells is used to comb for keratin, in hair. Because of its durability and longevity as a native material, various cultures found it a very useful material for making things. It is highly valued in some native cultures of the world, especially those located in coastal areas like the Pacific Ocean where the locals take painstaking effort to clean the shell after eating the fleshy parts of the turtle either as meat or as aphrodisiac. Island nations like Samoa, Vanuatu, Solomons, Hawaii (before becoming an American state), Tahiti, and as discussed in an earlier paper, consider shells (turtle shells) as a part of the kula system in theTrobriands area of Papua New Guinea (Myers & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2001, p. 7). A well-combed hair enhances the aesthetic appearance of the person as well prevent any hair loss due to entanglements of the hair strands. This is why people attach so much effort in the making of a comb and a comb made from turtle shell takes more than the usual manual effort. It essentially consists of first drying the turtle shell, then cutting it into its desired size and shape, and then making the teeth as fine as possible or as desired, using filing instruments to make some serrations on the material. Tortoise shell is generally preferred as material for comb making but in places where this is not readily available, such as in landlocked areas like Africa, then ivory or animal horn is equally suited for the purpose of making combs, because shell, ivory and horn are molded by softening it first by slow heating and when it cools, it hardens and retains its shape. A comb is not only a practical strip of teeth-lined device for removing the snarls of the hair but also in many places, intentionally left on the hair of women, especially. In this aspect of its use, it is considered as a fashion accessory, part of the art of female grooming. A comb also is used to remove anything undesirable from the hair, such as lint, pieces of dirt, sand or even the worst thing imaginable found on hair, mites and hair lice. This is why a fine-toothed comb that is made of turtle shell is particularly suited for this hygienic purpose, because once this type of comb is run through the hair, the lice is literally taken or combed out. The comb serves as a kind of sieve that ensnares the lice, the finer the teeth, the better that comb is for this purpose. With the advent of capitalism and its mass-production methods and facilities, the art of comb making that saw its heydays in the 18th and 19th centuries is gradually dying out and in its place are the plastic combs very common today. Tortoise-shell combs are now considered as the cultured skills of a bygone era; it is now a lost art and replaced by fake or imitation combs. These ancient combs are now usually found only in museums as part of their collections in which these combs are considered as works of art, masterpieces or cultural antiques that show how a particular culture regards personal grooming, especially with long hair of women who are naturally anxious to spend a great deal of time combing their hair. Combs are a universal object, as it can be found practically anywhere in the world, even in some quite primitive tribal societies. The fine art of comb making using indigenous materials such as tortoise shell is slowly being lost in a materialistic world that prefers plastic, speed in production and low cost as compared to the old combs of yesteryears which took weeks to make as these were hand-crafted by artisans. The introduction of celluloid (plastic) in 1869 helped avert the extinction of endangered species. Origination – the particular comb talked about and discussed in this paper came from a tribe of North American Indians, but I unfortunately could no longer recall which particular tribe it was as mentioned to me by my grandmother. At any rate, the making and use of combs can be considered as a human universal, something that is common to all societies. Anthropologists like to call this phenomenon as a cultural universal that transcends location, distance and geography. Among the members of this tribe, a tortoise comb was a very valuable object, reserved for use only by members belonging to the higher hierarchical strata of their tribe. Those who wear these combs were considered as wealthy too, because a tortoise comb is quite expensive in those days. It takes several months to fashion out one comb out of turtle shell and this is further to be enhanced by its intricate design and inlaid with some additional material on its flat portion as a show of love for the craft of making combs. Some materials used for this purpose were feathers of a particular rare bird to signify the high rank of its intended user, usually royal members. The possession of these highly-prized tortoise combs was indicative of individuation or singularization, representing the opposite end of the Western way of looking at things as a usual commodity because the combs were made with the intent of making them highly individualized; no one comb is similar to another one in terms of size, shape, design or inlays; each is unique. A comb made as a labor of love, sort of speaking, served as a cultural marker too in terms of what it signifies to the user and in certain ways, to the entire tribe who take pride in it. It acquires the cultural biography of that particular tribe and cannot be considered as a commodity (Kopytoff, 1986, p. 64) except in the rare cases of it being used in a commodity exchange, such as conflict mediation or signifying the cessation of hostilities among warring tribes, as a peace offering. Some of the oldest artifacts ever recovered by archaeologists from historic excavations are combs; their existence is indicative of an advanced civilization like that of the Persians some 5,000 years B.C.E. (before current era). In those ancient times, combs were used for a variety of purposes other than straightening out hair; it was used as a head ornament, to keep skullcaps in a secure place on the head (as sort of a fastener), and historically, primarily for delousing. As far as I can remember it, my grandmother had mentioned some Indian tribes (native Americans) living on the Pacific Northwest, most probably Oregon or Washington, as the source of this shell comb. It is a finely-crafted comb as attested by its sheen and smooth edges, polished to perfection. Based on my initial research, the most likely tribe that made this tortoise shell comb is either the Walla-Walla tribe, the Coquille tribe or the Umatilla tribe in Oregon or the Salishan, Shahaptian, or Shoshonean tribe in the case of Washington state. These tribes are the most likely source as they lived near the Pacific coast before the arrival of the colonizers to explore the area. History - my grandmother is now eighty-two years old, and she suffered a mild stroke a year earlier. This had affected her memory a bit when I tried to ask her the details of the comb, how it came into her possession. Anyway, she said her mother gave it to her as a gift when she married. It was the father of my great-grandmother who originally obtained the comb from a fur trader in the time when Oregon and Washington states were still virgin territories and considered frontier. The nationality of that fur trader is now lost; he could be Russian, English, French, or even a Spanish buccaneer, as there were many trappers and fur traders around that time between the period of the first European explorers landing on the coast of Oregon sometime in 1543 and the subsequent expeditions of Lewis and Clark in 1805. My guess is that the comb was by then acquired by that trapper or trader, including fur, as part of an exchange involving firearms. The Indian tribes were constantly at war with each other, and acquisition of a modern weaponry like rifles extended significant advantage to those who managed to obtain them. A fur trader would be extremely glad to exchange a few pieces of rifles and ammunition for valuable fur; it may have even involved training the Indians how to use it, to aim and fire, to clean it and how to store it properly where it will not get wet or get rusty, ready to use in any emergency. After that initial exchange, the comb went from the fur trader to the father of my great-grandmother, as he was a town merchant back then selling various goods in his store. The comb was then given to my great-grandmother who gave it to my grandmother, to my own mother, and now me. In the entire period spanning several generations, the comb did not further enter into exchange as a commodity but instead acquired its biography of ownership. It became a family heirloom as part of an inheritance; valued for its age, rarity and oddity (Jenkins, 1994, p. 242). Contemporary social life - I consider the comb as a brand-name commodity, its brand being that of a thing made by a native Indian tribe and once used by its royalty although it had been taken out of the regular objective economy of the visible kind of transactions denominated in money or any other usual currency. It reminds me of those banana leaves used in Trobriands in which their kula system of exchange allows ordinary things to become valuable, because the previous owners' personalities had adhered to those objects. It is the same case here with the tortoise comb, the spirits of my ancestors had somehow stuck in it. It is valuable to me, as its present owner, because it has the sanctified status of a relic. Its association with a glorious past precludes it from being put up for sale for any reason at any price. I intend to bequeath it to my kids as a memento of things past, present and future. It is now an integral part of our heritage. Conclusion Plastic products today are ubiquitous and they have become a part of the global mass consumption culture (Miller & Slater, 2007, p. 5). Plastic combs have entered this consumption culture because they are very cheap, generally speaking (although there are expensive ones too), and plastic is characteristic of a very modern lifestyle, a wasteful and conspicuous consumption mentality in a “throwaway” society in the literal sense of this word (Lucas, 2002, p. 5), much like the Styrofoam cups we throw away daily after drinking a cup of coffee at a local shop. But a tortoise comb, unlike plastic combs, cannot be melted to become a commodity again. It cannot be a part of the capitalist process of constant innovation through its so-called creative destruction (Foster, 2008, p. 10) but an antique with the multiple valuations of historical, artistic, sentimental and personal values (Clouse, 2008, p. 3) because of its authenticity, culture and tradition. Reference List Clouse, A. (2008). Narratives of value and the Antiques Roadshow: “A game of recognitions.” The Journal of Popular Culture, 41(1), 3-20. Foster, R. J. (2008). Commodities, brands, love and kula: Comparative notes on value creation. Anthropological Theory, 8(1), 9-25. Jenkins, D. (1994). Object lessons and ethnographic displays: Museum exhibitions and the making of American anthropology. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36(2), 242-270. Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64-91). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lucas, G. (2002). Disposability and dispossession in the twentieth century. Journal of Material Culture, 7(1), 5-22. Miller, D. & Slater, D. (2007). Moments and movements in the study of consumer culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Myers, F. R. & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2001). Art and material culture: A conversation with Annette Weiner. In F. R. Myers (Ed.), The empire of things: Regimes of value and material culture (pp. 1-23). 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