Reflections-Crucibles of Change: Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Live after 1500

Reflections-Crucibles of Change: Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Live after 1500

Article: “Crucibles of Change: Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Life after 1500” • Authors: Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton • The Source: In the Balance: Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998) • The Online Source: Bridging World History -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

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

In the realm of food, clothing, and body art, cultural differences 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, 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

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 • 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

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

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

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 sign of marital happiness; by this it was suggested that a woman’s religious devotion should be directed to her husband

In a similar vein, Christian European urban dress bound female forms, restricted movement, and represented increasing levels of male control after 1500 • Until the seventeenth century female dress was linked to devotional and virtuous roles and meanings, with sexuality hinted at but not expressed • 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

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

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 • 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 exorbitant 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

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 sugar producing 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 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

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

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 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

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

Reflections-Crucibles of Change: Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Live after 1500