Content area
Full text
Hair is one of the classical foci of scholarly musing about the body, attaining this focal status through the seminal essay of Edmund Leach, "Magical Hair." 1 My intention is to draw the strands of this debate into a coherent conversation and to contribute to the colloquy by exploring transformations of feminine sex roles in Samoa from contact to the present. I do so by viewing changes in hair styles as indices of changes in these roles, arguing that the rules for hairdos that pertained to young women in precontact Samoa paralleled "dos and don'ts" for their sexual behavior and that changes in the former and the latter coincided. I use historical and ethnographic sources to document these changes, as well as data collected during my own eight-year residence in Samoa from 1981 to 1989.
As long as there have been chroniclers of Samoan culture, hair has been a symbol of import. When the British consul William Churchward resided in Samoa between 1881 to 1884, he observed a tropical profusion of hair styles and a ubiquitous preoccupation with the arrangement of hair:
One can rarely pass through a village without seeing some branch of hairdressing, either cutting, oiling, combing, liming, or shaving .... A flower is never more than a second or two in the hands . . . before it is transferred to the hair. When feasting or visiting, coronets and garlands, most elaborately woven with the greatest possible taste from all sorts of bright-hued flowers, berries and variegated leaves, invariably mixed with the high-scented leaf of the Musooe, are worn by both men and women, who never lose an opportunity of so adorning themselves.
Another . . . habit is, by the continued application of lime, to artificially produce a light-colored hair ... or ... to stain it a deep red .... The light color is .... produced by plastering the hair once or twice a week with a thick coating, well rubbed and combed in, of lime burnt from the coral-rock. This is allowed to remain during the day, but is washed out in the evening .... The
men present the appearance of... sunburnt barristers .... When these white heads are set off with bright-colored flowers and leaves, the effect, contrasting with...