Bodies as Palettes

Last week in Physical Anthropology we studied the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, which ran from about 40,000 years ago to about 14,000 years ago. What strikes one immediately is that the people of this period filled their world with art.

The 200 or so caves in southern France and northern Spain with wondrously beautiful paintings on their walls suggest a people who wanted to beautify their living spaces. The graves of people do not have unequal amounts of grave goods in them, suggesting an egalitarian rather than class stratified society. However, these graves are filled with artifacts that these people wore on their bodies every day. They tatoo-ed their skin, and covered the rest with orange manganese dioxide and ochre. They wore rings in their noses, ears, and lips, and bracelets on their arms and ankles. They wore necklaces with large pendants. They wore clothes with thousands of colourful sea-shells stitched into them, and hats of hundreds of beads. These peoples' bodies were artistic palettes. Their utilitarian artifacts were covered in art, as were their weapons. These people were the first undoubted musicians, playing bone flutes. Compared to anything that had come along previously, these people of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe began and sustained a long artistic 'explosion'.

And this makes me wonder about my own body. I am losing my hair rapidly, and so doing anything like colouring, spiking, or crimping it would be absurd. I don't have tattoos, and now that my skin is losing its turgor it is probably a good thing for everyone. I have no piercings or body paint, and the wedding ring I wear is emblematic of my commitment to Denise rather than an artistic statement. The clothes I hang on my body are efficient and comfortable, and can in no way be construed as art. If anything, my body is a statement against art.

But when I look around, I see that I look the same as all of the men of my generation and socio-economic class. Sure, some might have an earing, a tattoo, or a cool haircut, but these are just embellishments to the same cookie cutter design. By comparison to the people of the Upper Paleolithic, we seem to conform to drabness.

I remember in the 1970's the pressure to wear my hair long. I remember feeling kind of trapped: every male of my generation then had long hair, and to have short hair meant something tragic had happened, like cancer, or joining the military. Short hair was deviant, and while we all may have thought we were doing something different, we were all just conforming as much as any other generation conforms. With New Wave in the early 1980's, I cut my hair short and have kept it that way ever since.

In some ways it is not the same with my kids' generation. While they too have to conform to today's fashion, it seems the scope of fashion is much wider than it has been for a while. Aidan, my 13 year old son, presently is wearing his hair longer, but it would be fine if he cut it short as well. Kira likes to wear bright clothes, will wear a dress or jeans, and has a pierced nose.

But it seems my kids are more conservative than most. A walk down Kira's High School hallways is a revelation. People have hair with every colour of the rainbow, and have piercings all over their faces, and in their tongues and navels. Young women wear brightly coloured and very revealing clothes, and the boys' pants show most of their bare butts. Often the exposed skin of both the boys and girls screams out with brightly coloured tattoos. It seems that my kids' generation has begun to treat their bodies as palettes. Good for them. This is a breath of fresh air.