All posts by Amanda Herbert

Barbie and the RP

By Amanda E. Herbert

While we’ve never received an RP pitch for a Barbie post (*ahem* get cracking) we have, over the years, featured many amazing and insightful posts on beauty standards, cosmetics, makeup regimes, and the art of gender. Our authors have shown decisively that beauty standards have changed over time, and that while these beauty rules often encourage people to enact idealised versions of femininity and masculinity, individual people — the women and men who populated the past — have interpreted, adopted, furthered, and rejected these standards in their own individual ways.

When I began thinking about this Barbie post, I had a lot to choose from: Alana Martini’s “What’s in an Ancient Egyptian Makeup Bag”; Eugenia Lean‘s “Recipes for the Inner Chamber: Vernacular Manufacturing in early 20th century China,” on the creation of home beauty remedies in modern China; Mobeen Hussain‘s “The Kitchen, Courtyard, and Bazaar: Meditations of ‘Natural’ Health and Beauty,” on the ways that women in interwar India balanced ready-made, commercially-available beauty products with their own homemade cosmetics; and so many more. The RP even did a fabulous special series on Beauty Recipes in 2014, led by my co-editor Jess Clark.

But the post that spoke to me most strongly was this one, written by Daisy Payling in 2019: “Beauty and the Beaumont Magazine: Transgender Make-Up.” Payling blends insights from Trans activists, such as Charlie Craggs, with sources from the past that illuminate the lives, struggles, and triumphs of Trans women and men. In particular Payling focused on the Beaumont Society, the longest running support organisation for the Transgender community, and the past issues of the society’s publication, The Beaumont Magazine. The post shows how organisations and publications like these could be a helpful source of advice, while also offering senses of community, care, and support to members and readers.

This brings us to this vintage 1966 advertisement for “Hair Fair” Barbie.

“…you can change Barbie’s hairstyle, every time you change her costume.”

The quote that Payling uses to open her piece, from Charlie Craggs herself, speaks provocatively to the ad for “Hair Fair” Barbie, above. Craggs talks about makeup as a crucial tool, a powerful mechanism by which to shape identity and self-presentation. It is something to be respected, celebrated, and treated with care. This is something that comes across clearly in “Hair Fair” Barbie, whose close-cropped head can be covered with any number of elaborate wigs. Appearing in 1966, in the midst of the second wave, this advertising campaign celebrates beauty choice and variety. Changing this Barbie’s hair, the ad says, is just as deliberate, desirable, and possible as changing her clothes.

Of course the ad has its limitations, many of which are serious. Everyone in the spot is white, from dolls to humans. Nearly everyone is blonde. There aren’t any boys playing with Barbie. And this Barbie’s look is stereotypically and traditionally feminine, all skirts and dresses — although she does sport a pretty groovy pair of tights around 0:22.

So while we should be cautious about celebrating “Hair Fair” Barbie uncritically, she does have one thing in common with Margot Robbie’s interpretation of the iconic woman-who-does-it-all: she owns her sense of style. The tools of fashion, which can include makeup, hair styles, accessories, clothing, and anything else that we use to decorate, shape, and adorn our bodies, all have, as Payling suggests, “a transformative power.” How we own those transformations is up to us.

A ‘recipe’ for chocolate on a 19th-century cup

Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

By Frederick Fossey-Warren

This porcelain hot chocolate cup from the early 19th century seems decidedly Ottoman. Gilded with gold and over-glazed with an intricate red pattern, the cup is designed to follow the “Egyptian style” that proved immensely popular with colonial Ottoman officials at the turn of the century. In fact the cup is so extravagant that it’s possible it was never actually intended for use, but purchased as a display piece, a succinct symbol of both status and wealth, by a member of the Ottoman elite.

Given its appearance, one could reasonably expect to trace the cup’s origins to a Turkish city such as Istanbul or Ankara. Upon closer inspection, however, the presence of different languages written onto the cup complicate its provenance. While the cup was bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, its origins lie elsewhere. In fact, the cup was constructed in none other than…Paris? So, how did we get here?

After its arrival in the so-called “Old World” in the early 16th century, chocolate slowly but surely became a new court favourite across Europe and, by the end of the 17th century, had become a mainstay in aristocratic circles. It wasn’t long before chocolate began to spread into Asia and Africa, truly becoming one of the world’s first global commodities. As in Europe, given its scarcity and price, in the Ottoman Empire chocolate was initially largely restricted to the nobility, as much a status symbol as a foodstuff.

Initially enjoyed primarily as a drink, chocolate was seen as not only a nourishing treat, but a superfood, a sobering source of energy able to cure or prevent most common ailments. Many saw potential in its import as a commodity, and through its arrival it often contributed to the development of industry and revenue. Given its initial scarcity – chocolate had to be harvested in the Americas, loaded onto ships, and sailed across the Atlantic in a journey that routinely lasted three months – chocolate stayed in high demand, and markets soon opened not just for cacao, but for chocolate ‘accessories.’ These included such objects as chocolatera for dissolving together chocolate paste and sugar, molinillo for frothing hot chocolate, and, of course, cups for drinking, which brings us back to our porcelain cup.

When people consider the movement of luxury goods in the long nineteenth century, it is often taken for granted or assumed that goods primarily moved out of the peripheries of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and into the imperial core of Western Europe. This cup, however, challenges this understanding. From the date and manufacturers mark on the underside of the object, we can tell that this cup, saucer and lid collection was constructed in Paris in 1809. Given its design, it was likely always intended for sale within the Ottoman market.

In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire remained a powerful and, importantly, wealthy force in Eastern Europe, and an attractive market for many across Europe. When, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire expanded to encompass much of the Middle East and North Africa, the tastes of Ottoman elites changed, adopting the styles and fashions of many of their newly incorporated colonial subjects. This chocolate cup was ingeniously crafted to capitalise on these trends, part of an aesthetic and cultural movement that historian Ussama Makdisi has called ‘Ottoman Orientalism’.

Inscription detail. Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

So what were the design features that made this chocolate cup an example of ‘Ottoman Orientalism’? The underside of the saucer features a series of seemingly random Chinese characters. In relation to the cup’s purpose, these four characters, 李唐宋官, roughly translate to ‘Li Tang, Song dynasty official’. While there was a Li Tang in the Song dynasty, and in fact he was an accomplished landscape painter, he had nonetheless died almost seven hundred years prior to the time of this cup’s creation, and almost six hundred years before chocolate’s arrival in China. So why were these Chinese characters included? Simple: to make the cup seem more appealing to prospective buyers, and hence more likely to sell. The inclusion of these Chinese characters, presumably merely copied wholesale from another source, both fed into the intended exoticism of the piece, and attempted capitalise on a long existing market for Chinese porcelain in the Ottoman Empire.

The story of this cup does not, however, merely end with its creation and sale. Just as with the saucer, on the underside of the cup is another short sentence, this time, however, in Urdu. Unlike the Chinese characters, this writing was added after the cup was purchased and offers us a perplexingly poetic phase. The cryptic writing roughly translates to ‘That same diminished consciousness; This same deep target’ and is attributed to one Jannatī, likely a pen-name, meaning ‘the heavenly’. Whoever this Jannatī was, they clearly had some affection for the cup; not only did they write an inscription on its underside, but there is evidence of attempts at restoration, with the gold on the lid having been re-gilded.

Inscription detail. Porcelain chocolate cup, saucer and lid set created in Paris for the Ottoman market and marked in red overglaze, 19th century, Oriental Museum, Durham University. Image courtesy of the author.

When taken together, the elaborate and varied inscriptions on this cup act, in some sense, as a recipe. If a recipe is a set of instructions allowing you to, hopefully, produce something far greater than the sum of its parts, then, for a historian, the cup’s inscriptions act as an invaluable recipe in allowing us to gain a far deeper understanding not only commerce in the early 19th century, but also of chocolate, and its role as one of the world’s first truly global commodities. From South America to France, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire and even China, this porcelain cup combines facets of many different cultures and civilisations in both its purpose and construction. While both the maker of this cup and its first owners are by now long dead, this object they left behind lives on, and continues to tell us much about the world in which they lived.

Frederick Fossey-Warren is a scholar interested in the role of race and ethnicity in modern East African politics. He participated in Durham’s Undergraduate Research Internship (UGRI) programme to conduct research on chocolate in the Durham University collections. He currently studying towards a Master’s in History at Durham.

August Break

"Rest, Rest, I Have No Thought But Rest". Cartoon by Edith Mahier. Illustration in "Jambalaya" Tulane University yearbook, New Orleans, 1916.
“Rest, Rest, I Have No Thought But Rest”. Cartoon by Edith Mahier. Illustration in “Jambalaya” Tulane University yearbook, New Orleans, 1916.

 

Dear RP community members,

We have, once again, reached our annual break. While we’re away, we’ll be spending some quality time with these RP posts:

Jacqueline Soule’s Mesquite Atole – Kúi Wihog

Betsy Golden Kellem’s The Circus Origins of Pink Lemonade

Sharifa Lookman’s Experiencing Historical Techniques through the Color Black at the ROOHTS Summer School

Sally Osborn’s Eighteenth-Century DIY

Elizabeth Hunter’s ‘Dwale’: A Medieval Sleeping Drug in a Seventeenth-Century Receipt Book

When we return, we’ll have exciting news about new directions for the RP. Until then, all best wishes for rest and rejuvenation!

RP Editorial Team

New Work Forum: Continuing the Conversation About Hunger in Violent Appetites

By Carla Cevasco

Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, by Carla Cevasco. Image courtesy of the author.
Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, by Carla Cevasco. Image courtesy of Amanda E. Herbert.

Long before Violent Appetites was a book, it existed in conversation with classmates and colleagues, conference audiences, the other scholars I read and cited, and with readers at The Recipes Project. So it is a joy to return to the conversation here with such a brilliant and generous group of scholars. I am deeply thankful to Peggy Brunache, Eleanor Barnett, Juneisy Hawkins, and Kate Mulry for sharing their thoughts on my book and its place in the field of food history, and to Amanda Herbert for proposing the New Work Forum series. I will conclude the series with a few reflections on each of the essays and how my thoughts on hunger are continuing to evolve in conversation with these authors.

Penobscot people, Berry box/container. Collected by Dr. Frank G. Speck (Frank Gouldsmith Speck/F.G. Speck/FGS), Non-Indian, 1881-1950. Media/Materials- Birchbark, Folded, stitched. Place- Old Town; Penobscot County; Maine; USA. Catalog Number2/8170, National Museum of the American Indian. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/objects/NMAI_30154
Penobscot people, Berry box/container. Collected by Dr. Frank G. Speck (Frank Gouldsmith Speck/F.G. Speck/FGS), Non-Indian, 1881-1950. Media/Materials- Birchbark, Folded, stitched. Place- Old Town; Penobscot County; Maine; USA. Catalog Number2/8170, National Museum of the American Indian. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/objects/NMAI_30154

Brunache’s contribution, drawing on her scholarship about foodways, drawing on her scholarship about foodways, identity, and resistance, centers on how Indigenous peoples have “performed culinary resistance through a politics of food and stood culturally resilient against colonial manipulation and assimilation.”

One of the most striking aspects of completing Violent Appetites in the first year of the covid-19 pandemic was seeing how Indigenous food sovereignty movements across the continent have mobilized in response to the crisis. These movements attest to the power of Native traditional hunger knowledges, which have endured hundreds of years of colonial invasion and stand ready against the crises of the present moment.

One of my hopes is that the concept of hunger knowledges as I’ve developed it will be useful to scholars looking at many different contexts; people have always worked to overcome hunger, and these traditions are vital in confronting hunger in our own time.

Copper-deficient & copper-replete fleeces, Royal Veterinary College. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Copper-deficient & copper-replete fleeces, Royal Veterinary College. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Barnett brings her expertise as a historian of early modern religion as a historian of early modern religion and food to her examination of how “food has long been tied to spiritual beliefs regarding divine intercession,” and analyzes “the centrality of food in the expression and formation of different” Indigenous and colonial “religious identities” in early America.

When I first started writing the book, I did not anticipate how crucial religion would turn out to be, from the theological debates over cannibalism among Protestants and Catholics in early modern Europe, to the southern New England Indigenous Christians whose practices of fasting and repentance mirrored Reform Protestant rituals but were rooted deeply in Native traditions of communal mourning. I especially appreciated Barnett’s description of these beliefs and practices as “spiritual foodways,” a phrase which elegantly encapsulates what it took me many words to discuss.

Beluga whale skull. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Beluga whale skull. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

Hawkins, who specializes in food economies, provisioning, and Anglo-Spanish relations in the colonial American southeast, begins her essay by noting that the field of Food Studies has only recently begun to wrestle with hunger rather than plenty: “What happened when people did not have food? What happened when communities were confronted with the possibility of starvation? This field, which as far as I know has not been officially named, can be understood as Hunger Studies.”

Hunger Studies does exist, but as an applied field that seeks solutions to the problem of hunger in our current moment. It is not a neat parallel to the field of Food Studies, which asks both “what is food?” and “what does it mean?” I believe that soon Hunger Studies will be asking similar questions, as an increasing number of historians including myself, Rachel Herrmann, James Vernon, Nicholas Crawford, and Tom Scott-Smith, among others, have turned to understanding the changing meanings of hunger in different places and times.

And, following on the work of archival theorists like Marisa Fuentes, it is becoming clear that hunger, like many forms of historical inequity, has profound effects on the production of the historical record, as Hawkins explains at the conclusion of her piece.

Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Lightning-blasted tree. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

Finally, Mulry, whose work examines the relationships between environment, health, and the body in the Anglo-Atlantic world, draws out the connections between hunger, colonialism, and imperial demography in her essay: “As imperial authorities sought to increase their own numbers while violently displacing Native peoples, they sought more food. The English and French invaders understood food as an instrument to achieve social and political control,” while Native peoples used food to resist imperial incursion.

As Mulry reminds us, feeding the populace has always been a political project, and hunger is far more often politically imposed than completely inevitable.

I’ve worked on Violent Appetites for the better part of a decade and it’s surreal to finally have the completed book in my hands. I am grateful to everyone at The Recipes Project for using this forum to welcome the book, and look forward to continuing the conversation.

The book may be done, but I will never be finished thinking and talking about food and hunger. More than 38 million people in the United States, including 12 million children, are food insecure as of 2020, with even more going hungry during the pandemic. Hunger is concentrated disproportionately in communities of color. While these numbers are horrifying, beyond the statistics lie many hunger knowledges, the resourceful, ingenious ways that food insecure people survive day by day. In seeking solutions to the problem of hunger, it is crucial not to disregard the strategies that people are already using and have been using for generations. Hunger knowledges deserve to be celebrated as legacies of resilience that can also inform the future of how we fight food scarcity.