ABSTRACT
A few years ago an anthropologist addressing a group of people on a social studies course confessed that before meeting them he nearly went and had his hair cut - that he did not was due to the length of the queue (line) at the barber's. He used this as an illustration of how bodily characters, such as length of hair, are used as symbols, create expectations about conduct and provoke social reactions (Harre, 1968). Put this together with Hallpike's recent generalization (1969) that among men, wearing long hair is equivalent to being outside society while short hair is equivalent to social control - and that in an attenuated form the same principle can be extended to the hair of women. Add to it the Elizabethan John Heywood's proverb 'long hair, short wit', or the French 'tongues cheveux, courte cervelle\ We can then ask what is there about hair, especially in its length, that makes it of such social, even symbolic interest?*
A person's hair is a biological accessory, a very personal, private thing, growing and changing with his bodily condition, and capable of only very limited voluntary regulation by him. Hair is a horny product of the epithelial or skin tissue, and is a character peculiar to mammals. Man is remarkable for the general scantiness of his hair, except on the scalp, where though inferior in hairiness to gibbon and gorilla, he has about twice as many hairs per sq. cm (312) as the orang-utan and nearly three times as many as the chimpanzee. Among mammals man is unique not for his general lack of hair - whale, elephant and hippopotamus are more naked, area for area - but for his complete absence of tactile hairs, such as a cat's whiskers, which are organs of great delicacy. Despite metaphors of his hair
'standing on end' with shock or terror, man's hair is relatively inert. According to physical anthropologists, hair is apparently a true racial character in man, hereditary and unaffected by environment. Racial variables include length of head hair; hairiness of body exclusive of scalp hair; form, texture and colour of hair. In evolutionary terms, an important function of hair has been for protection, especially in serving as an insulator to retain heat, but for human beings this has long ceased to be of much significance (Hooton, 1946, 41, 192-9, 469-75, 483-8; Howells, 1947, 33, 214; Turney-High, 1949, 22). Hair is not only perishable, a wasting asset; it can be lost completely with only social, not physiological disability, or at least minimal physical discomfort.
