Money, Aging, and Facial Piercing

I'm currently writing a review of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (a magnificent book, an overwhelming anthropological takedown of the discipline of economics), and am straining to refrain from saying much about it now. But one of countless intriguing observations in the book connects up with something I've been thinking about a lot recently: adornment and its transformations throughout the human life cycle. It's come to seem to me, in particular, that one might best look at the facial piercings and the hair experiments of people aged roughly 12 to 30 almost literally as secondary sex characteristics: like the appearance of acne or the change of voice, these partially exosomatic features (they literally pierce the boundary between the body and the culture through which the body moves) now seem to me impossible to separate from the matter of, as Kierkegaard says, the stages of life's way.

When I was younger I took for granted that the hair experiments would come to an end at some point. But I could not quite understand, nor did I really think about, the question why they would end. Hair is peculiar in that it affords different possibilities at different stages of life; an adolescent male naturally has more freedom to experiment with androgyny, and to beautify himself, than a middle-aged male, in large part because there is more hair there, it can be worn long and full, it can hang down in the eyes, and so on.

I also assumed the piercings would fall away at some unspecified future moment, but never asked why. I suppose that unlike the hair, they could in principle be sustained into one's autumnal years. But the perception of them would be different; now it would be a matter of 'sticking it out', of insisting on keeping the outward signifiers of an inward hormonal activity that everyone knows to have slowed down long ago. So one gives up, and blends in, and no longer considers himself a player in the game of self-display.

Representing the other prominent gender, there are of course the grandes dames who never give up, who pile on the brooches and bracelets, and spend ever-increasing hours at the hairdresser, in exactly the same measure as their nubility wanes: they double up on the outward signifiers of beauty, but the actual social possibilities these signifiers afford necessarily contract.

But here is where Graeber's account of the origins of money has me intrigued. He writes:

Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful (145).

This account seems perfectibly plausible, yet it leaves me wondering: if this is the case, then why don't old, grey, bald men lose interest in money? To put this another way: I miss my nose ring less and less with each passing year (some who know me will have noticed that a hole remains, one that could easily accommodate a stud if I should ever choose to insert one), and simultaneously I grow ever more concerned about the meagreness of my retirement savings. The extension of adornments for use as money must therefore have involved a substantial transformation or expansion of the conceptual role these items played. Otherwise, the accumulation of money, like the display of facial piercings, would be simply an age-specific stage, an epiphenomenal expression of a temporary hormonal shift.

I suspect that the transformation has precisely to do with the shift from display to accumulation. Why put it in your nose when you can put it in the bank, and let it cause you to shine indirectly with an aura of importance, even at an age when you are now grizzled and coming apart, and any amount of direct adornment of the body would be of little use? I suspect also that this shift has much to do with the ongoing importance of the adornment of women: both of  young women, who can themselves serve, in exchange for jewelry and other gifts, as a sort of adornment of grizzled men (vestiges of what Graeber calls the 'human economy'); and of old women, who can see no brighter option than to keep participating in the human economy that absorbed them at an early age, even if they are forced to compensate for their ever-diminishing value on this perfidious market with ever-chunkier adornments.

I suspect finally that if men could just remain androgynous ephebes, with their thick bangs hanging down into their eyes, then it would be enough for them to adorn themselves with a piercing or two, or a whale tooth or two, or some red paste made from a camwood bar, spread on the body as a cosmetic (144); and it's only the process of aging that precipitates the shift to accumulation, one of the more irksome consequences of which is our patriarchy.

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Comments

[Bennett Gilbert]

I got my first piercings when I was over 40: my septum, which I had wanted done from first I saw such a thing, because my nose was a source of ridicule during my childhood. Over a few years I got a dozen more body piercings. I also took up getting tattooed, which I plotted very carefully, taking a year with each design. I wore the septum until a few years ago, and the rest after coming out for a recent surgery I have not replaced. Early on I began to feel that tattoos were much more important, more complex---they exist for so many reasons and express so many things---and for that reason I shall probably always continue getting them. I miss the piercings because they were part of a happily assertive stretch of sexuality. When I saw both piercings & ink in others, I know they usually represent thoughts, often profound & very touching thoughts, on sexuality and also great thoughts about many others of the more important things in life. Seeing them everywhere now cheers me: it's living in an emblematized world, each thinking through his or her own and committing to them; and also it speaks a freer, queerer, stronger, more honest world than the one I see elsewhere around me--and than the world I grew up in. Display is communication, accumulation is hiding away. Sylvia Bedford called greed the acceptable vice of old age. I think this is true to a degree, if it is comforting and harmlessly pursued. But older people ought to display, too---because it's a good thing for them to have sex; and they ought to communicate too, because they sometimes have well enough tired of giving a pass to needless suffering and their stakes need not be so much with their private futures as with common or enduring goods.