Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Curiosity and Method, Princeton, April 9, 2011

The Polish Plait, or, An Illness of the Hair

I've already mentioned that this coming Superbowl Sunday is going to be one of the best I've ever spent: I'll be busy talking about hair with a bunch of effete Brooklynites.

Quite independently of my preparation for this debut as a hair counsellor, I have just happened upon a number of references to an important chapter in our capillary history that has previously quite escapted my attention. I am speaking here of the plica polonica, which was long thought to be an illness, most commonly diagnosed in Poland, whose primary symptom was matted, clumpy, dreadlock-like hair.

I first came across a reference to the Polish plait in François Bernier's 1669 letter to Jean Chapelain, written from Shiraz in Persia, describing the appearance and practices of the yogis he had seen during his sojourn in India: "There are some [yogis] who have hair that falls to half-way down their thigh, and that is matted into branches like the massive hairs of our water-dogs, or rather like the hair of those who suffer from the illness from Poland that we call the 'Polish plait'. I saw in many places ones who held an arm, and sometimes both arms, elevated and stretched continually above their heads."

I was quickly able to turn up a number of medical treatises, mostly from the 19th century, that identify the Polish plait variously as 'a sort of trichoma', a 'strange illness' or a 'hair disorder'. The 1834 Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine informs us that its frequencey in Poland results from a long tradition, going back to the 11th century, of wearing the hair "after the manner of the Tartar and some Indian tribes," namely, in "a single tuft of hair being left to grow from the top of the scalp." The poorer inhabitants of Poland, "being wretchedly lodged and clothed, and exposed to the combined injurious influence of a marshy soil and a damp variable climate, the general cutaneous exhalation is at all times below the healthy standard, and ... hence arises the greatly increased gowrth of this portion of the hair, and the unnatural quantity of viscid secretion which is at the same time thrown out."

Now by now you are surely thinking: how could there be an illness of the hair? If it clumps, or split ends emerge, or any other such salonfähig problem arises, it can simply be cut off. This is a concern for beauticians, not physicians. Or is it? The author of the Cyclopaedia entry tells of a patient, a boy of about fifteen years of age, who "lay in a most filthy state, and his black hair, knotted long and matted together, gave out an intolerable stench." It is related that the Polish phyisician in attendance strongly opposed the possibility of "cutting off the hair, on the ground that the humour exuded on the hair might turn in on the brain and cause apoplexy."

Lest we presume that this is just a problem of the benighted past, it should be noted that there is an article in a medical journal from March, 2000, bearing the title "Plica polonica in the 21st Century." The abstract, translated haltingly from the German, reads as follows:

We describe a young man presenting with dreadlocks. There are remarkable similarities with the so called plica polonica, that historically had been treated with long courses of mercury. Apparently very important in the 18th century, the interest for this hair-disorder appears to be lost in specialized medical literature. In contrast dreadlocks, a recent hairstyle are frequently encountered. Lack of other sources various websites provide dermatologists with answers to questions regarding complications. Fortunately a simply haircut is today treatment enough.

Now I had put this curiosity behind me until by chance this evening I stumbled across the intriguely titled 1653 book of Thomas Hall, the Comarum akosmiai: The Loathsomnesse of Long Haire: or, A Treatise Wherein you have the Question stated, many Arguments against it produc'd, and the most materiall Arguments for it refell'd and answer'd, with the concurrent judgement of Divines both old and new against it. With an Appendix against Painting, Spots, Naked Breasts, &c.

I hope to be able to get back to that last part of the title soon, but what jumped out at me given my recent encounters with this strange diagnosis was the dedicatory poem, "To the Long-hair'd Gallants of these Times." It begins with some delightful couplets:

Go Gallants to the Barbers, go 

Bid them your hairy Bushes mow.

God in a Bush did once appeare,

But there is nothing of him here.

And so on. But then already by the fifteenth line or so we are told of the horrible wrath a vengeful God has let loose on Poland:

Have you not been inform' o'th' hand

Of God on Poland lately laid;

Enough to make all Lands afraid,

And your long dangles stand an end?

Feare him that did that Plica send,

And those sad Crawlers: and hath more

Unheard of Judgements still in store.

It's interesting in this connection, and I won't dwell at length here, to reflect on the semiotics of dreadlocks in the Euro-American sphere. They are supposed to come from Jamaica, and to be a transposition of a hairstyle 'naturally' suited to African heads onto heads that can only cultivate them with great effort. But we see here that the dreadlock in the European imagination originally came from Poland, or, rather, from a country on the Eastern frontier of Europe that had allowed itself to be influenced by the barbarian practices of the Tartars of deepest Eurasia: the nomads who ate raw meat and drank blood. I suspect that the association of matted hair with the Afro-Caribbean and African-American cultural sphere is itself the transposition of prejudices that are much more deeply rooted than most will ever know.

Let's Talk about Hair

All I ever wanted to do was to write, but my Cabinet colleagues think writing is better in combination with events. So if you are in the New York area next week please do come to the Brooklyn Flea to hear me, along with a wonderful panel of distinguished speakers, speaking about hair. Well, not so much hair, really, as the idea of hair, but of course you already knew that. 

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"Fair for Knowledge: Hair"

Featuring Laurel Braitman (historian of science), Barbara Cassin (philosopher and philologist), Cécile Guilbert (essayist), Justin E. H. Smith (philosopher), John Strausbaugh (author), and Sophie Wahnich (historian), seated at special tables designed by artist Gareth Long

An event organized by Cabinet and co-presented as part of Villa Gillet's "Walls and Bridges" series

Date: Sunday, 30 January 2011, 2–6 pm
Location: Brooklyn Flea, 1 Hanson Place (at Flatbush Avenue; map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary.



Designed to encourage an informal, social, and open mode of learning, Cabinet's series of "fairs for knowledge" aims to create bridges between specialists and the general public by providing unusual venues for short one-on-one discussions between an expert and a member of the general public. In this first installment, six writers will be seated at special tables placed between the regular stalls of the Brooklyn Flea and be ready to engage the public in conversation on a topic that occupies our minds a great deal but is considered too lowly to be worthy of serious reflection—hair.

Come and brush up on “hair plucking” among anxious captive animals; Mary Magdalene’s hair as described in the Bible; fashion, hairdos, and underwear; hairlessness as a signifier of rationality in the history of philosophy; the exceptional hairstyles of rock stars; shaved women and the symbolic loss of power in the French revolution; and more!

To read more about Villa Gillet, click here. To read more about the Walls and Bridges program, click here.

This event has been supported by Villa Gillet and Conseil de la Création Artistique. Special thanks to Eric Demby and the Brooklyn Flea.

The Raw and the Cooked: An Interview with Cătălin Avramescu

The beginning of the modern age is heralded by the discovery of the New World, whose human inhabitants were principally noteworthy for their custom, real or imagined, of eating other humans. Scarcely had Columbus returned from his first encounter with the Arawaks of Hispaniola when this point of apparent cultural difference became for European moralists the centerpiece of their search for the ultimate grounds of morality and for the causes of the diversity of moral systems. The figure of the cannibal, in this sense, plays a leading role in the emergence of early modern moral and political philosophy.

The Romanian philosopher and political scientist Cătălin Avramescu is the first scholar to notice the importance of the cannibal in modern European thought, and to attempt to write a comprehensive intellectual history of anthropophagy. His book first appeared in Romanian in 2003 under the title Filozoful crud (“the cruel philosopher” or “the raw philosopher,” depending on context), and in 2009 was published by Princeton University Press as An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. In June 2010, Justin E. H. Smith spoke with Avramescu in Bucharest about, among other things, the difficulty of intellectualizing such a bloody topic as this. This interview was subsequently fleshed out in a series of e-mail exchanges.

Click here to read the interview in Cabinet Magazine.

The Soul Is a Trapped Gas

In Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 Mason & Dixon, Charles Mason Sr., the father of one of the two great American explorers, claims to believe  

that bread is alive,—that the yeast Animalcula may unite into a single purposeful individual,—that each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for example, serving as skin or Carapace,—the small cavities within exhibiting a strange complexity, their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon magnification, to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume, so forth, down to the Limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness. 

Is bread in fact like the soul? It is well known that our own word for the biotic condition does not descend from the same distinguished Indo-European lineage as bios, vita, vie, and so on. Instead life, along with the related Germanic cognates such as Leben and leven, took the place of bios and its variations thanks to the intervention of the humble loaf, which originally had none of the connotation of the verb “to loaf,” but had instead only to do with bread. Indeed, loaf is a cognate of the Russian word for bread, khleb, and also of the Gothic hlaif. At some point, then, and I really do not know when, the ancient Germanic tribes started using the word for bread to denote life itself, since, obviously, bread sustains life, is a condition of life, and thus, in some primitive way of thinking into which it is not all that hard to work one’s way back, is life.  

It is quite likely that Mason Sr. is being made by Pynchon to paraphrase a commonplace of what was often called “chemical philosophy” or “chymistry,” but since the eighteenth century has been marginalized as mere alchemy: the primitive, irrational ancestor of chemistry. Chymistry, or alchemy, or whatever you wish to call it, had as one of its central goals the isolation of the “essences” or “spirits” of things through laboratory means such as distillation. In Johann Agricola’s Chymische Medicin of 1638, for example, we are given practical advice for the distillation of spirit out of flesh, blood, sugar, and, of all things, bread. The spiritus panis, which Agricola describes as a vapor that remains in the glass bubble of the alembic after the alchemist has performed his operations, is a sort of “pure bread,” or bread reduced down to its very essence. It is to bread what my immortal soul is to me.

To continue reading, go and purchase Cabinet Magazine, No. 37.