Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Polish Plait, or, An Illness of the Hair

Justin E. H. Smith
[email protected]

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.

Philosophy of Religion Is a Fraud, But...

Right after typing out some of my recent reflexions on atheism, I came across this post at Religion Dispatches magazine, telling of a prominent philosopher of religion who has come to the conclusion that he has devoted his career to a subdiscipline that is in essence a fraud. Keith Parsons of the University of Houston is now abandoning this area of teaching and research (presumably to work on something else).

Is the philosophy of religion a fraud? As it is currently taught, yes, it most certainly is. It is, again, a huge waste of time to argue about the existence of God, not because both sides will stick stubbornly to their guns, but because this is not a universally meaningful question. We might as well be arguing about whether the Australian Aboriginal ritual object called a tjurunga is in fact responsible for impregnating Aboriginal women.

But as we might have predicted, one thing that Parsons does not consider is that, short of simply declaring a research program bankrupt, one might first consider whether there are not more fruitful approaches or more fitting methodologies for getting at the core of the thing that has long interested you. And here I just have to shake my head in amazement that my fellow philosophers seldom even notice the possibility of an ethnographic turn. Such a turn would make philosophy of religion into a data-driven, interpretive program, and thus it would parallel the turn currently being defended with some reason by advocates of the new, so-called 'experimental philosophy'. It would not ask, "Does God exist?" or "Is the soul immortal?", but rather "How does culture x's belief in such-and-such transcendent entity fit, logically and structurally, within that culture's universe of meanings?" When this task is accomplished, one can move on to cultures, y, z, and so on, and eventually come up with a schema for the universal parameters for the range of possible beliefs about some entity, say God or the soul, that is of interest to philosophers of religion.

Parsons is still beholden to that prime directive of philosophy (to which many x-phi advocates, at the cost of coherence, also remain committed), that "if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it." But this would mean that no one should devote serious attention to Australian Aboriginal theories of reproduction, and to my mind that would be to let something interesting and important fall off the academic agenda. Of course, when Parsons says 'serious academic attention' what he means is 'serious attention from academic philosophy', and one might reasonably ask whether the comparative and data-driven turn is not a turn away from philosophy (a similar question is being asked of x-phi advocates who are interested in psychology experiments).

My own inclination is to respond: who cares? As long as it gives better results, then why should we be afraid to cross disciplinary boundaries? But upon further reflection I also have to add that Durkheim and Mauss, for example, are also better philosophers than, say, John Hick or Louis Pojman. They are asking vastly more sophisticated questions, and using vastly more rigorous methodologies, to find answers to problems that they themselves recognize as emerging from the Western philosophical tradition.

The one great difference between the French comparative-religionists and the later philosophers of religion is that the former are perfectly willing to take seriously beliefs that they aren't considering adopting themselves. This is what philosophers simply can't do, as Parsons nicely demonstrates for us, and this limitation is the root cause of my estrangement from my own discipline (though the emergence of boundary-defying tendencies in academic philosophy in recent years, including experimental philosophy, does give me some hope that in the long run it will be worthwhile to stick around).