Art & Ecology:
Photoessays: Art and the Earth
Earthly Matters
Recycling on the Body
by Suzanne Seriff, Ph.D.
"The first commercial impulse of the local people is not to become just like us, but more like themselves."
- Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
Why do we wear what we wear? To be beautiful or powerful; holy or hip; ceremonial or comfortable?
People throughout the world decorate their bodies with necklaces, earrings, pendants, rings, headdresses, robes, and costumes. These articles of adornment, in addition to being beautiful, can express aspects of a person's status in relation to others--wealth, gender, age, occupation, or marital or political status--or can express aspects of the social context in which the item is worn, such as a festival or a wedding. Community rules dictate who can wear what and when. While these codes are generally followed, there is plenty of room in the language of personal ornament for innovation and artistic creation.
For example, one material can--and frequently is--substituted for another, as long as the important rules of shape, color, symbol, or pattern are maintained. In the contemporary world, industrial castoffs are popularly adapted as decorative items for adornment because they are often cheaper and easier to obtain and work with than "traditional" materials, like rare shells, precious stones, or ivory. Phonograph records, dishes, colored plastics, tin cans, aluminum pots, rubber gaskets, and an assortment of trinkets from Cracker Jack toys to broken baby dolls have inspired fashion designers and wearers throughout the world to innovate with what is readily at hand.
High up in the Andean mountains of central Ecuador, costume makers engage in a form of recycling to produce ornate headdresses worn by dancers for the Catholic feast day of Corpus Christi. Each headdress is elaborately decorated with a variety of Western-made objects such as light bulbs, mirrors, chrome car parts, plastic toys, zippers, sunglasses and costume jewelry pieces. In some cases, the discarded industrial pieces retain the shape and symbolic significance of the more conventional Catholic images which preceded them. This is the case with the reliquary made by master costume maker José Ignacio Criollo from the bottom of a glass jar, and the molded plastic "Lamb of Christ." Other pieces translate the headdresses' earlier baroque style--with its shiny gold, silver, and stone-studded ornamentation--into modern-day equivalents such as costume jewelry pieces, watch bands, silver coins, and reflective mirrors. These contemporary motifs appeal to the young Indian and mestizo dancers who wear the headdresses in the annual processions.
Anthropologists use the term "appropriation" to describe activities in which one cultural group re-defines the use or meaning of an object to meet its own needs and desires. In this case, the appropriated item from the industrial world is given an entirely new "social life" by wearing it on the body.
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