The New World and the Changing Face of Europe
In making sense of the New World and its inhabitants, many European observers attributed considerable significance to the question of the beard. This essay shall argue that the discourse concerning the beard and its meanings that emerged as a result of the New World encounter may be discerned not on...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc.
1997
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| In: |
The sixteenth century journal
Year: 1997, Volume: 28, Issue: 4, Pages: 1181-1201 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | In making sense of the New World and its inhabitants, many European observers attributed considerable significance to the question of the beard. This essay shall argue that the discourse concerning the beard and its meanings that emerged as a result of the New World encounter may be discerned not only in European writing but also on European faces, especially during the sixteenth century. Before 1492 the most prominent aliens in the European mind were the Muslim and the Jew, both of whom were widely imagined and graphically represented as being bearded. After 1492, however, this situation changes markedly. The Jew and the Turk were still alien, but the mental symbol of radical otherhood, as Tzvetan Todorov has observed, became the American Indian. After the encounter between the Old World and the New and as each gradually penetrated the mental world of the other, the inhabitants of neither could apprehend the presence or absence of facial hair in precisely the same way they had done so before. The whiteness of the faces of the conquistadors and the heaviness of their beards became part of a single image of European identity on both sides of the Atlantic in which beardedness was closely associated with whiteness and, hence, with European culture in its widest sense. It is with this semiotic shift and its reflection in the changing face of Europe that this paper shall concern itself. |
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| ISSN: | 2326-0726 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The sixteenth century journal
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/2543574 |