: Indian types of beauty by Shufeldt Robert W Robert Wilson - Beauty Personal; Indian aesthetics; Indian women

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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INDIAN TYPES OF BEAUTY

--BY--

R. W. SHUFELDT,

Member of the Philosophical, the Anthropological, the Biological, and the Entomological Societies of Washington, D.C.; Member of the Cosmos, of Washington; Member of the American Society, and Honorable Associate of the British Society for Psychical Research; Member of the American Ornithologists' Union; Member of the American Society of Naturalists; Cor. Member Soc. Ital. Anthrop. Ethnol. and Psicol. Comp. of Florence, Italy; Cor. Member of the Zool. Soc. of London; Cor. Member Biol. Association of Colorado; the Academy of Nat. Sciences of Philadelphia: of the Academy of Sciences, Chicago; of the Linnaean Soc. of New York; Member of the International Copyright League; Member of the Anthropometrical Soc.; Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Member American Society of Anatomists, etc., etc.

INDIAN TYPES OF BEAUTY.

One of the most interesting studies in the entire range of the science of ethnology is the estimate of beauty arrived at by various peoples. It really seems that the lower the race in the scale of civilization the more fixed and restricted are their ideas in this direction; that is to say, the men among the lower races can see beauty in the women of their own tribe presenting certain characteristics, as the women of the same tribe see comeliness in certain of the men, but neither of them recognize any beauty in those considered beautiful or handsome by the members of other tribes. On the other hand, the majority of the men, at least among the Indo-Europeans, can often see beauty in women of the greatest variety of other countries than their own. Perhaps one of the best proofs of this is the fact that they sometimes marry them. Even here in the United States it is not difficult to find instances, and these, too, in any plane of society we may select, where men have married women of other races and nationalities. And as a wise philosopher and observer has said, "In civilized life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance," it is fair to presume that the man in any case was attracted by what he considered to be the woman's beauty. In my own personal experience, cases have been met with where those among us have married negro women, and negro women as black as ever graced the banks of the Congo of the West Coast. Others have married Chinese women, and a friend of mine has a very talented little Japanese wife. Nor is the Englishman Rolfe the only white man that ever married an Indian woman; one of the generals in our own army married such, and there is every reason to believe that he was influenced by her beauty alone.

With respect to the lower races, Mr. Darwin has said, quoting Mr. Winwood Reade's observations upon the native Africans, that these "negroes do not like the color of our skin; they look on blue eyes with aversion, and they think our noses too long and our lips too thin." He does not think it probable that negroes would ever prefer the most beautiful European woman, on the mere grounds of physical admiration, to a good-looking negress. And again, "A man of Cochin China spoke with contempt of the wife of the English ambassador, that she had white teeth like "a dog, and a rosy color like that of potato-flowers."

We have seen that the Chinese dislike our white skin, and that the North Americans admire "a tawny hide." In South America the Yuracaras, who inhabit the wooded, damp slopes of the Eastern Cordilleras, are remarkably pale-colored, as their name in their own language expresses; nevertheless they consider European women as inferior to their own."

Who but a Hottentot man, may we ask, can admire one of their ridiculous-appearing steatopygous women? Yet the men of that race can see beauty in no other form, and the idea of a woman lacking any development in the gluteal region is, to them, absolutely loathsome. Thus we might proceed and furnish almost innumerable cases illustrating this interesting study, and comparing the various standards of taste in this particular among the many races of the world, but enough has been said to serve our purpose here. In general terms it may be stated, then, confining ourselves to the ideas of the men, that it will be found in some races that a woman with a black skin, black eyes, a broad face and flattened nose, and a head of coarse kinky hair, is admired; others see beauty in a thickset figure, a lighter skin and an enormous development of fat over the gluteals. Some admire the body rendered entirely devoid of hair; some a lithe form, others a ponderous one; while every variety of taste exists in reference to the color of the skin, the set of the eyes, and the form of every individual feature of the face. Nor do such other structures as the ears, the neck, the shoulders and the mammae escape attention or consideration--for all of them and all of the forms they may assume, have not escaped the critical eye of men, and they have each contributed their share in forming his estimate of beauty. No doubt among the higher races intellectuality and the impress it makes upon the features has also had its weight. Indeed, whatever type of beauty may be chosen among women, that has its host of admirers among the men, we are pretty sure to find among the latter in some other quarter of the world, those that consider the same type as almost hideous; and these again have a very different standard of female beauty for their ideal, and see only ugliness in its opposite, the various shades of opinion among men as a whole wearing every degree of diversity, and being almost limitless in their expression.

Closely associated with this phase of our subject and quite inseparable from it, is the question of the ornamentation of the person, which is indulged in, the world over, as much by the men as it is by the women; and, we may add, the various kinds of adornment practiced by the women of all races is everywhere to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex. Among the higher races, such as for example among the Indo-Europeans, there are a great many individual cases where women habitually delight in adorning their persons, where the just mentioned object has, of course, been entirely lost sight of; but this is by no means the case among savages low in the scale of civilization. As numerous as are the various tastes with respect to the appreciation of the beauty of women, among the races of the world, the means resorted to, to enhance that beauty, are none the less so. These means resolve themselves principally into moderate exaggerations of personal charms already possessed; into a tattooing and coloring of the face and other parts of the body; into the wearing of trinkets, jewelry, and adopting peculiar styles of dress; into removing the hair from the body entirely, or else encouraging its growth, and wearing it dressed in extravagant modes; and finally, in the production of physical deformities, and these sometimes coupled with the wearing of some mechanical contrivances associated with it.

Every traveler of any distinction, who has published an account of his explorations, whatsoever part of the world he has examined, mentions more or fewer cases under either one or several of these various heads, and so familiar to us all have the more conspicuous of them become that to repeat them here would be quite superfluous. My own studies have been limited to the Africans, far less so to the Chinese and Japanese, while to many tribes of our North American Indians I have devoted no little attention, the opportunities having been afforded by a life among them extending over a period of more than ten years.

Now as interesting and important as such a study is among our northern tribes of Indians, it can hardly be compared in either of these particulars, with similar investigations undertaken among those races of Indians found south of the 37th parallel, and west of the Rocky Mountains. Here we meet with the Navajos, the Apaches, the Mojaves, as representative field Indians; and the Zunians, the Lagunas, the Moquis, and various other remnants of nations, as the most interesting examples of the sedentary or Pueblo tribes. Among all or any of these we find much applying to which your attention has been invited in the foregoing paragraphs. In some directions they have been slightly influenced by the steady advance of our civilization, but this applies, in so far as it concerns us here, more especially to the opportunities it has offered for the there-considered beautiful women to adorn themselves in the matter of dress and trinkets. As a study, let us select as our first example a woman from among the Navajos, and one considered by them to be a type of beauty, in their estimation. I have chosen Anserino, the wife of Pedro, the ironsmith, who, by the way, is deemed a handsome man by those people Both these Indians the writer knew personally for several years, and judging from what other men of the tribe have said, Anserino has the reputation of being a pretty woman among them.

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