Jamelia and the Human Hair Commodity Chain

The film Jamelia: Whose Hair is it Anyway? uses a multi-sited approach to a commodity chain analysis of human hair. It begins with a description of the consumption of human hair through the widespread use of hair extensions in the United Kingdom. It then attempts to uncover the source of the human hair and its path to commoditization. Jamelia, a celebrity personality, hosts the film. Jamelia has very little prior knowledge of hair extensions and their peregrinations and in many ways this makes the informal investigation of the commodity chain more relatable to the average BBC audience member. The viewer is able to travel on the same journey as their charismatic host, whose realizations and epiphanies might reflect those of the spectators. At times it seems that Jamelia's moralizing stance reproduces conceptions of distance and otherness that imply directionality rather than connectivity in the flow of hair extensions. Ultimately, however, Jamelia's journey is representative of many biases that her audience may also experience. She begins with specific prejudices but soon gains an increasingly complex understanding of the circulation of human hair and what it might mean to people in different locations where it crops up.

Jamelia's search is subject to many of the same benefits and pitfalls of academic multi-sited fieldwork. Marcus discusses techniques of understanding movement when studying multi-sited fieldwork. In her search, Jamelia uses two of these. First is the “follow the thing” mode in which the motion and circulation of a material subject is mapped out. The subject or commodity in this case is human hair and Jamelia attempts to work backwards from locations of usage of hair extensions to the places where the hair is cut and processed. As used in the film, this technique is shallow. Jamelia finds a few sites where hair is donated, but it is far from comprehensive and one cannot be sure how representative it truly is. This seems to be a common difficulty of multi-sited fieldwork; since the researcher presumably has less time to spend in each location as they are broadening their focus, the results lack depth. Second is the “follow the metaphor” method in which concepts, discourse, symbols, and metaphor are the things followed. Jamelia becomes just as interested in concepts of beauty as in the origins of the hair extensions. By following the metaphor of beauty and attempting to understand its representations in different locations, Jamelia draws connections between the individuals giving up their hair and those ultimately purchasing it. As Marcus states, this mode of following is “potent for suturing locations of cultural production that had not been obviously connected” and which opens possibilities of new social terrains (Marcus 1995:108-109). This method is easier to follow as Jamelia focuses on one particular question: how is human hair linked to conceptions of beauty? Because she is tackling less, it is easier to observe the interconnectedness and the physical link between ideals of beauty in different locations and the way in which they are materialized.

As Kopytoff notes, an object may be a commodity to someone but something different entirely to another person. This disparity and when it occurs implicates the “moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions” (Kopytoff 1986:64). In essence, this is what Jamelia is attempting to uncover. As the purchase of human hair to augment one's personal appearance is normalized in British society, it is atypical that Jamelia feels the need to probe the ethics around these acts of consumption. Indeed this aspect of morality calls into question global markets and the way they function. In Ramamurthy's article on a feminist commodity chain analysis of Land's End catalogues, she shows that the catalogue moralizes the act of consumption. Land's End constructs a “global moral identity” (Ramamurthy 2004:747) by insinuating that individuals who purchase the clothes made by Third World weavers will be performing an act for the sake of the common good. Jamelia also moralizes the act of using hair extensions, though the effect is different in the film. In the Land's End catalogue, discourse is employed to make globalization sound good. They are opening up a new world of customers, the audience of the catalogue, to weavers who desperately need the funds. It is implied that the connectedness brought on by globalization can save these weavers. During the course of the film, on the other hand, globalization is occasionally implicated as something harmful. Jamelia at first tends to victimize the women in India and Russia who give up their hair. When she learns that the temple to which people donate their hair in spiritual sacrifice she believes that they are coerced and lied to in order for the temple to earn a profit. However, she comes to the realization, and the audience is able to witness this first hand, that the business cycle involving the hair is better than she originally perceived it to be and the circulation of money ultimately beneficial. She sees that the temple gives back to the community and since the profit is used to help feed people, Jamelia is persuaded to be more accepting of the process.

The film is quite successful in demonstrating that the human hair that flows across the world holds many different meanings and is potent in its relation to the concept of beauty held locally. The case studies of Stanley Tambiah and Reader and Tanabe both demonstrate how objects can gain and retain power outside of their initial religious or spiritual value. Material objects, because they have social lives, can be transformed in meaning, as they become part of new contexts. In Tambiah's “The Objectification of Charisma and the Fetishism of Objects,” he studies amulets in one of the earlier studies of social lives of objects. He shows that amulets can act as repositories of charisma and power; objects are linked to people. However, the way they are linked depends upon the cultural “grid” of any given society (Tambiah 1984:340). The human hair that circulates around the world also takes on new meanings; the film shows how these can be built upon rather than lost. In tracing her own hair extensions, Jamelia discovers that hair has physical traces of its owner as well as its previous life in its corporeal makeup. For her it means a different persona, beauty, and confidence. When she narrows it down to being hair donated to a temple somewhere in India, she discovers that it may have once been imbued with spiritual meaning. She finds that many people donate their, something she ascertains to be valuable in terms of conceptualizing beauty in Indian culture, often as a spiritual offering to the temple to attempt to ameliorate their lives or ease hardships through sacrifice. Similar to the hair extensions, the amulets are donated to the public but later acquire a commercial value (Tambiah 1984). The meaning attached to them dictates how they are valued in exchange.

Feminist commodity chains are non-linear. They examine the interconnectedness of subjects all over the world rather than purporting a directional flow of goods. In the film, this is achieved through an investigation of concepts of beauty but to a lesser degree in the analysis of the human hair commodity chain. However, Ramamurthy says in her feminist commodity chain analysis that the Land's End catalogue attempts to establish a dialogue between remote groups of people and, in a sense, the film tries to do the same thing (Ramamurthy 2004). Jamelia wants to know what people buying and using hair extensions think about in terms of where these come from and wants to persuade them to be more conscious of it as is made explicit in the ending speech of the film. She is also curious about what people in India think of their jobs, their sacrifices, and the use of their hair in faraway places.

In such a discussion involving moralizing and commodification, it is valuable to look back at Weber's theory of rationalization. The process of commodification is rationalized in that it is one that has more to do with economic processes than traditional religious doctrine (Weber 1904-05). In the film, Jamelia tries to attach a sense of morality to something which is largely commercial and distant from a discussion of quotidian social values. In the United Kingdom, people are not thinking about human hair as something having to do with right and wrong; when Jamelia asks young girls if they would wear hair from a corpse, they are mostly unconcerned as the source of the hair is not an ethical issue. Buying hair extensions is part of a commercial transaction and wearing them fits into a larger cultural landscape of normalized appearance. However, this does not seem to fully explain the commoditization of human hair. The transformation of hair from something that helps define an individual to a spiritual sacrifice to a commodity and back to something that helps define someone, particularly in terms of beauty, has less to do with bodily efficacy and more to do with normative cultural values. Ultimately, we see that human hair is unique in some ways, in being a part of the human body that is perceived to be quite valuable, but simultaneously quite similar to many other kinds of commodities. The film eventually demonstrates that values of beauty and nodes on the commodity chain are intricately.

References

Jamelia: Whose Hair Is It Anyway? BBC 3. 2008 (60 min.)
Kopytoff, I. 1986. The Cultural Biography of Things. In A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things. Cambridge UP.
Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the mergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual review of anthropology 24: 95-117.
Ramamurthy, P. 2004. Why is buying a Madras cotton shirt a political act? A feminist commodity chain analysis. Feminist Studies 30: 1-36.
Reader, I and G. Tanabe (eds.) 1998. Ch.6 Selling Benefits: The Marketing of Efficacy and Truth. In Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.
Tambiah, S. 1984. The Objectification of charisma and the fetishism of objects. In The Buddhist Saints of the Forests and the Cult of Amulets.Cambridge University Press.
Weber, M. 2001 (1904-05). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.