history

It’s been way too long since we’ve talked about one of my favorite foods-lost-to-history: vegetable flavored Jell-O.  I added some more examples to the end.  They’re truly awe-some.

Another great example of how tastes are shaped by history: JELL-O in the flavor of celery, seasoned tomato, mixed vegetable, and italian:

A box of various flavors:

What do you do with it? Well, fill it with things like chopped celery, olives with pimento, and squares of… something:

Or, um, tuna…

Don’t forget the hard-boiled eggs:

See also our post on aspic, meat-flavored gelatin foods.  And, for fun, here’s a history of JELL-O that includes a brief description of how you would have to make it if you had to make it from scratch, which will leave you wondering how we ever bothered to invent and make gelatin to begin with.

(Ads found at here, here, here, here, and here.)

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

We often think of athletic ability as innate, something people are born with.  In fact, athletic performance is a combination of (at the very least) ability and opportunity.

Case in point: the marathon.

The first Olympic marathon occurred in 1896. A Grecian named Spyridon Louis won that race with a speed of two hours, 58 minutes, and 50 seconds. Women were excluded from formal competition until 1972. Once they were allowed to compete, their time dropped to an equivalent two and a half hours in just five years (source).

Today the men’s record is faster than the women’s record, but by less than 10 minutes… a much smaller difference than the one hour difference that we saw when women were first allowed to compete.  The rate at which they’ve been catching up with men has slowed though. Still, who knows how fast they’d be running if they hadn’t been excluded from competing for the 64 years between 1908 and 1972.  In any case, the quickening of both men’s and women’s times over the years shows just how contingent athletic performance can be.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Notice how disapprovingly he is glaring at her icky, untidy stockings.

Via Vintage Ads.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Two new submissions inspired me to revive this post from 2008.

Part of the privilege of being white is having a society that considers you the norm and is, therefore, organized around you.  A really nice example of this is “flesh” color.  What is flesh color?

Ben O. sent us this 1952 ad for bandaids (from Vintage Ads)

The next set of images come from Nathan Gibbs’ flickr photostream:

A lot of companies have gotten a clue.  Crayola doesn’t have flesh color anymore (or so I’ve heard, let me know if I’m wrong).  And now they make “multicultural crayons.”  Though, Nathan notes:

It’s interesting how “culture” here is a substitute for “race.”

“White” skin is still taken-for-granted in many products.  Here are a couple examples I’ve collected (found here and here):

Perhaps trying to walk the line, EcoPencil has a “light flesh” color, but no other flesh colors to choose from (sent in by kelebek in Australia):

Caroline observed that Breathe Right not only centers whiteness in their logo…

…but calls white skin “normal” (see second-to-bottom line):

For more examples, see our posts on (the irony of) Michelle Obama’s champagne-colored described as “flesh-colored”, the widespread use of such language to describe light tan in the fashion world,  and lotion marketed as for “normal to darker skin.” See also our Contexts essay on race and “nude” as a color.

For contrast, see this post about how the generic human in Russian cartoons is colored black instead of white.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dolores R. sent a link to a map created by Derek Watkins to show how the names given to geographic features reflect cultural patterns. Using a database of names officially accepted by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, Watkins mapped generic terms used in the names of streams (excluding “creek” and “river,” which are commonly used throughout the U.S and were plotted in a gray that fades into the background):

The generic terms reflect historical immigration patterns. “Kill” appears in areas of New York originally settled by the Dutch; “cañada,” “arroyo,” and “río” indicate areas of Spanish exploration and settlement in the Southwest; of course, Louisiana and the surrounding area still reflects its French heritage through the term “bayou.”

The map reflects internal migration and cultural diffusion within the U.S., as well. For instance, Watkins suggests that the patch of red in southwest Wisconsin, indicating the use of “branch,” may be due to the lead mining boom in the early 1800s. Lead mining attracted Appalachian miners to the area, and they may have influenced local naming practices, bringing along terms common in Appalachia.

For more on the interconnections between geographic names or terms and larger cultural patterns, Watkins suggests reading Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, by George Stewart (2008). Another excellent source is Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, by Keith Basso (1996).

In Capital, Karl Marx discusses how the products we buy are separated from any recognition of the people who produced them. If I want to buy a TV, I’m unlikely to be involved in any kind of interaction with the people who made it. I don’t see the factory where they worked, I don’t have any idea what the conditions were like, I have no specific idea where it was made, outside of “Made in  _____” written on the box. Instead, I exchange money for the TV at a store that almost certainly had nothing to do with manufacturing the TV; no one at Best Buy or Wal-Mart could tell me any more about the specific conditions of production than what I can figure out from reading the package.

Marx referred to this as commodity fetishism. The social relations embedded in products — the fact that someone made that TV, under particular conditions, making a certain amount of money for their labor while producing profit for their employer — are obscured and workers become invisible. Instead, we focus on how much we pay for it, and which store charges the least. Marx argues that relationships between workers, employers, and consumers are presented to us simply as relationships between things; we exchange paper money (an abstract measure of our labor) for commodities, and we rarely pause to think about how the price of a TV is determined by the worth placed on workers in a particular place at a particular time.

Social activists concerned with working conditions, environmental impacts, and a range of other concerns often push back against commodity fetishism, attempting to make the social relations of production visible to consumers again. Craig Martin of Religion Bulletin provided an example from South Africa’s Apartheid Museum. This poster, produced during the struggle against apartheid, calls for a boycott on South African fruit (UPDATE: A reader found a larger image so you can see more detail; via):

The visual of workers soldiers superimposed on the fruit, with workers and protesters in the background, and the phrase “Every bite buys a bullet!”, remind consumers that items they buy having meaning for the world around them, and that they aren’t just exchanging money at a grocery store in return for that fruit; they are buying into a system of production that provides profits for a racist government, which uses those profits to buy military supplies used to enforce its brutal, unequal racist policies.

As Martin says,

In Capital Marx says that commodity fetishism presents relations between men as relations between things — and this poster is a powerful example of an attempt to demystify commodities and reveal that they are in fact relations between human beings.

We now have evidence that media coverage of the Occupy Movement has increased after each clash with police.  Many of these clashes have resulted in photographs and videos that appear to show police acting violently against peaceful protesters.  To many this is an unjustified use of force by the government, one that makes the state look like the bad guy and the movement look like the good guy.

This very process — media coverage of peaceful activism and violent backlash by the state — contributed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement.  And it couldn’t have happened before TV.

In 1950, only 9% of homes had a TV.  One year later, 24% of homes did.  And by 1963, when Martin Luther King told the world his dream, 91% of America could have tuned in.

(source)

The media frequently covered the protests positively, while the backlash was undeniably horrific.  So Americans sitting at home watching the TV could be simultaneously inspired by the activists and horrified by the establishment.  In the two videos below we see both sides of this coin.  In the first, a newscaster introduces and contextualizes the March on Washington before King begins his famous speech; in the second, we see news footage of a violent police attack on peaceful protesters in Selma, Alabama (trigger warning, also known as “Bloody Sunday”).

Television coverage of King’s speech:

Television coverage of the attack in Selma (trigger warning):

Ultimately, the success of the Civil Rights Movement must be credited to the people who gave their energy, heart, time, and lives to it. The invention of the television, though, and its introduction to so many homes at just the right moment in history, had an interesting role to play as well.

With this history in mind, it seems likely that aggressive responses to peaceful protests will likely raise support for Occupy.  And, with digital cameras, smart phones, youtube, facebook, twitter, and the like… the role of the media may be more important than ever.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Cyborgology.

As part of my research into the popularization of tattooing, I have accumulated quite a few interesting links on tattoo toys for children. I don’t mean those temporary tattoos we all used to get from the vending machines at popular chain restaurants. This toys I am talking about have drawn flack from parents as being “inappropriate” for kids, creating an example of a burgeoning “moral panic”. Some examples include: tattoo inspired toddler wear, tattoo machines for kids, and of course, tattooed Barbie dolls.

Tokidoki Barbie:

Toys like these have been released every few years since the 1990s, when tattooing was ranked as the 6^th fastest growing industry in the country (Vail 1999). But we are now seeing more children’s tattoo toys spring up, dovetailing with the increasing popular interest in the craft. We may very well be observing a second Tattoo Renaissance (Rubin 1988), especially given the expansion of the industry and the artistic flowering that has occurred since the tattoo reality TV shows first emerged in summer 2005. 

I believe we are we observing a cultural paradigm shift (Kuhn 1962) regarding tattooing.  Cultural trends are slowly reshaping popular conceptions of tattooing, turning them from “marks of mischief” (Sanders 1988) into an “ironic fad” (Kosut 2006) of consumer capitalism. Whereas tattooing was once largely reserved for working-class men, sailors, carnival performers, and exotic dancers, we have since seen the practice become widely popular amongst all races, genders, and classes.

G8 Tat2 Maker by Spin Master Toys:

Beginning with the Tattoo Renaissance of the 1960s (Rubin 1988) and more recently with the expansion into reality television (Lodder 2010), we have seen the cultural cache of tattooing shift in favor of middle-class notions of identity work (Atkinson 2003); that is, towards seeing the body as a vehicle for expressing oneself, towards actively controlling and crafting the body as a form of empowerment, and towards the development of “distinctive individualism” through appearance (Muggleton 2002). The highly narrative focus of tattooing contained in popular reality TV shows like “LA Ink” or “NY Ink” only bolster these trends, as new tattoo enthusiasts invest deeply-held meanings into each tattoo.

But these trends do not mean that tattoo toys aimed at children are any less offensive to some. Largely, it appears to be a generational divide: youth are much more supportive (in fact, largely celebratory) towards body art like tattoos and piercings, but the baby boomers continue to view tattoos through the lens of deviance.

For people of my parents generation, tattoos continue to be a symbol of deviant proclivities. Some have even called it a “disease” plaguing the youth of today. I have taken issue with such an interpretation of tattooing, especially by social scientists who continue to conceptualize the practice as an indicator of mental pathology or emotional instability, and have proposed a “pro-social” conception of contemporary body modifications like tattooing and piercing [you can read my work here]. In my opinion it is just a matter of time before prominent and visible tattoos become commonplace in professional and public settings, tattooed Barbie notwithstanding.

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David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW) is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies issues of intersectionality, consumption, and popular culture. In addition to his work on the popularization of tattooing, a project on the revolutionary pedagogy of public sociology, and more theoretical work on zombie films as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural anxieties. He previously wrote for the blog Racism Review and currently blogs at Cyborgology.

For more from Strohecker, see his posts on facial tattoos, the origins of zombies, QR codes and the digital divide, and laughing at disability.

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