From Temple Tonsure to Woman's Wig: Making Indian hair markets in the Cold War
Jason Petrulis, Assistant Professor of US and Global History, The Education University of Hong Kong
This paper examines Cold War globalization, using the human-hair wig to understand how global markets were constructed and connected. It pivots around a 1965 US embargo on communist Chinese hair, which aimed to articulate a “free world” empire but unintentionally made markets for non-aligned Indian hair and wigs. We track Indian tresses as they reconstructed globalizing markets – traveling from temples, where worshippers donated hair, transforming body into gift into cash; to courtrooms, where barbers’ tussles over tonsure rights remade labor and property markets; to factories and salons, where wig-workers and -wearers fashioned new meanings for the global markets that entangled them.
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