"I've got to do something about my hair."
Irrational or not, when you alter your hair, you feel you've made a significant change in your life.
So believes Grant McCracken, anthropologist in the Department of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum, whose book "Big Hair" (Overlook Press, $16.95) traces the evolution of women's hairstyles in North America from the post-World War II era through today.
"Despite the fact that hair is one of the great preoccupations of contemporary life, that we North Americans spend $16 billion a year on it, that people will drive 200 miles through a snowstorm to see their hairdressers, no one has really bothered to look at it," he writes.
So McCracken researched the history and traditions of cutting and styling. He met with hairdressers in eight North American cities and interviewed friends and strangers about hair.
The result is not a work of history, but a free-form meditation on the stuff that covers (or uncovers) our scalps. McCracken believes that as our world has become more fast-paced, chaotic and confusing, "self-transformation has become the single constant of our lives." We cannot control the world around us, but we can control our own appearance; we can't decide what the world will look like, but we can decide what we will look like.
And that's why hair matters. "We've been led to believe that that hair is a trivial, shallow subject, and being interested in it means you're a silly, shallow person," says McCracken. "I wrote this book because I believe the opposite to be true." The study of hair, he says, can help us understand changes affecting whole nations. Society is in constant flux, and so is hair.
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