Wow, Dan, helluva conclusion to jump to–I don’t like dreadlocks, so I must have some deep-seated, racist hatred of all things non-European? I’ve suffered accusations of a deep-seated racism against Europeans, but this brings me something new.
I would guess that one could keep dreadlocks clean, but unfortunately, I’ve never known anyone with dreadlocks who did. Then again, almost everyone I’ve known who’s had dreadlocks also had skin the color of unbaked cookie dough, so mixed in with the stink of unwashed hair I also picked up the peculiar stink of cultural appropriation and pretending to some kind of false claim of racial authenticity.
I don’t think of Africans as dirty. Then again, I haven’t seen too many Africans with dreadlocks, either. Actually, most Africans and African-Americans I’ve known (and I’ve known both) have had in common a meticulous cleanliness, and placed a great amount of pride and importance on keeping themselves well groomed, even sometimes to the point of elevating it to a moral virtue.
When I had long hair, I had a hard time keeping it clean, too. I never wore dreadlocks, though, but long hair always presents some intractable problems for cleanliness. But we have a myth that to live primitively, you must have long hair. Plenty of ways to keep your hair nicely cut by primitive means. One does not need dreadlocks to prove their primitive credentials.
In total, Americans bathe far too much–to the point that it becomes unhealthy. Washing the oils off your skin constantly compromises your immune system. By the same token, far too many people rebelling against American society go to the opposite extreme. The “dirty hippie” didn’t become such a popular stereotype because it lacked concrete examples, y’know. Like you said, Odineeus, “within reason.” You should feel comfortable with a certain amount of dirt; our dirt-phobia doesn’t serve us well. And “clean” should not mean “I must smell of stinking chemicals so that people will not notice me.” It should mean smelling and looking like a human being, not a chemical factory, and not a pig pen. There exists a happy medium between those two extremes. One of my personal biggest pet peeves with primitivism as we see it practiced too often today lies in the outright rejection of indigenous examples, in pursuit of fairly childish overreactions to civilized culture, and this gets to one of those prime examples: Americans wash too much, ergo we should always walk around caked in mud and dirt and stinking to high heaven. Now, I have nothing against getting dirty; you can’t track, much less do any kind of scouting, without a pretty good comfort level with dirt. But when you get home, you wash. You clean. You don’t go around like that all the time. Look at indigenous examples: look how much time Haudenosaunee men spent preening about their appearance. Or, to get back to Dan’s accusation that I act like a racist because I don’t like dreadlocks, look at actual African tribes, and how much value they place on good grooming and cleanliness! These do not exist in mutually exclusive isolation from one another, and it irks me to no end when people buy into the notion that they do.
EDIT: As far as hating anything not European, I’ve liked this song (lyrics) for a while now. Appropriate in both tone and substance!
(I’m just teasing you a bit, though, Dan; I know what you mean, and I agree that most people who don’t like dreadlocks probably fit into that category, but when you make a blanket statement like that not half a page down from where I said I don’t care for dreadlocks, it really comes off as “Anyone who doesn’t share my aesthetics is a racist!” and I know you don’t want to really stand by something like that.)