Object

Abstract

Analogies are elementary forms of meaning-making. In this chapter, I explore how the ponytail hairdo is imbued with meanings as we ascribe animal traits to people and human characteristics to animals to create “objective” or “natural” realities. The cultural creation of the natural through analogies, resemblances, and inductive reasoning makes symbolic work disappear from aesthetic surfaces, yet survive in an invisible cultural depth, reappearing in Freudian slippages and affective snippets of text. I show how meaning moves through the sensual materiality of the ponytail, and this aesthetic surface awakens a cultural depth to mediate social relations. The ponytail—or horsetail, as it is called in Norwegian—exudes kinetic energy that is recaptured on the catwalks of global fashion capitals. Like a horse’s tail provides balance for the animal, the ponytail balances the wearer’s stride and allows a feeling of movement, being moved and passionately moving others. The ponytail moves to move us.

To understand how the symbolic layers of the ponytail thread through experiences of the practical and the material, we need to fathom the ponytail in its most “elementary” form. For this matter, we cannot think of our modern selves and societies as sharply distinct from traditional societies (Alexander, 2021), nor can we dismiss the fact that theatrical forms, myth, and symbolism of the sacred generate contemporary ideas of rationality and modernity.¹ To grasp the social processes that enable us to weave meaning into existence, we need frameworks and concepts that allow us to see how meaning itself can move.

Touching Culture

“Every human body harbors an interior being, a life-principle that animates it; and that principle is the soul,” argued Durkheim (1912/1995, p. 242). Of all spirit beings, the soul is prototypical. Its form, Durkheim continued, can take the external appearance of the body or be held in a grain of sand to pass through the smallest opening. It can reside in animals. “Its form is essentially unstable and indefinite; it changes from moment to moment to suit circumstances and according to the demands of myth and rite” (p. 244). Durkheim’s notion of the soul is associated with collective life, totemic forces, and mana. Because the soul resides in things and bodies, its sociocultural origin is unseen. A soul is an almost magical power with supernatural forces holding taboos, ritual protections, and charismatic prestige that provide a person with both sacred and profane attributes (Smith, 2020, pp. 51–52). When the soul or life-spirit inhabits the body, it exists in a distinct bodily viewpoint in time and space. A person is shaped as culture, the body, and biography fuse:

Even if all the consciousnesses situated in those bodies view the same world—namely, the world of ideas and feelings that morally unify the group—they do not all view it from the same viewpoint; each expresses it in his [sic] own fashion. (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 273)

Durkheim’s notion of the soul makes the abstract concrete and allows us to study how collective meaning threads through materiality and the body. We can see how the emotive, sacral, and semiotic dimensions of culture can enter the body to shape it and be shaped by it. Soul becomes a form of “heat or electricity” that any object receives from outside and can therefore retransmit to the surroundings (p. 327). Any sacred being, spirit, or object that radiates with this force, called mana, “permits the production of effects that are outside the ordinary power of men [sic], and outside the ordinary processes of nature” (p. 59). These forces are animate and conscious, usually invisible to the human eye, but through animism suggest that humans live a kind of double life. The most telling example perhaps is the being awake and asleep:

When he dreams of having visited a far-off country, he believes he really has gone there. But he can have gone there only if two beings exists in him: one, his body, which remained stretched out on the ground and which, when he awakens, he finds still in the same position; and another, which has moved through space during that same time. Likewise, if while he sleeps, he sees himself talking with one of his friends who he knows is far away, he concludes that his friend, too, is composed of two beings: one who is sleeping some distance away, and another who has manifested himself through the dream. (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 47)

The soul and a spirit are two different things, according to Durkheim; however, the issue at hand, is Durkheim’s explanation of how shared culture travels through and settles in materiality. Meanings have an “extreme fluidity, they can go inside bodies and cause them disorders of all kinds, or they can increase the bodies’ vitality” (p. 49). The soul, in other words, is the totemic principle individualized. To be a person is to contain a relationship with the often unseen social source that shapes personhood. This totemic principle or totemism, Durkheim (1912/1995, pp. 141–157) explained, is a process in which social meaning flows through objects and energizes anything the object touches. The meaningful object, or totem, becomes an archetype and a tangible reference to the accomplished forming of social life and persons coded as sacred and profane.² The totem “sits at the heart of culture insofar as it is part of a classificatory system” (Smith, 2020, p. 48).

As the source and force of an object’s power, culture vanishes to reappear in aesthetic and sensory experience. In the societies Durkheim explored, a community’s and a person’s soul could reside in and move through animals. Communities actively shaped their worlds as they joined their similar experiences in the practical and the material with abstract moral frameworks. Among the Arunta of central Australia, frogs were associated with the gum tree, because they were often found in the trees’ cavities. Kangaroos were linked with a kind of parakeet that often flew around them. If two nearby communities wanted to establish moral boundaries, the moon was associated with the one and the sun with the other, the black cockatoo with the former and the white cockatoo with the latter. Once these contrasts were socially replicated as binary codes, their oppositions extended to the community and its persons. An internal tie then bound persons to the group and its system of symbols.³ All things within this meaningful ecology, all that attaches to it and all that it touches, are part of and share in its aura by a “latent totemic nature” that is felt as soon as circumstances permit or require it (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 152).

How then do abstract realities settle in daily hair-styling practices and how do we draw upon the aesthetics of hairdos to recreate symbol systems? Energizing this deeply affective process is the potential to condense our social hopes and fears into images that we can then reinsert into real life, real places, and real time. ⁴ Today, we are all interpreters “drenched in culture” (Jijon, 2019, p. 143), well aware of other places, interpretations, and criticisms (Alexander, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). I argue that the ponytail is an icon that allows us to “feel” its association with these other ideas and things in a tactile way (Alexander, 2008, 2010). Therefore, let us explore how journalists and interviewees use hair to describe and interpret the life events that form them as persons and societies.

Norwegian Horsetails

The ponytail’s presence is unmistakably visual, but not always in a straightforward manner. It blends with a myriad of real-life details, and, therefore, is seen when its iconicity is allowed to break through all the surrounding noise and redundancy. As we know from myth, details and variations make it hard to pinpoint a story’s meaning with exact words, but these real-life quirks make the myth’s morals recognizable and reassuring (E. Leach, 1969, p. 9). The cultural logics of the ponytail enter and leave numerous situations, on a multitude of differently shaped bodies, and with a vast variety of colors and lengths. Ponytails may be curled, straight, or braided, with or without ribbons, and its siblings are pigtails and rattails. What can be said about a picture is also true for the ponytail: Not only does its visual presence speak more than a thousand words, it sets words in motion.

The Norwegian word for ponytail is hestehale, literarily “horsetail.” My search of representations and references to the ponytail in contemporary Norwegian newspapers yielded quite a large amount of data because the results included non-human animals that also wear a hestehale. You guessed correctly—mostly horses. While these references to actual horsetails initially felt like a dead end, the Durkheimian conceptions the soul and totemism make them quite useful. We have to ask if “Western moderns” might understand the ponytail in somewhat similar ways as the Arunta understood the frog’s relationship to the gum tree and the kangaroo’s to the parakeet. In a rapidly transforming modernity (Alexander, 2017; Smith & Alexander, 2005; Stang, 2009): how do people use inductive reasoning and analogies to position the ponytail in a meaningful ecology? How does the ponytail answer to spiritual and corporal diversity?⁵ For starters, the ponytail hairstyle and an actual horsetail bear a striking visual resemblance (Fig. 1):

They ride, in a straight line, to the riding hall. Small girls in clothes of many colors. Straight backs. Stine rides her horse named Frisko. I watch them ride away, one light horsetail [ponytail] under her helmet and a black tail just below. (Bergens Tidende, February, 5, 2001, p. 19)

Fig. 1

One horsetail under her helmet and one just below. (Picture credit: fotokostic via Getty Images)

In fashion, the horsetail is recreated in the fabrics paraded on the fashion runways of Paris where the latest “strangling tight satin and velvet dresses” are on display. “Tight as a spear, strapless, with two half-pleated shawl-breadths running from the chest, obliquely down the to the back, under the belt, where they finally burst [bruser] á la ponytail” (VG, January 9, 1953).

But it is not simply that the ponytail hairstyle and horsetails are aesthetically alike, they can also feel alike and elicit similar sensory experiences. According to a report in the Norwegian national newspaper, VG, police on horseback tried to control the crowds in Oslo who had taken to the streets to get a glimpse of the royal family during festivities on May 8, 1946, one year after the country was liberated from German occupation:

Short horsetails tickled people under their noses, as slick-groomed horse butts pushed the crowd onto the sidewalks before, in seconds, the streets where full again. (VG, May 9, 1946)

Safe to say, it is easy to imagine a very different situation in which a police horse’s tail, might whip rather than tickle a street mob. Indeed, most of the time (and this sole incident of tickling horsetails is testimony to this claim) the journalist did not consider the whereabouts of horsetails as significant enough to mention. Why then include mention of the horsetail? These are the poetics of an 8th of May celebration, the condensation of a moment. In other words, the spirit of the moment moved through in the horsetails felt by those they brushed. Surely, a sober Norwegian journalist might find it more appropriate to report on such tickles when humorously covering a human stampede in the streets than when writing about women’s hair. After all, this was news coverage, not simply entertainment. Here, the tail entertained the noses of a festive crowd, perhaps adding to the joy of an event in which some rules were already broken, or bent, in effervescence. The horsetail’s aesthetic form provided a rewarding tingle in the taken-for-granted logics of the situation.

There is of course not a causal relationship between public and personal culture (Lizardo, 2017; Obeyesekere, 1981) so a horsetail’s sensuous surface, its tickle, is made meaningful as we deal with public culture in personal ways (Kurakin, 2019; Mast, 2019). For example, Ørjan, a boy who is mute with other disabilities, is “one big smile when he sits on the horseback, safely leaning on his trainer.” His favorite activity is spending time with the big animals:

[He] smiles from ear to ear as nurse Ragnhild Aanderaa brushes a horsetail against his cheek. That is when the boy feels what is in store for him … His body language is not to be mistaken. The smile powerfully expresses how much he appreciates being on horseback. After a ride he comes to life and to happiness, and gets to work out his legs too, says nurse Aanderaa. (Aftenposten, May 12, 1988, p. 2)

Ørjan’s relationship to horses through the feel of their tails brushing his chin as he anticipates the ride arguably has a lot to do with personal meaning-making, habits, and practices (Lizardo, 2017). At the same time, the horsetail is an iconic construct that fuses the nurse’s sensory pedagogy, her being with the boy and the horse, their moving together and being moved together as they ride on horseback. Within this exchange with the horsetail, emotional energy is generated in ways that form Ørjan’s and the nurse’s meaningful interaction.⁶ As the horsetail transmits these meanings and elicits an emotional display on Ørjan’s face, the nurse is reassured that their being together is positive and should be continued. Not only is the horsetail an affirmation of their shared being, but it represents their friendship and helps us feel it—right there, in the social heart.

For sure, the meaning of a tickle or a brush of hair is manifold and contingent on the context and social composition of our encounter (Geertz, 1973). Nevertheless, aesthetics, the sheer materiality, also appear to us and shape our perceptions (Alexander, 2010). For example, in humans and horses, hair can hide and veil. To keep our attention and suspense, skillful writers may use the horsetail as a meaningful materiality to let us sense what has not yet been said. In the twists of prose, a secret love is confessed in one of Grande Estate’s stable booths, as two lovers find themselves separated by one last obstacle, the horsetail. Jan Jørgen “gathers his eyebrows” and looks at Karen Sofie “behind the horsetail” to finally “loudly and fervently” shout out, “Because I love you” (Drangsholt, 1944, rendered in Raumnes, February 8, 1950, p. 3). Here, not only does meaning move through the horsetail, but as an icon, it serves to maintain suspense behind its veil before uncovering what lies behind.

Gendering Analogies

As an object or an icon, the ponytail meets gendered expectations (Goffman, 1976), distinction-making (Veblen, 1899/1994) through materialization of social life and the whims of physical attractiveness (Daloz, 2010, p. 88). The ponytail evokes ideas about human relations and our discipline (or lack thereof) in a biological form that shows how we enter or leave society (E. R. Leach, 1958; Obeyesekere, 1981; Synnott, 1987). Reporting on young adults in 1968, a VG newspaper reporter argued, “… Ponytails are back in fashion in a hair-happy time, and this might be a good thing, allowing us to, once again, look people in the eye.” Hair may hide the windows to the soul, and apparently, the writer thought ponytails provided some civility to the longhaired hippie wearer. However, for real discipline, the horses of the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth set the best example, it is said. Not everyone has “the opportunity to get a real horsetail [hestehale]” like the Queen’s horses. These four-legged royals have ribbons making their tails “stand out and swing throughout the parade.” In a time when hair had become the “most attractive adornment of both [human] sexes,” the VG reporter concluded, “a real horsetail is hard to find” (VG, September 18, 1968, p. 23). Yet the high ponytail, on a woman’s head, with all its parading swing was not hard to find. While fashion trends may fool us with novel designs, the ponytail is nothing new. Reports from the 1950s note that a ponytail is “not just a ponytail,” but can be straight or braided, floating freely or “tightly fixated in a way that makes it stand out like a veritable whip. Refined, jolly, and rude” as its wearer traverses busy shopping streets of the city (VG, July 14, 1956, p. 6). Like Queen Elizabeth’s four-legged royals gallantly striding through the city, with ribbons making their tails “stand out and swing throughout the parade,” so does this ponytailed woman walk the city.

Controlled or set free, the ponytail is a way of interacting with the world by making analogies that create anticipations and community. Analogies and imitation, in creative play, for example, is a common way to draw inspiration from animal behavior to define human relationship norms (Hamayon, 2016). To be sure, this meaning-making process succeeds only if it seems to work itself out independently of anyone’s performative design; however, this is no whim of imagination, but involves process of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, seeing human relations in animal behavior and animal relations in human activities. It is a meticulous approach of joining recurrent observations and abstract theorizing in social life.

To a horse, the tail is more than mere ornament, a flag parading discipline, or a glorified flyswatter for that matter. The animal uses its tail for balance and for communication, mostly among horses, but also between horses and humans. If you know the language, the horsetail can tell you about the horse’s mood, health, energy, and locomotion, according to King (2006/2020) writing in EQUUS, a horse breeders’ magazine. As an expression of aggression to frighten invaders, a stallion will lift its tails and prance. Horsetails demonstrate friendship, too. Standing head to tail, horses swish flies from each other’s faces. Frisky foals set off to enjoy games and races, their tails held high, a sure sign of excitement and high spirits, King writes, noting that subordinate and shamed horses tuck their tails between their legs. No wonder, then, that when a thief broke into a stable and stole seven horsetails in Romerike, Norway (NTB, August 18, 2005), the owner was quite upset as his horses had lost one of their most important tools and means of communication. Even worse, he had to spend that summer spraying down his horses to keep away the flies.

Human beings also feel the annoyance of summertime insects, even losing one’s balance and cool in a frustrating attempt to swat away irritating mosquitos and aggressive warble flies. For example, let us revisit a media account (Aftenposten, July 27, 1984) of a honeymoon at foot:

Go bike riding on your home field for your honeymoon, the priest told May Ellen Hartting and Knut Kudsen. However, our Olympic gold medalist Knut [professional cyclist] and his May Ellen, parked their bikes as they travelled to Valdres. It was time to use their feet. Long hikes with Knut-made “matpakke” and coffee in a thermos.

A honeymoon does not get any more Norwegian than that—majority ethnic Norwegian, that is, the husband making a lunch of bread with various spreads (usually dry ones) packed in that delightful Norwegian sandwich wrap. Coffee too, of course, the everyday brew of ontological security that fills a kitchen with its aromas and warms the throat on a gusty day.⁷ The reporter meets the newlyweds at Kervaasstølen in the Reinfljellene mountains, where they are enjoying a pit stop in the summer pasture among well-fed cows. No rain today, and unfortunately, not much wind either. Cows lazily whip their tails to keep away the mosquitos and warble flies.Verse

Verse “You want the full recipe for a walk in the mountains,” May Ellen asks while waving at an aggressive heel fly, “Mosquito bites and blisters.” “I met May Ellen while I was out jogging,” Knut tells us. He was kind of lazy and plump at that time, about to break the 100-kilo barrier. Today the weight’s scale-pin stops at 83. “Not if you keep eating like you do here in the mountains,” May Ellen teases Knut. “My wife is as fast a talker as she is a runner,” laughs Knut. May Ellen is a sprinter. “I can talk for myself,” May Ellen replies, and whips her ponytail. “I started cross-country skiing. Now I prefer running. However, after this vacation I will chase a job. I am done at the Department of Business Economics.” “Do you favor Grete Waitz or Ingrid Kristiansen? the journalist asks. [Waitz and Kristiansen are Norwegian long-distance runners.] May Ellen cheers for Grete, because she has Waitz-calves herself, says Knut. Knut roots for Ingrid, because she has given birth, May Ellen parries. “How long will you keep being a celebrity, Knut,” asks the reporter. “Others are welcome to take my place. I have made the priest’s words my own: ‘Dare and win on the home field.’” (Aftenposten, July 27, 1984, p. 15)

Returning from the polluted city to enjoy nature’s many trials and pleasures is most notably a vital part of public culture in Norway, and can indeed be gendered,⁸ as this account of May Ellen and Knut shows. With blisters on their feet and smiles on their faces, they perform a healthy active tourism, good for the soul and for the waistline—you can even have another piece of bread without feeling bad about it. At home in the mountains with food and drink and amid fly-swatting cows, May Ellen used her own ponytail to whip Knut back in place, asserting that she can surely speak for herself. She is a modern woman maintaining her romantic relationship as she chases mountaintops and new job opportunities. For Olympian Knut, life in the limelight is over. He has vowed to shine on the home field where he makes the “matpakke” and together, he and May Ellen, practice gender politics.

Grete Waitz or Ingrid Kristiansen? Two of Norway’s most renown sport heroes of all time seem to raise questions of embodied politics. Waitz, a celebrity athlete with a ponytail, is a pioneer in the sports world, as is Kristiansen, who also symbolizes motherhood. What are the stakes in this zoomorphic play of gender relations between Knut and May Ellen? For this woman depicted on the newspaper page, ponytail deals is both personal and political, as she uses it to maintain the balance that threads meaning through social life, which the journalist relates.⁹ From the work force to the very initiation of family, culture affects how our bodies enter and shape social life (e.g., Martin, 1991). The ponytail can surely signify heteronormativity, but, on this 1984 woman, it is far from synonymous with a passive, dichotomous opposition to her husband (Connell, 1987, 2005). Nor is this a glossed-up Hollywood gendered relationship, or what some Norwegians may call “plastic fantastic.” This story is a glossy representation of hegemonic Norwegian-hood in which outdoor life reinvigorates urban dwelling and a modern woman launching from the Department of Business Economics. In this honeymoon story, with no words and flick of the neck, the ponytail, as culturally natural as can be, whips flies, men, and semiotics into place. Maintaining embodied appearances of gender equality amidst economic and normative constraints on work-family life remains difficult. But with the ponytail, the quest and hope for equilibrium continues.

The longhaired ponytail becomes gendered in obvious, but surprising ways. As its embodied symbolism intersects with interpretive schemas (Butler, 1990, 1993; Champagne, 2018, forthcoming; Friedman, 2013) hair assume performative power in multiple ways (E. R. Leach, 1958; Obeyesekere, 1981; Synnott, 1987). For example, on Women’s Day, March 8. 2021, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published an article about elderly women’s wearing long hair. A couple days prior, a commentator had asked whether elderly women should choose the short-haired look of “the old lady” or the longhaired style of “the witch.” Long-time leader of the political party Left, Trine Grande (who is 51 years old and short-haired), replied, “The long hair is our culture’s hijab” (Aftenposten. March 8, 2021), emphasizing that for her, a short style was a statement of emancipation from the longhaired beauty ideal. With a humorous twist, fashion writer Ander Kemp replied that short hair is practical and has been the normative public sector style for decades, that is, for women passed a certain age. Short hair worn by Erna Solberg, the 2021 Norwegian prime minister, as well as by some of her most powerful political colleagues showed that short hair is “… the hair you need for authority!” Short hair can signify emancipation from a longhaired norm, but also a transition into an adult sexuality, authority, and practicality (Gimlin, 1996; Tarlo, 2017; Weitz, 2004). The twenty-first-century power woman portrayed in the stereotypical Claire Underwood [Robin Wright] in the Netflix series House of Cards illustrates how physical appearance, attire, race, and short hair convey many meanings within this long- and short-haired power spectrum.

Ponytailed Pride

Both long and short hair can hold power, and therefore, the ponytail’s force is reliant on the affective codes we use to shape its charge. In my search for the invisible meanings of myth, which is a powerfully enduring variable of social explanation, the anthropomorphism and zoomorphism documented thus far indicate how journalists use inductive reasoning to draw analogies between animals and humans. If Durkheim and contemporary thinkers like Hamayon (2016) and Stang (2009) are right, resemblances between animals and humans are a significant source of an imitation’s iconic force.¹⁰ Pride emerges as a recurrent theme in this chapter, depicted in Queen Elizabeth’s horses on parade and the ponytailed woman fashionably promenading Oslo’s busy shopping streets with an orderly clip. We see this theme in the way a woman may use her ponytail to “swat” men into place, or in the fashionable dress, fresh off the runways of Paris, that bursts with a spirited horsetail. For the many observers, the ponytail is telling of movement, an energetic mood, high spirits, willingness to act.¹¹ Like with those frisky foals described EQUUS magazine (King, 2006/2020), there is a lively spirit in the ponytail.

These accounts and others show how folklore and myth are rewritten in the material realities of modernity. In politics and myth, “universalism is most often articulated in concrete” (Alexander, 2006, p. 49) and objects retain both spirit and function (Jung, 1972/2003, p. 132): The horsetail is fly swatter, communication tool, and the means to connect to other horses. If we are to believe the reports, for Ørjan, the boy with disabilities, the tickling horsetail signaled a pleasurable ride to come and a connection with his caregiver. For May Ellen Hartting and Knut Kudsen, the horsetail was likely a preferable hairdo for a hike and to show an unmistakable pride and meaningful approach to their relationship. As for the fly-swatting abilities of a horse’s tail or a woman’s ponytail, a comparison may indeed seem remote to our ideas about woman’s fashion. But perhaps that is because our ideas of fashion are too limited by quick surface analyses of ideologies and social power. Apparently, imitation and myth can cause these many mental concepts of form and function to transform into signs that, in turn, can fuse with a believer.¹² This is a multidimensional process. Not only is animal form given to humans and human forms to animals, but beliefs about animals’ social lives meld with ideals of human life.

In Aesop’s Fables, the fox is always cunning, the lion bold, the wolf cruel, the bull strong, and the horse proud. What if the ponytail had a different name? We know that similar fashions have been called rat tails, for instance, and a hairdo that collects hair into two braids close to or just above the ears is called pigtails in English and musefletter [mice braids] in Norwegian. Those names have quite a different ring. Horsetail or ponytail, on the other hand, conjures the image of a galloping foal with tail high, or a mare whose chiseled body is balanced by a memorable mane and tail, a familiar silhouette of powerful grace against the landscape. According to Franz (1964, pp. 175–178, 220), the horse, as other animals, is associative of instinctive natures and connectedness with our surroundings, which is why many myths and fairytales include helpful animals. When saddled, animals evoke the imagined disciplining of these forces. When rider-less, roaming the plains, climbing a hillside, the animal evokes notions of unconscious forces escaping a disciplining consciousness and society. The blend of spirituality and body technique, the ways in which meaning threads through the ponytail object and surfaces in its bound yet longhaired aesthetics, steer our focus moving on. The ponytail involves a long and dutiful practice, not just as horses stand head-to-tail, but as humans—mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, and stylists—stand fingers to head to recharge the individual with hair belonging to a world of social power, inequalities, and ideologies.¹³

This book explores how semiotic systems, and the idea of symbolic layers, make objects’ meaning transformable and multilayered. The ponytail’s iconic power shapes social life, but not without ideological contests. In a contemporary ideological terrain, neoliberal ideals, for instance, may pervert and destroy minds and bodies.¹⁴

A journalist wrote an engaging piece in Dagbladet (July, 2, 2016, pp. 26–30) on Karoline Bjerkeli Grøvdal, female track and field athlete in a neoliberal world, who relates her challenge to overcome past eating disorders. The journey, Grøvdal admits, has been tough, but today “There is not much that can break my stride, I have regained control and now I am clinging onto it.”

The journalist writes:

She assembles her light-blond hair in a tight ponytail. She looks like a chiseled, well-built thoroughbred, as she toe-hops down the stairs. Well out in the sun, she is ready to thrust down the white mountainside.

High performance sports, the fitness craze, the glorification of youth and compulsive ideas of progress are part of the modernity Grøvdal must maneuver. Her biography, along with the journalist’s poetics, create an avalanche effect, the paramount force of contemporary crazes washing over them and us. The ponytail, with its animalistic and instinctual freedom to move, is not only a forceful ally of social and gender movements, but also a destructive enemy if shored up by ideology. The journalist endows Grøvdal with the power of this mythical thoroughbred that can both roam free, silhouetted on the horizon, yet saddled to exhaustion and confined to the stable of sport. The ponytailed athlete regains a freedom once lost, to move in and with this freedom, to materialize it and feel its force and its loss yet again. The distinctive content of Grøvdal’s iconic salvation through the mythical logics of the ponytail grant freedom from the physical, psychological, and social suffering of modernity, and she is able to transcend the senseless treadmill and transitoriness of life as such.

This deeply cultural and aesthetic experience narrows our attention to how the journalist’s observation of the ponytail conveys Grøvdal’s inevitable imperfection. In an individualized society, some might conclude that Grøvdal has not managed to stay strong and resist the forces of elite sport. Although the journalist indeed emphasizes Grøvdal’s individual struggle and victory, the way the narrative depicts, enacts, and recasts the ponytail object allows us to see, feel, and at least unconsciously, recognize the social powers and ideologies surrounding her. Contaminated by a record-crazed sport that almost made her robotic, Grøvdal became entangled in the murky, mechanistic confusions of modernity.¹⁵ She was shackled in the worst thinkable way, through mental illness, but was able to break free, with all the powers of the well-built thoroughbred escaping to a cultural idea of the natural. Who has ever thought that kinetic and social movements were free from toil, obstacles, and pain?

Fair enough, the everyday poetics and romantics of these cited newspapers articles are surely a stark contrast to the many gender challenges and inequalities that persist in Norway. Grøvdal’s story of an unhealthy sport culture in which dieting and competition almost destroyed her body—and mind—and other accounts are, if we allow them to be, examples of gender problematics in today’s Norway and reports of injustice and democratic hope. In lay terms, we sometimes think of icons, of totems and meaningful objects, as providing easy and faulty escapes from the hard facts of social power and inequality. Grøvdal’s storied horsetail shows us that this is a mistaken simplification. Indeed, the ponytail provides an answer, but one that is continuously questioned and challenged in a modernity in which the ponytail must be fused with meaning time and time again. The hair must be assembled in a “tight blond ponytail” again and again. This is not merely a theoretical argument, but an empirical inclination to see the meaning systems that shape, reshape, and challenge ideologies as we understand social life as imitating natural life. Also, this understanding not only has to do with the name for this hairdo—a ponytail in English or a horsetail in Norwegian—but with the imaginative and now mostly unconscious reasoning for its naming.

The ponytail is indeed a hairdo of practical necessity; however, short hair is far more practical. Thus, the ponytail’s practicality has been meaningfully shaped through performance and an iconic consciousness of its visual and sensuous actuality. With Durkheim, we can say that practicality might be the easy way to explain why this hairdo is often chosen, but the semiotic processes outlined here are generated by very important deep structures that are not necessarily viewed as the true “social” cause of the icon.¹⁶

The short vignettes described in this chapter show how much meaning can reside in the brushstroke of a tail. The horsetail is an aesthetic parade of kinetic energy which can be recaptured on a fashion runway or in a bursting horsetailed dress. The horsetail is a means to keep one’s balance in stride as life moves. It is not just an object that swings and moves, but contains also the feel of moving, of being moved, and of moving others. The ponytail icon is existential. Just watch as Ørjan feels the horsetail on his chin or as Grøvdal escapes the social facts of modernity by thrusting proudly down the mountainside.

This analysis is a stark contrast to the social theorizing that frames modernity as the triumph of mechanism over meaning, of rationalization over myth, and of commodities over meaning. From that viewpoint, we would likely assume that the ponytail must really be the rational choice of the modern woman, a practical style when she works or works out. If anything, its visual should shine with capitalist ideology and have a touch that sustains hierarchies. But counter to this intuition of critical theory, this study shows that through performance and icon, we can make sense of the existential twists of fate in the justice and injustice surrounding social power and ideologies in a deeper and cathartic way. This is no conservative analysis or neat or abusive way to mask agency and real injustice; rather, I seek to describe why, how, and when the ponytail can contest injustice and sustain gendered paradoxes and options.¹⁷

What makes the ponytail fashionable? The answer lies in the ever-changing spirits of our times and how landscapes of meanings materialize in a ponytail that is moved by its wearer but also itself moves through social facts that surround us. Here, the ponytail object materializes both the abstract ideas and empirical realities shaping our far from perfect or complete life projects.

Notes

• 1. Despite the weight sociologists give to social power and rational actors in modernity, I follow the strong program in cultural sociology that draws on and updates theories on how social dramas and theatrical forms (Barthes, 1957/2009; Goffman, 1959, 1976; V. Turner, 1982) shape social life and ideas about what is rational (Alexander, 1995, 2004, 2017; Larsen, 2016; Smith, 2008; Spillman, 2012).

• 2. Durkheim described this process (which I translate as one that makes the classified another aspect of the classifying aspect) as “the gods that govern things are but another aspect of the things they govern” (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 145).

• 3. “All the beings classified in a single clan—men [sic], animals, plants, inanimate objects—are only modalities of the totemic being … Moreover, the adjectives applied to them are the same as those applied to the totem” (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 151).

• 4. Myth is a process that makes abstract realities settle in our daily life and that draws on a selection of empirical life to make moral abstractions (E. Leach, 1969; Lévi-Strauss, 1967). Myth transform wishes, fears, and hopes into condensed images and reinserts these images into real life, real places and real times (Franz, 1964; Jung, 1972/2003). Through processes of myth, hair allows communities and individuals to condense their own life events, challenges, and changes and to reinsert themselves into social life with this symbolism (E. R. Leach, 1958; Obeyesekere, 1981; Synnott, 1987).

• 5. Durkheim (1912/1995, pp. 141–157) and the study of animism in myth and play (Benedict, 1934/2005; Franz, 1964; Gregor, 1977; Hamayon, 2016; Jung, 1972/2003) has a long history. I aim to keep Durkheim’s focus on ritual consensus at a distance by drawing on Stang (2009, p. 60) who explored spiritual and corporal diversity in transformational worlds. Stang argued that the Mehinaku she visited in the early twenty-first century recounted many myths about humans and animals, but mostly defined these myths as “old stories.” There is no one true reality, but many. Perspectives ranging from a state of wilderness to gentleness are not simply prototypes of relationships between human and non-human, but also a continuum that allows many entrances into natural and social reality.

• 6. Bodies let us to join in social life and to recreate other bodies and objects, and to give and drain us of emotional energy (Collins, 2004; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012; T. Turner, 1995).

• 7. Harald B. Broch (2014, 2020) showed how coffee, as the ontological security that fills a kitchen with aromas and warms the throat, can be used to create the feeling of home elsewhere (on a boat), or simply a familial outdoor event.

• 8. Ideas of pristine nature are important in Norwegian public culture, which is concerned with political management and ideational work of sports, leisure, and urban life (Goksøyr, 2013; Gurholt & Broch, 2017; Slagstad, 2010). We also find these ideas in children’s literature from Nordic writers, such as Astrid Lindgren’s (1981) book on Ronja Røverdatter and Maria Parr’s (2009/2017) Astrid, the Unstoppable.

• 9. Throughout the post-WWII era, Norway has priced itself as a champion of gender equality and women’s emancipation, but by no means is the country rid of gender inequality. In fact, feminism is deeply institutionalized in Norwegian political and institutional life with ongoing criticism and debate (Engelstad & Larsen, 2019; Mjøset, 2017). For exciting reads about the death of the breadwinner and life of the two income-family, as well as the gendered reality of the double-shift working woman, see (Hochschild, 2003; Aarseth, 2011).

• 10. The purpose of ceremonial ritual can be “to transform the social body into an animal, bird, or other such extrasocial body, and thereby to transform the embodied subject from an ordinary social actor to an agent endowed with the creative powers of the mythical beings who first instituted the relations and cultural forms the celebrants are ritually engaged in reproducing” (T. Turner, 1995, p. 160).

• 11. The ponytail is telling for the Vogue journalist reporting on Kim Kardashian West, for the U.S.A. women’s soccer fan club rooting for their team dubbed The Ponytail Express (Schultz, 2014), and for those Weitz (2004, p. 63) interviews about hair symbolism.

• 12. See Csordas (1990), Durkheim (1912/1995), Mead (1934/2015), and Tarde (1903).

• 13. See the many powerful recounts of how daughters and mothers, sisters and friends connect through grooming in Prince (2009), Simon (2000), Tarlo (2017), and Weitz (2004).

• 14. See Gill (2016), McRobbie (2009), and Toffoletti et al. (2018).

• 15. In his Sociology of Religion, Weber (1922/1993, p. 149) argued, “The distinctive content of salvation in the world beyond may essentially mean freedom from the physical, psychological, and social suffering of terrestrial life. On the other hand, it may be more concerned with liberation from the senseless treadmill and transitoriness of life as such. Finally, it may be focused primarily on the inevitable imperfection of the individual, whether this be regarded as more chronic contamination, acute inclination to sin, or more spiritually, as entanglement in the murky confusion of earthly ignorance.”

• 16. See Smith (2020, p. 51).

• 17. In mapping out the elementary forms of place and their transformations, in an article by the same title, Smith (1999, pp. 33–34) made an inspirational case for seeing the transformative and dynamic potentials in Durkheim’s theories. In studying how institutional strains become social crises, Alexander (2019) showed how Durkheimian theorizing clarifies the cultural mechanisms behind social endangerment and change.