Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (10 page)

Children’s and adults’ feet still need protection, and not just from hostile terrain and climate. The domestication of dogs, for example, has exposed humanity to the risks of the bloodsucking
hookworm, endemic in the tropics and subtropics. In the glorious days of shoeless youth in the American South before World War I, there were nearly four million cases of hookworm infection, and even one barefoot enthusiast in Charleston, South Carolina, acknowledged that he needed hospital treatment for it while growing up. Hookworm larvae usually enter the body through exposed toes and
multiply in the intestine; the parasite can rob children of up to a quarter of their normal growth and drain the energy of adults. Elsewhere
in the world, many of the most dangerous parasites are waterborne, notably the flatworms that cause schistosomiasis (bilharzia), which affects up to 200 million people globally. Footwear can be a barrier against the larvae, which are transmitted by snails
spread inadvertently since the nineteenth century by migration, colonization, and irrigation projects. The alternative to covering one’s feet may be chronic damage to internal organs from the massive release of eggs by the females. Next to sanitation, footwear has been such a major theme of antiparasite campaigns that Southern critics of the 1909 (John D.) Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the
Eradication of Hookworm Disease accused the philanthropist of planning to enter shoe manufacturing. These critics were overlooking the drop in the rate of infection once children reached the “shoe age” of fourteen. And during Henry Ford’s unsuccessful attempt to grow rubber in the Brazilian Amazon, the
seringueiros
(rubber gatherers) balked at the company doctor’s campaign to combat hookworm by
replacing their sandals with shoes.
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There are other risks in modern life. Ubiquitous rusty nails can transmit tetanus. Even the original habitat of barefoot hiking, the woodlands of the northeastern United States, are infested by deer ticks bearing Lyme disease. Urban environments present risks as well. In the 1950s, physicians at the University of Hong Kong found the feet of the city’s unshod
fishermen and — women more mobile and structurally far healthier than those of a group of their shoe-wearing patients. Impressed as they were with the fishers’ ability to grasp lines and nets with their toes, they also found in their keratinized soles “many minor lacerations due to traumata” and observed that striking stones and other objects on the ground had produced toenails that were “thick,
cornified, and short with uneven and jagged edges.” Footwear, then, may not correct but it can protect. Each modification of the environment increases the pace of the technological treadmill. Once we have stepped on it, we have stepped into footwear.
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The simplest solution is the sandal: open footwear, secured by leather, fiber, or other material or, especially
in India, grasped by a knob between the first and second toes. Sandals may have appeared independently in widely different societies, or they may have been diffused and elaborated during the thousands of years of migrations by which the earth was peopled
One of the first depictions of sandals, on a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian palette, is of the barefoot King Narmer followed by a servant bearing
a pair of them. The Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1567–1304
B.C.
) wore sandals of leather and of woven palm-leaf strips little different in appearance from some of today’s beachwear. By the end of this period, there was a hieroglyph for
sandal
, a long oval with an inscribed, upside-down V representing the thong, that would be universally recognizable today. We know more about sandals and
shoes than about most other items of apparel from prehistory through modern times. Many of the plant fibers used to make the sandals of desert peoples were unappealing to insects, while tannin has prevented the biodegradation of leather deposited in bogs and even in the remains of the
Titanic
on the North Atlantic seafloor.
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Today sandals evoke primitive simplicity and a return to the natural.
And they do affect our feet far less than closed shoes. They may be the most gender-neutral footwear of all, removed from the swagger of boots and the swaying walk of high-heeled shoes—even though recent medical research has suggested that the latter do not have nearly the radical effects on posture that laypeople and professionals alike had supposed. But sandals, while connoting naturalness, are
far from simple. They have inspired not only elaborate techniques of manufacture but unexpected changes both in the feet and in the act of walking.
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One of the first memorable descriptions of these differences occurs in Herman Melville’s
Typee
(1846): the toes of the Marquesas Islanders are “like the radiating lines of the mariner’s compass, pointed to every quarter of the horizon.” Steele F.
Stewart, an orthopedist who studied barefoot peoples around the world a century after Melville’s voyage to the South Seas, underscored the differences between these and the shoe-wearing nations. The fourth and fifth toes have a prehensile curl toward the mid-line of the foot, and barefoot peoples grasp things with their toes. Their normal gait is smooth and restful, a rolling motion beginning on
the heel, continuing with the outer edge of the foot, and ending with the ball of the foot and the toes, which extend and contract as the foot makes contact, helping give a final push while walking. While Stewart did not believe that sandals interfered with the foot—at least, not if they were cut to the foot’s natural shape—later studies suggest that even the simplest footwear starts to rearrange
the bones of those who habitually use it. A team of Japanese medical researchers compared the feet of barefoot East Javanese, sandal-wearing Filipinas, and shoe-wearing Japanese, and discovered that the second
were in some ways closer to the third than to the first. In the Filipinas, the ratio of foot breadth to foot length in proportion to their body mass was similar to that of (shod) Japanese
women. Sandals also interfere with the roll that Stewart observed. And while they do not deform the small toes as most closed shoes do and preserve and even develop the toes’ natural gripping abilities, thong sandals do increase the separation between the big and second toes of children who grow up wearing them. Japanese authorities, it is said, were able to distinguish assimilated Koreans from
ethnic Japanese during World War II by inspecting their bare feet, as Koreans generally did not wear zori. On the other hand, expatriate Westerners are sometimes bemused to find their children growing up with such a gap. Those who take to zori later find the adjustment less natural. A young American teacher who came to Hawaii in the 1960s, Victoria Nelson, took months to develop the necessary “zori
callus” between her toes, alternating several pairs so that the blister, whose location varied from pair to pair, had time to heal.
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To judge from extensive remains that have been found, early sandal technology makes much of today’s mass-market footwear appear crude, no matter how elaborate the machinery that produces it. Armed with a new carbon dating method, accelerator mass spectrometry,
which spares all but a tiny sample of ancient textiles, archaeologists have been discovering that complex and beautifully produced sandals were older than they had thought. Some sagebrush-bark shoes from Oregon turn out to be nine thousand years old, and various remains from a single cave in Missouri have been dated as between eight hundred and eight thousand years old. The earliest was a padded sandal
of plant fiber with a pointed toe, a sling-back formed from twisted lengthwise elements, and a cord zigzagging through loops across the foot, tied down at the ankle. (Some sandals were made from
Eryngium yuccifolium
, or rattlesnake master, considered an antidote to snake venom.) From the Anasazi people of the desert Southwest, the Utah Museum of Natural History has hundreds of sandals made from
yucca leaves and cordage, dating from seven hundred to two thousand years ago, and also exhibiting an impressive variety of forms, weaves, and tying systems that are surprisingly like the technology of today’s open footwear.
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Impressive as these sandal collections are by today’s standards, they are crude compared to the examples in another noted collection from the Southwest, 188 sandals from
about fourteen hundred years ago, collected and first analyzed by the early-twentieth-century archaeologists Ann and
Earl Morris at a site in northeastern Arizona that had been occupied by ancestors of today’s Pueblo peoples. The Puebloans’ descendants had turned to leather moccasins by the time of the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century, but whatever the reasons, more sophisticated workmanship
was certainly not among them. The examples in the Morris collection are unique and nearly flawless; learning to make them must have required careful observation of master weavers. While the Puebloans’ agriculture, houses, and pottery were unremarkable, the complexity of the sandals’ construction startled the archaeologists who rediscovered them in the 1990s. One of the investigators, Kelly
Ann Hays-Gilpin, has identified at least twenty-six textile techniques used to make them, and a graduate student of another investigator prepared a master’s thesis on the toe area of the sandals alone. The investigators believe the variety and complexity of the geometric patterns, more elaborate than the designs of any of today’s footwear, were associated with communities, families, and individuals,
their raised patterned soles leaving distinctive footprints to be read by friend and foe. People were living together in larger units, and the decorations may have helped to assert or maintain the identities of groups. But the sandals were functionally as well as symbolically ingenious. They had doubled-warp toes (with twice as many lengthwise fibers) for extra protection. Twill twining was used
under the toes and the ball of the foot for a flexibility matched by few sandals today. Raised sole designs under the ball of the foot also improved the sandals’ grip on stony or wet surfaces. The depth of their treads, rounded and patterned heels, ridges oriented in multiple directions, edges pointing outward to expel water, all meet the latest specifications for rubber safety footwear published
by the American Society for Testing and Materials. The hide moccasins that replaced the sandals by Columbus’s time were functionally and aesthetically more primitive than the earlier footgear. New materials may have unintentionally broken the transmission of refined and beautiful techniques centuries before the age of plastics.
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Steele Stewart wrote of “pan-Pacific”
sandals worn for protection of the sole by the inhabitants of the volcanic cordilleras of Central and South America and of the volcanic Pacific islands whose shores are lined with sharp coral. Japan did not have the same rough terrain as other Pacific
islands, but it did develop footwear well suited to a climate in which hot, humid summers alternated with cold, snowy winters. Japan is a densely
populated country, with much of its land unsuitable for agriculture, and its people have had to use its limited supplies of food, timber, and other resources efficiently.
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Traditional Japanese footwear suited this environment admirably. It also responded to religious and cultural influences. In the sixth century, under the influence of Buddhist teachings against animal slaughter, wooden clogs
called geta replaced leather shoes and boots outdoors. (Even now, many leather workers are descendants of the former pariah caste of burakamin, to whom this trade was reserved.) Geta, unlike Western clogs, are flat platforms supported by two transverse blocks between two and four inches high placed far enough back so that the front end can tip forward. They were more elegant versions of the wooden
planks fastened by rice straw straps that rice paddy workers had already been using for hundreds of years. Two cloth strips forming a V are fastened at the sides toward the rear of the geta and meet between the first and second toes. Geta raise the wearer above mud and puddles, originally protecting the hem of the kimono, the universal outer garment of men and women alike. Sizes were standard for
men and women, and even left and right geta were interchangeable, as the forward point of the V was in the center of each platform, not toward the body’s center where the toes would naturally lie. Men’s zori and geta were (and are) square, while women’s had rounded corners. While some women’s geta were luxuriously fitted with sole coverings of plaited rushes and rich fabric thongs, male counterparts
could be so similar to one another in size and appearance that drunken dinner guests often walked off with the wrong pair. The best geta were carved from a single block of pawlonia wood, sometimes covered with tatami (bamboo) insoles; others were assembled with tongues and grooves. Far from declining with industrialization, geta became affordable for most poor Japanese with nineteenth-century
machine production. But artisanal techniques survived. Well into the twentieth century, craft shop owners traveled deep into Japan’s mountain forests to buy whole pawlonia trees for the best-quality geta.
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Other footwear needed no quest for rare materials; it recycled common ones. The original Japanese sandals,
waraji
, made of rice straw, appeared even earlier than geta, about two thousand years
ago, as rice was becoming a staple of the Japanese diet. Like their yucca counterparts in the New
World, they were one of history’s most stunningly economical items of costume. Rice straw, a waste product of food production, became both a practical and a religious item. Shinto shrines have sacred straw ropes. Straw was the material of the roofs and mats of traditional houses, raincoats, and rain
hats. Woven straw matting, bound with straw rope, secured food products in transit. And the same renewable straw was woven into
waraji
sandals with a twisted straw cord passing through loops at either side of the foot and heel and secured at the ankle. (An immense straw
waraji
, supported by more than twenty bearers, was recently dedicated to Tokyo’s Sensoji temple, as an embodiment of the protection
of the nation.) In the ninth century, a new kind of straw sandal was introduced, the zori, following the V pattern of geta. Rush, bamboo sheaths, and other economical materials were often used instead of straw. While
waraji
remained country work footwear, zori ultimately were produced with many variations of design and workmanship, including luxurious white brocaded silk wedding models and others
with double rice-straw soles presented by the fiancé’s family to the bride-to-be on their betrothal.
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