Display

Abstract

“Display” discusses gold’s appearance in British ethnographies of a wide variety of people who broadcast foreignness with gold earrings, nose rings, chains, bracelets, bangles, and bells. This genre of writing was most evocative in descriptions of Greek and Middle Eastern women who brandished coins around their necks instead of concealing them in their pockets; but it was also present in depictions of African kings, Southern European peasants, and—most effusively—South Asians of nearly all castes and ethnicities. In the course of describing foreign adornment, travel writers developed a series of models that explained the brandishing of gold as rational for the stage of civilization under review but not, implicitly, for contemporary British society; and British visitors to almost every foreign clime viewed golden ornaments as picturesque signs of a society frozen in age-old customs.