pernodel

Bluish Women

And speaking of exotic Orientalism, how about these? When I first looked at them, I thought that they were supposed to the sort of imaginary Africans who used to appear in the cartoons and comic books of my long-ago youth–the kind whose strange customs included various sorts of bodily mutilation, including the use of tooContinue reading “Bluish Women”

Non-Specific Exotica

Since I’ve been looking at orientalist stereotypes, evocations of the mysterious East, this seems like a good time to take a look at this set: Not Asiatic, but still evocative of orientalism and the mysterious other. I think these are maybe supposed to represent some kind of Africans–or Polynesians, or Indonesians or native South Americans,Continue reading “Non-Specific Exotica”

More Aesthetic Asians

Just to confirm how typically and conventionally stereotypical the set I described in my last post is, here’s a second set that repeats the same basic characteristics: slanty-eyed Asians of uncertain gender, both dressed in exotic pantsuits, both wearing strange round hats, both sitting on the floor, both engaged in the acts of sensitive aesthetes–thisContinue reading “More Aesthetic Asians”

Exotic and Smashable Fragility

I’ve previously written a number of posts about the racial stereotypes represented in my salt and pepper shaker collection: lazy Mexicans, but especially adorable Native North Americans and jolly overweight African Americans. This time, it’s the turn of the Asians. This set sums up one significant branch of the Asian world as it is depictedContinue reading “Exotic and Smashable Fragility”

Perfectly Armless

Some months ago, I did a series of posts about shaker sets that represent women with various limbs, etc., missing. I described this set: And this set: But I somehow managed to forget about this set: Here we have two more versions of what appears to be a certain sort of masculine ideal of womanhood:Continue reading “Perfectly Armless”

Skin or Mask?

Here is another example of a set of shakers that exudes an intriguing ambiguity. It represents a clown, clearly, accompanied by a drum. Why a drum? I have no idea. Perhaps the drum originally came from a different shaker set–although the color tones do suggest these two do belong together. But that’s not the sourceContinue reading “Skin or Mask?”

More on Veggie People

Copacetically, just after I’ve just been talking in my last post about salt-and-pepper radishes humanized with human eyes, another blog that is also focused on salt and pepper shakers offers a recent newspaper article about “veggie people”–anthropomorphic depictions of humanized vegetables from a century ago, found on cards and other places, including,eventually, salt and pepperContinue reading “More on Veggie People”

Big Radish Is Watching You

If, as I discussed my last post, there’s something odd and unsettling about shalt-and-pepper shakers that look like raw potatoes and that are designed to be put on tables that include cooked food like fries, then what are we to make of a pair like this: Now admittedly, these radishes (I think they are radishes–eitherContinue reading “Big Radish Is Watching You”

Le cru et le cuit

In my last post I talked about how categories get confused when you put salt-and-pepper shakers representing food items on a table in the midst of real food items: categories like real and fake, hard and soft, edible and inedible, etc. Yet another such category, one that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss thought was culture-defining, isContinue reading “Le cru et le cuit”

Food, Fictional and Non-Fictional

Thinking as I wrote my last post about how disturbing it was to look at versions of the exact same characters in different poses in two different salt and pepper shaker sets, about how the impression that they could move and take different positions seemed to suggest a life they were leading outside and beyondContinue reading “Food, Fictional and Non-Fictional”