History of the fur trade

History of the fur trade

2.1 History of the Fur Trade

The fur trade has been in existence for centuries in western countries like America, Canada, UK and other European countries. The Great Lakes in Canada opened its ports for fur traders in the 17th century, participated in by indigenous people who accepted goods such as firearms and liquor, iron axes, knives, hatchets, fish hooks, trade cloths, wool blankets, linen shirts, brass kettles, jewelry, glass beads, gunpowder, alcoholic drinks, as well illnesses which were previously alien to them in exchange for fur (Native American Encyclopedia, 2014). This extended to the native cultures in Siberia as Russian traders discovered the fur trade in the 18th century (Fur Trade, 2013).

The Hudson’s Bay Company was the greatest British fur trading company based in Montreal, Canada. It was dominated by French and Scottish traders. It merged with the North West Company in 1821 after being bitter rivals before that. In the United States, its counterpart company was John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. In 1816, British traders were not allowed to enter the United States unless they become US Citizens (Fur Trade, 2013).

The beaver hat was the most saleable item of the American fur trade, however, as fashion evolved, American fur trade slowly declined. This was because of the advancement of settlement with the trade in wild furs getting more popular than fur of farm animals. The stock of beaver and other amimals was also depleted, ending the fur trade in the 1840’s in the United States and Canada. Traders exploited their geographic knowledge of the sources of fur and the knowledge learned from Native Americans in the creation of fur for trading (Fur Trade, 2013) .

Apart from hats, fur was also used for trimmings for dresses, hats, muffs and collars and eventually, full fur coats became fashion items in the late 19th century (Ewing, 1981). It was at that time when silver foxes and nutria were bred by farmers to revive the glory days of the bountiful fur trade before animals were depleted.

By the mid-1940’s mink farming began to be known as a lucrative business (Skov, 2005). Other animal fur skins were also used such as “weasel, squirrel, racoon, sable, marten, fisher, seal, cat, dog, chinchilla, rabbit and several types of lamb, including karakul. Skins from big cats such as leopard and ocelot were also used” (Skov, 2005, p. 20).

The world centre of the fur trade moved to London in the 1930’s. Having organized “Empire Fur Week” since 1934, the London Fur Trade Association fostered the proliferation of trade journals dedicated to furriery. It also signalled the skinning of several hundreds of thousands of fox, ermine, beaver and mink pelts. Experimental furriery included the skinning of animals which were unlikely to be considered fur donors – badger, skunk, wolf, polecat, squirrel, musk ox, monkey, nutria, raccoon, wombat, wallaby and even hamsters and house cats (Dyhouse, 2011).

By the mid 1970s the International Fur Trade Federation (IFTF) endorsed the CITES agreement banning the use of endangered animals as a responsible action for the preservation of natural resources (Skov, 2005).

2.2 Representations of Fur in History

The fur trade that began in North America became a source of business and wealth to Western Europe. Native Americans who have participated in the trade were suddenly overwhelmed with new forms of exchange such as guns, kettles, tools, new foods and luxury items (Emberley, 1996).

However, Innis (1970) has recognized the centrality of the fur trade in the development of Canada as a nation-state. It has been understood as influential in addressing political and economic interests.

Not only does it bring in money as a commodity which is in demand but it has also become a sign of symbolic power (Emberley, 1996).

2.2.1 Function

Fur coats came into existence originally to protect the wearer from the bitter cold. Clarke (1981) narrated that cold weather calls for clothing with both leather and fur. The leather garments were worn next to the skin followed by a layer of fur cover. Extreme coldness may necessitate two layers of fur, with the first layer turned hair side in, forming air pockets that provide insulation and protection from the dampness of perspiration. The second layer had its fur turn outwards as a shield against the coldest weather.

2.2.2 Status

In medieval Europe, there was a legislation regulating the wearing of fur among the nobility, the clergy and peasantry to distinguish their class affiliation and social rank (Emberley, 1996). Decorative furs such as ermine were sewn into heraldic crests and coats of arms of soldiers while peasants and labourers wore leather apparel and occasionally, fur, but only as hats and nothing more. The more exotic and extravagant amounts of fur were reserved for the upper classes to indicate their dignity and nobility.

Prostitutes were not allowed to wear fur and if they must, due to necessity and comfort from the cold, should wear them inside out. This was also meant to symbolize her inverse position as a ‘respectable woman’ and hence, set her apart from those considered respectable (Baldwin, 1926).

2.2.3 Power

Fur has also been used to symbolize power and represent political affiliation. The beaver hat was used to distinguish Puritans and Cavaliers in seventeenth century England and Charles II gave Hudson’s Bay the monopoly for the North American fur trade in 1670. In more modern times, ex-President Nixon of the United States referred to the use of fur to distinguish honourable and dishonourable practices in saying his wife may not have a mink coat but she has a respectable Republican cloth coat, but she would look good in anything (Parmet, 1990). His sarcasm was pointed against his political opponents to connote sexual propriety as well as political propriety, and Nixon was able to exploit the representation of fur at that time, at the height of controversy for fur-trapping by First Nations, protests of animal rights activists against fur use and the globalization of the fur trade (Emberley, 1996).

2.2.4 Sexual Fetishism

Fur’s innate softness elicits sensuality. The sexual fetishism attributed to fur brings about a new mode of gendered dissimulation associated to “power, eroticism and exchange of women” (Emberley, 1996, p. 440). In an image of a woman wearing fur, it is her body that mediates the symbolic exchange. It is also the sensuality she projects while wearing the fur that invests sexual fetishism in the object, giving it more value and meaning to the fur, while inscribing her as a figure of erotic power.

Because the fur coat may represent wealth and prestige as well as erotic power for women, people who desire such can develop a strong desire to possess fur, as they have deciphered the code that it is one ammunition of bourgeois women of power over men (Emberley, 1996).

2.2.5 Fashion

Women’s obsession for fur was further deepened with watching movie stars flaunting various kinds of fur to epitomize glamour in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Actresses on the silver screen wore coats with high fur collars or indulged in the finest wraps and full length fox and sable coats. Movie plots centered on women rising from poverty to live more empowered lives, as in the movie Easy Living, a 1937 film about a woman named Mary Smith chancing upon an expensive new sable coat and thereafter has transformed her life into a fairy tale story. Fur has become ingrained in fashion that in the 1920’s, two out of three women in England may be found wearing fur coats or have fur trimmings of some kind in their clothes (Dyhouse, 2011).

2.3 Fur Activism Movement

The political and libidinal economies of fur have come together in startling ways in the contemporary moment. Constitutive to the agenda of the animal-rights movement is resistance to fulfilling the fetishistic desires of a ruling social and economic class, whose pleasure derives from the slaughter of animals. Implicitly, the human/animal opposition, which structures both criticism and support for animal-rights activism, contributes to a new kind of fetishism, the spectacle fetishism of the mass media and its images of sadistic violence and cruelty to animals.

In the early twentieth century the fur trade declined drastically and fur became, in the Western economic context, a marginal commodity which served to redouble its status as a luxury commodity: as certain fur-bearing animals became rare and extinct, so too the fur coat itself became a rare and reified commodity. Meanwhile, in other worlds, fur retains its economic value for aboriginal people and its symbolic value increases as it becomes a vital support for modern aboriginal cultures. ‘For today’s fashion, we’d rather dance with wolves than skin them’ recalls a residue of colonial relations layered by current ecological correctness and the spectacle fetishism of cruelty to animals at the hands of the bourgeois female consumer. I would argue that we can red in this excess of significations a postcolonial allegory of the history of imperialism. And further, that the history of fur in its various value-laden contexts constitutes a treasure house of signs from which to trace the gender and colonial character of early European expansion.

2.4 Faux vs. Real Fur

In September, 1992, the New York Times Magazine featured a fashion spread entitled ‘Furs in Disguise’. Fur fashions, affected by the fashion trends of the 1980s towards fake fur were ‘disguised’ through dyeing and cutting techniques in order to resemble their artificial counterparts. This disguise also had the added feature of masking the use of real fur and further abstracting the product from its association with the referent, the fur-bearing animal. This fashion layout represents a strategic response to conflicting symbolic and material interests.

‘Furs in Disguise’ , an allegory of the simulated economic and libidinal investments of fur in our postmodern times, dramatizes the ideological operation of misrecognition essential to the commodity and exual fetishisms of an object that is made to be known, like the prostitute’s identity, rather than to figure in the process of knowledge.

2.5 Fur Fashion

The fall of fur in the 1980s was instigated by animal rights activists led by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). They made a huge impact on their protests against the manufacture, marketing and consumption of fur at the expense of the animals found to be skinned cruelly (Dyhouse, 2011). However, after more than a decade, fur has resurfaced in fashion markets. Initially, it reappeared in trimmings on jackets and sweaters or in accessories such as bags, belts and shoes, until it re-emerged as a full length coat. Skov (2005) reports the shift from short-haired hides of cows, ponies and seals popularized in the late 1990s to long hairs again. In 2004, silver fox and lynx were on parade on the Italian catwalk.

Contemporary fashion has expanded the design of fur from coats with conservative cuts to new fur apparel cut closer to the body. New furs were cut, shaped and dyed in various ways to correspond to the trends. Skov (2005) compared old and new fur fashion as follows:

“Whereas the weight of the old fur coat signified the practical purpose of

keeping its owner warm as well as her middle-class solidity, new fur is light;

with a minimal number of seams, and without lining or interface, a mink coat

now weighs less than 2 kilos. While core consumers used to be women over

50, women in their thirties are now buying fur. At the same time, fur is no

longer sold exclusively in specialized retail outlets but through the boutiques

of name designers and exclusive brands” (p. 12)

2.6 Marketing Fur

2.7 Women’s Sense of Self

Fredrickson & Roberts’ (1997) Objectification theory explains how a woman internalizes how others view her to be her primary view of her physical self. Such a view leads her to habitually monitor her body, how she dresses and fixes herself to look the way she does. If she does not come close to the high standards by which she measures her worth, it increases her shame and anxiety, failure to reach motivational peak states and diminishes her awareness of her internal bodily states. This means she may not be conscious that in the pursuit of looking good, she may be starving her body of the nutrients it needs to survive. Vulnerable to judgment of society, women vigilantly monitor themselves with the knowledge that being positively viewed by others means more opportunities. Studies have shown that how a woman’s body appears to others can determine her life experiences (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997). Physical attractiveness seem to matter more to females than to males that is why they dominate the scene in fashion and beauty.

2.8 Women and Fur

Fur has been associated with glamour, fashion, comfort and success. Women in post-war Britain desired to possess fur coats, preferably mink, as it is a sign of luxury and a defining quality of femininity reflective of one’s sexuality (Dyhouse, 2011). Emberley (1996) noted that the twentieth century saw women wearing fur as a fashion commodity to show off the “twin signs of wealth and social prestige” (p. 438). She also contended that “European bourgeois women actively participate in achieving their status through the accumulation of the symbolic capital invested in ‘femininity’” (p. 438).

This investment in her femininity with cultural capital earns a woman a social differentiation from other women, and a social prestige of the subjective value of a woman eligible as an object of

exchange among the wealthy class (Emberley, 1996). Having access to the bourgeois class comes with certain privileges.

In Leopold von Scher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1989), fur figures as a central prop in a masochistic drama of willed masculine disempowerment and the creation of a correlative negativity, the feminized agent of power and domination:

I went on avidly reading tales of the most fearful cruelty; I gazed with particular relish at paintings and engravings depicting such practices, and I noticed that in every scene furs were the attribute of the torturer. The most bloodthirsty tyrants that ever sat upon a throne, and murderous inquisitors who had heretics persecuted and burned, and all the women whom the great book of history has placed under the sign of beauty, lust and violence: Libussa, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes of Hungary, Queen margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxelana and the Russian Tsarinas of the last century, all wore fur garments and ermine robes (179-80).

Chapter 3

Methodology

3.1 Qualitative Research

Qualitative or the interpretivists believe that the world is a social place and is created by the shared understanding of situations. (Roberts – Holmes, 2005). The qualitative researcher tends to use strategies such as narratives, case studies or phenomenologies, and employs methods such as observation and open-ended interviewing. Qualitative approach focuses on a single concept, and tries to bring personal values and views into the enquiry. In collaboration with participants, the researcher interprets the data in order to create an agenda for change or reform. (Cresswell, 2003).

Since this study shall undertake research on women’s insights about the use of fur as an apparel, it will be a qualitative method of enquiry during which personal opinions will be sought so that meaning and understanding could be derived in a holistic, natural framework. Peat (2002) states the strengths of a qualitative study as being able to obtain information from the perspective of the participant. This can increase how humans understand a concept or phenomenon. However, there can be numerous limitations, for instance the fact that it cannot test a hypothesis. Also there can also be more ethical issues related to qualitative studies, due to the fact that the participants are giving personal opinions about the topic being studied or investigated.

3.2 Research Methods Used

3.2.1 Questionnaires

Campbell, McNamara, and Gilroy (2004) described questionnaires as “a very versatile data-gathering method; they are cheap, easy to administer, whether it be to three people or 300, and can be used to gather a great variety of data of both quantitative and qualitative nature” (p. 146). Cohen, Manion, and Morrison (2000) also praised the use of questionnaires for their efficiency. Surveys and questionnaires allow the researcher to collect a significant amount of information in one attempt, rather than conducting interviews over a period of weeks. Gillham (2000) wrote that questionnaires make efficient use of the respondent’s time, because the survey participant can complete the questionnaire at a time that is suitable, and the survey process does not require the researcher and respondent to match free periods of time to conduct the research. However, a disadvantage of using questionnaires is that the only data collected are variety of tick boxes and brief responses, which means the data tends to have more breadth than depth (Watzlawick et al., 1967; Oppenheim, 1992). This outcome results from the lack of an interviewer to prompt for further information or more detail in the answers. The questionnaire or survey cannot interpret questions for participants who may be unclear about what is being asked, so each participant has to decipher what they are being asked independently. Participants may resort to their own subjective understanding of the questions (Oppenheim, 1992).

Interviews and questionnaires provide a method of directly provoking a response by asking specific questions of research interest. There are a range of different types of interview methods; such as journalistic, employment and therapeutic (Drever. E, 1995) Robson (2002) draws attention to the three different styles of interview; fully structured; semi-structured and unstructured. In a fully structured interview, the interviewer has predetermined questions and uses them in a pre-set order. The semi-structured interview uses predetermined questions where the order can be modified or adapted as necessary. In an unstructured interview, the interviewer has a general area of interest, yet allows conversation to develop freely.

Interviews serve the purpose of enabling participants to be able to discuss their interpretations of a concept, as well as giving participants the opportunity to express their own point of view with regard to certain situations. (Cohen et al, 2000). The interview method involves questioning or a discussion of issues with one or more people. It is useful to collect data which may not be accessible through observation or questionnaires. (Blaxter et al, 2006).
2.Analysis of Data

The questionnaires shall be analyzed qualitatively with the backdrop of the information taken from the literature review. Verbatim transcripts of the focus group interview shall also be be analyzed qualitatively. Bowen’s (2005) analysis of interview transcripts identified patterns in the data by means of thematic codes. This means there will be themes in the interview data that may surface. Patton (1980) explains “Inductive analysis means that the patterns, themes, and categories of analysis come from the data; they emerge out of the data rather than being imposed on them prior to data collection and analysis” (p. 306). Bowen’s analysis of data entailed studying the patterns that emerge, making logical associations with the interview questions and reference to the review of literature. He details the process of deriving his research findings as thus: “At successive stages, themes moved from a low level of abstraction to become major, overarching themes rooted in the concrete evidence provided by the data. These emerging themes together with a substantive-formal theory of ‘development-focused collaboration’ became the major findings of the study” (p.306)