On Sun, 12 Mar 2006, Bjarne og Leif Drews wrote: > Yes in the end all you australian and american, would all be european > origin.
Well, um, no, not really. 200 years ago, almost true in the US (but there were still Native Americans and some Africans). Now add the East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, South American, Pacific Islander, etc. and the US population is well on its way to being majority non-European -- can't remember the last time I heard a demographic prediction of what year that would occur, but it's not far off. Of course every such prediction makes sense only on paper, because in reality intermarrying gives a lot of people here part-European part-other ancestry. Getting this back to costume: This came up on the list a few years ago, when we were discussing the typical facial characteristics associated with particular European historical populations, and how historic costumes/headdress styles generally developed to flatter the dominant facial "look" of the local population (e.g. Italian, Germanic, Russian, Flemish) -- something especially true for Medieval and Renaissance periods when regional populations were mostly homogeneous. In the US, there is no dominant "look," and indeed many people here do not have features that can be uniformly compared to any one particular historic population because most of us have a mix -- even if it's a mix of various European heritages. As someone pointed out at that time, the difference is noticeable when you look at a group portrait of a European re-enactment group, when pretty much everyone in the picture is from the same general gene pool, and it's close to the same gene pool as the population they're re-enacting. Then compare that with an American re-enactment group; even if everyone's dressed to the same place/period, their faces show a huge variety of features, colors, etc. It's something I've found that the Europeans take for granted because they're used to looking at the same general type of faces every day. Yes, this is changing in much of Europe now, particularly in the larger cities, but genetically the mixing is way behind what we see in the States, and it takes a few generations to get a mix significant enough to affect the overall visual look of a group. Often in a specific locally based European re-enactment group you can pick out a couple of outliers -- in the American groups all the faces are different from all the others. It is my costuming bane that I have a face that is Middle Eastern filtered through Russian, which means I look best in Italian, ethnic Greek, and of course Russian costume ... none of which I am remotely interested in. No, I had to get interested in Franco-Flemish, me with the tiny forehead and heavy dark brows and pointy chin... --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
