Bare feet have marked both saints and slaves
In medieval Europe a barefoot friar signalled holiness, while a barefoot peasant signalled poverty. Roman slaves had to go without shoes, and colonial slave codes in Suriname and Cape Town made bare feet the visible line between bonded and free. Few things as simple as removing your shoes have carried so many meanings.
Shoes protect feet, but they can also limit the foot's flexibility, strength and range of movement, and they are linked with flat feet, bunions and hammer toe. Walking or running barefoot tends to produce a rolling step without a hard heel strike, which means less jarring force through the foot and lower leg. Gymnasts, swimmers and martial artists compete barefoot, as did athletes at the ancient Olympic Games. Spartan boys were made to go shoeless during military training, and Socrates famously preferred bare feet.
Rome used footwear to sort people. Patricians wore dyed, decorated shoes, plebeians wore rawhide or hobnailed boots, and slaves usually went barefoot. Roman shoes were so uncomfortable that even the rich kicked them off at home, and Augustus was thought odd for wearing his all the time. In China footwear was a sign of civilisation, yet from 1965 to 1981 the state trained rural medics called barefoot doctors, named after village healers who worked in the rice paddies alongside everyone else.
Religion often asks for bare feet. In Exodus, Moses is told to remove his shoes at the burning bush because the ground is holy. Visitors take off footwear in mosques and Hindu temples, pilgrims climb Ireland's Croagh Patrick barefoot at night, and orders such as the Discalced Carmelites, founded in 1568, took their name from going shoeless. Even secular sites follow suit: both George W. Bush and Pope John Paul II took their shoes off at Gandhi's memorial at Raj Ghat.
Today attitudes vary widely. Many South African children go to school barefoot, and New Zealanders routinely walk barefoot into shops; in 2010 an American academic lost a senior post after writing that the habit was uncivilised. Japanese homes have a genkan entrance area for swapping shoes for slippers. And in 1908 Maud Allan scandalised London by dancing Salome barefoot, at a time when an uncovered foot on stage was seen as obscene.
Source: Barefoot
