Introducing Anthropology. Laura Pountney

practices are often misunderstood or misinterpreted, even within the same culture.

Body modifications

      In both the past and the present, the body has been reshaped in many culturally relevant ways, from traditional foot-binding in China to more recent cosmetic surgeries in Western society. Humans modify their bodies for many reasons. Some religious traditions believe that marking the body is a corruption of the perfect human form designed by God, while many others consider the undecorated body to be not fully human. For some, body decoration is something that distinguishes humans from the animal world or from other humans in different cultures.

      The body can be either temporarily modified (for example, body-painting, make-up, toiletries, hairstyles) or permanently modified (tattooing, scarification, reshaping and piercing). Below are three examples of body modification in different cultures and different times.

      body modification The deliberate altering of the human anatomy

Foot-binding

      The foot-binding of girls was practised only in China and became popular in the twelfth century among the elite. Its purpose was to restrict the growth of the foot as a sign of beauty, wealth and discipline. A woman with bound feet could not walk properly. She was also considered attractive as a marriage partner because her physical impairment indicated she was honourable and a virgin. Foot-binding began at 3–6 years of age, when all the girl’s toes, apart from the big toe, were folded down under the sole of the foot and bandaged tightly in that position. The bones of the toes broke and the instep was artificially curved and raised in an attempt to create the ‘lotus foot’, the perfect arch of the foot. Women with these modifications would need constant support to stand, and walking was extremely painful and problematic in terms of balance. Men found women with bound feet very attractive. Foot-binding was officially banned in China in 1911.

       Lip plates

      Lip plates are worn in parts of Africa and South and Northwest America. The Kayapo men of Brazil still wear lip plates, though it is best known as a practice among the women of certain African cultures. A hole is sliced into the lower lip and a small object is inserted. After the hole heals around the object, it is removed and is replaced by a larger plate, gradually stretching the hole. The purpose and meaning of lip plates is different in different cultures. The Lobi women of the Ivory Coast and Ghana wear lip plates to protect against evil spirits that enter the body via the mouth. For others, they are a status symbol. Later in this chapter, Terence Turner explains the meaning of lip plates for Kayapo men (see p. 75).

       Scarification

      Scarification is a way of permanently marking the body by cutting the skin and is often carried out as part of a ritual. Scarification was, and is still today, practised most widely in Africa and among Australian Aboriginal people. The main point of African scarification is to beautify, although scars of a certain type, size and position on the body often indicate group identity or stages in a person’s life. Among the Dinka of Sudan, facial scarification, usually around the temple area, is used for clan identification. In southern Sudan, Nuba girls traditionally receive marks on their forehead, chest and abdomen at the beginning of puberty. At first menstruation they receive a second set of cuts, this time under the breasts. These are enlarged by a final, extensive phase of scarring after the weaning of the first child, resulting in designs stretching across the sternum, back, buttocks, neck and legs. Nuba scarification is determined by social status and maturity and is perceived as a mark of beauty. In the context of the cultural traditions of the Dinka and Nuba, the individual has little choice in the matter of scarification.

      In other parts of Africa, scarification is carried out for different reasons. Pain and blood can play a large part in the scarification process, determining a person’s fitness, endurance and bravery. This is especially the case in puberty rites, since a child must prove a readiness to face the responsibilities of adulthood, in particular the prospect of injury or death in battle for men and the trauma of childbirth for women. However, traditional scarification has declined in Africa, Australia and elsewhere as a result of health concerns and politico-cultural changes.

A Datoga woman with traditional facial scarification. (Kathy Gerber / Wikimedia Commons)

Body modification in Western societies

      In different cultures there are various ideas about what is most important regarding the body; for example, in some cultures adult men must have a beard, while in others they may spend hours plucking every hair from their bodies (for the example of Kayapo culture, see below, pp. 75–7). One common form of body modification in Western society is through cosmetics, which are used to beautify the external body. Some people may believe that a person decorated with make-up is more beautiful than that person in their undecorated state. In Western societies, people spend hundreds of millions of pounds a year on personal hygiene and make-up. In 2019, Fragrance Direct, a leading beauty retailer in the UK, commissioned a survey of one thousand women in the UK to find out exactly how much they were spending on make-up. They discovered that they spend, on average, £482.51 a year on beauty products – which works out at £2.39 per day on the twelve different products they use on their faces. And the actual value of these twelve products at any given time is £113.77. The research also showed that the highest beauty spend is among 16–24-year-olds, who use an average of sixteen beauty products a day, worth £153 in total.

      People in Western society spend a considerable portion of their time on their appearance. Ways of conforming to ideas of beauty and attractiveness vary through time and across cultures.

      For example, historically defined body shapes and expectations change. At the moment in British and Western fashion, the ideal beautiful body tends to be quite thin, but in the 1950s and early 1960s the ideal female body shape was curvaceous and with ‘good proportions’, meaning measurements of 36:24:36 inches around the bust, waist and hips. Similarly, the amount of bodily hair seen as desirable on men and women has changed dramatically over time.

A popular body modification in Western society for aesthetic reasons is plastic surgery. One example is breast enlargement. As one of the strongest identifiers of a woman’s gender and sexuality, breasts have been the subject of modification for many years. Silicone gel implants were developed in the 1960s, but breast enlargement surgery became more widespread only in the 1980s. Despite the considerable cost and health risks involved, breast enlargement is still the most popular cosmetic procedure performed on British women: more than 30,000 women receive breast implants every year (https://digital.nhs.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/information-about-number-of-breast-implant-surgeries-revealed-in-new-report). According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Brazil is the second largest (the USA is the first) consumer of plastic surgery in the world, with 1.2 million surgeries carried out every year. In the section below, Alexander Edmonds explains some of the reasons for these body modifications.

      Difference between plastic and cosmetic surgeries

      Plastic surgery is an essential procedure that is performed by specialist surgeons to repair damage to skin and tissue from injuries or problems present at birth. Plastic surgery helps people who have been in accidents or born with physical impairments and deformities (burns, poorly healing scars, cleft palate, etc).

      Cosmetic surgery is a procedure that people volunteer to undergo. Such procedures are usually undertaken to improve a person’s physical appearance, which, unlike plastic surgery, are just for aesthetic