The body jigsaw - borrowing body decoration from other cultures

UNESCO Courier, July, 2001 by Philippe Liotard

Imagine the body as a canvas, a space to mix and match physical and cultural elements in defining who or what you want to be. Here lies the great paradox. The scarring and piercing of tribal aesthetics are all the rage in rich countries, while in the South, western ideals are coveted by a monied few

In 1976, the punks barged into the lives of the reserved British with a bang. Disrespect was their word of order, as they went about ranting against the predictable world mapped out by their elders. They insulted the Queen and heaped abuse on nuclear energy, the economy, pollution, work and the media.

For even greater shock value, they tapped the power of the image. They spat on staid English conventions by donning a revolting, yet carefully studied appearance. A skirt could no longer be called a skirt, and punks gleefully paraded in torn, stained and gaudy clothes, marrying colours against all the cannons of good taste. They cut their hair into crests, horns and other shapes, plastered themselves with lurid make-up and wore chains. They covered their arms, faces, necks and heads with tattoos, reinvented piercing using safety-pins, studs and rings in their noses, eyebrows, lips and cheeks, and went so far as to deliberately scar themselves.

With their altered, rebel bodies, the punks quickly gave birth to a charged self-image. Their very own promoters conspired with the media they despised and turned them into symbols of decadence, before exporting their bodily aesthetics throughout Europe, North America and Japan.

Now, a quarter of a century later, the punks have spawned a loyal following. Top models, sporting personalities, singers and show-business stars jostle to display original hairstyles and body piercings. In rich countries, teenage girls show off their navel rings and stick out their bejewelled tongues, while boys wear rings in their eyebrows. Twenty-five years on, the socially-scorned practices of piercing or altering one's body have become musts for counting on the fashion scene. Young westerners have appropriated once "underground" practices to gain entry into the trendy but ultimately mainstream club.

There is, however, a paradox in all this. One would expect originality and innovation. In fact, what we are witnessing is a sweeping trend of cultural mix and match, drawing on body-altering techniques long used by non-western cultures for purposes of religion, aesthetics or identity. The American artist Fakir Musafar coined the term modern primitives," giving rise to a new ideal, a patchwork that "tribalizes" the western body. For the past 50 years, he has explored alternative forms of spirituality incorporating primitive body decoration and rituals.

How did these alternative ways of changing the body travel so far afield? What drives young westerners to have tattoos from the South Sea islands or Japan? What do these "tribal" or "primitive" markings and decorations mean in a western society?

Certainly not a return to the rituals that originally produced them: most of those who go for such adornments know nothing about these distant practices. Moreover, the bodies now being used as models were those that were stigmatized and displayed during colonial exhibitions in Europe and the United States right up to the early 20th century. They were curiosity objects and more significantly, living symbols of the supposed "backwardness" of the colonized peoples. Seen through European eyes, piercing, body scars and elongated lips, necks and ears were evidence of "barbarism," justifying the West's self-appointed duty to civilize. Such practices incarnated the opposite of the ideal "civilized" body.

By way of homage to the civilizations the colonial powers seemingly sought to stamp out, the vanguard of the "modern primitives" set out to investigate these body rituals. The "tribal aesthetics" of Maria Tashijian who owns a chain of body-alteration shops in the United States, is vaunted as a way to educate people by preserving the memory of extinct cultures and passing on their idea of beauty. Through piercing, stretching the ear-lobe and body scarring, we can thus create a jigsaw of ancient and modern aesthetics.

Others such as Musafar. see these practices as the chance to work on one's own profound sense of Self. "Body play," in his words, consists of experimenting with every known body-alteration technique. By willingly going through the initiation ordeals of traditional societies, one actually relives a primal experience that has long been forgotten in the industrialized world. It is the path towards rediscovering an original innocence.

Forget about those blonde surfers

What's important is not the markings left on the body, says Musafar. Instead, what matters is the confrontation with physical pain that takes one toward another plane of consciousness, shunned in western societies where all is done to combat suffering. But unlike the physical and symbolic violence of initiation rites in traditional societies, these bodily alterations are the fruit of a conscious personal choice.