A carefully studied statement that speaks out against convention.
A Masai in Kenya shows off her pineapple can earring.
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The
mind’s terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted.
D.
H. Lawrence, British novelist (1885-1930)
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What do these “tribal” or “primitive” markings and decorations mean in a western
society? What drives westerners to have tattoos from the South Sea islands? |
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 Tashjian, 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 re-lives 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.
Such discourse, however, will be rarely heard among the millions of people who flirt
with body decorating. The vast majority are merely fulfilling the modern-day desire
for self-knowledge and recognition from others. They might invoke aesthetics, spirituality,
sex games or the desire to belong to a group, but whatever the reason, the process
of altering the body and putting it to the test comes down to playing with identity.
This reflects a profound cultural shift.
The urge to assert oneself goes hand in hand with a desire to challenge social norms
and values, and to advocate different ways of experiencing, feeling and displaying
one’s body. Many fans of body-art, piercing and tattooing say they can no longer
accept the western model of a sanitized, bland, alienated body.
The ideals of the blue-eyed blonde and the Californian surfer with the sleek and
muscular bronzed body have to go. In this light, altering one’s body becomes a battle
against conventional appearance, a quest to give meaning to a life deemed otherwise
insignificant.
To this end, it’s not enough to go shopping for traditions. Piecing together a body
can also be done using modern materials, knowledge and techniques. By inserting foreign
objects under their skin, some body artists are creating protuberances on foreheads,
breastbones and forearms to radically challenge age-old perceptions of the physical
self.
A
battle against creeping standardization
All
these interventions can be seen as a quest to escape a destiny spelt out in terms
of sex, age and social origin. In this sense, they have political implications. By
shattering models, rejecting beauty standards circulated in the mass media and asserting
the right to do, wear and display what they see fit, this avant-garde is holding
up the body as one of the last bastions where individual freedom can be expressed.
Faced with the pressure to conform, to discipline one’s body in order to meet economic
and social demands, constructing an appearance becomes the royal road to upsetting
normality. Everyone becomes an actor, capable of displaying their body in a unique
way. Rather than sinking into the crowd, they spark a chain of reactions (grounded
or not), from attraction and fascination to rejection and fear.
The refusal to comply with social norms, the awareness that looking different has
an impact, is all part of a battle against creeping standardization. In this light,
such a philosophy stands at opposite ends from the promise of cosmetic surgery, diets
and the like.
Television and the Internet are giving play to all these trends. Day after day, we
are exposed to a million ways of perceiving the body, culled from past and present,
from the imagination and real experiments. Such depictions remind us that the body
is not about a static anatomy, and that there is more than one way to signal membership
to a group. They also remind us that culture is always on the move. What is exotic
one day is undesirable the next and rediscovered later. The globalization of images
has spawned multiple models of the “civilized” body, breaking with the western standard-bearer.
Dressed
to kill in Kinshasa
In
developing countries, however, those with money go to no ends to cling to the most
common western model, plucked straight out of television soap-operas. South American
immigrants in the United States go for breast implants, lighten their skin and bleach
their hair. In southern Africa and among African Americans, skin-lighteners and hair-straightening
products are all the rage. The famed sapeurs of Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic
of Congo, make enormous sacrifices to keep up with what they see as the latest in
Parisian chic. Cosmetic surgery is as popular in the U.S. as in South America, where
women have operations that bring them eerily close to the Barbie doll ideal. In Asia,
they ask surgeons to attenuate the “slant” of their eyes.… Does a perceived or real
context of political and economic domination lead some to hide their specific features?
“Westernizing” the human body reads like a strategy to fit in with globalization.
For now, creating a hybrid ideal of the body is a game for the privileged. Among
the poor, only a minority is going about removing the stigmas they have historically
borne. But popularizing this new ideal is stirring debate. By hijacking appearance
codes and adopting body-altering techniques that were originally designed for medical
purposes, people are carving in flesh the rules of a new game. Their efforts will
likely herald an all-round confusion over what norms, if any, govern the human body. |
