Body Modification Is Influenced by Culture
Introduction
This paper argues that body modification is influenced by the culture. To support such argument, the paper discussed the prevalence of body modifications in the form of tattoo and cosmetic surgery as the culture influenced them.
Body Modification in the form of Tattoo
Proofs of tattooing and associated practices started from the most primitive human societies. For instance, Egyptian mummies from the era of the Middle Kingdom have exposed a widespread culture of body marking. In a spiritual cosmology, the unassailable tattoos of humanity could be exchanged for spiritual privileges in the next life.
In traditional cultures, tattoos commonly serves as an assurance for good health and to protect against evil. Throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean, subsequent to the broadening of puritanical Islam, tattoos protected human beings from evils. On the other hand, tattoos were also used to memorialize dead relatives in Hawaii. In Indonesia, tattoos were indicative of significant secular events.
The era of 19th-century colonialism used tattoos as symbols of transitional stages in the life-cycle. The cultures of Polynesia and Melanesia revealed an astonishing tradition of body art in the form of tattooing as ethnographic work (Turner, 2005).
Tattoos in pre-literate societies were lasting, communal and mainly obligatory. The importance of a tattoo could be read unmistakably because tattoos were set inside a collective culture of joint meanings.
The main beliefs of social membership as expressed by means of bodily modifications, tattoos designate social membership through the symbol of the human body as a space where we compose the body politic. Specifically, body marks designate political identity such as gender at definite positions in the life-cycle. They are important in distinguishing stages in sexual development.
Let us further discuss the practice of tattooing in a culture. One culture that uses tattoos is the Baka group. The Baka is one of the Pygmy hunter-gatherer groups existing in southern Cameroon, northern Gabon, and northern Congo Republic. They live in the tropical rain forests of central Africa.
The Baka have four body modifications for aesthetic purposes and these are the sharpened front-teeth sange, the brand on the woman’s arm called batabata, the piercing called yuku and the tattoo tele. Tattoos have the most diversity of design among these four kinds of body modifications, and they normally found on the leg, waist, abdomen, chest, arm and face (Peng, Nagaoka and Hata, 2014).
There are two kinds of tattoos in Baka group: the traditional and the modern. The traditional tattoo is comprised of three simple patterns, while the modern tattoo has more patterns including a name, a fish, a scorpion, a snake or a leaf. The traditional tattoo used razors to carve some scars then they used charcoal to rub it into the wounds while the modern use ink and needle.
The performance of body modification such as tattooing in Baka society is not a mandatory ritual but it is a tradition that is preserved until now. Nevertheless, in some regions, the young Baka like modern fashion better than the painful conventional body modifications (Peng, Nagaoka and Hata, 2014).
The nature and purpose of tattoos changes throughout time because the purpose of social life also changes. By in contrary, the present-day interest in tattoos is no longer limited, as compared in previous periods of Western industrialization, to the youth culture, criminal societies and working-class. Tattoos expand through the social level as it is more and more used to construct an aesthetic improvement of the body. Tattooing is at the present more directly related to the commercial utilization of sexual subjects in popular culture than to life-cycle transitions and traditions (Turner, 2005).
Tattoos have become a normal aspect of consumer culture, where they insert cultural investment to the body's surface. Nevertheless, the need to mimic the body markings of previous cultures in modern primitivism can be used as additional confirmation in postmodern cultures of what we may productively called as the exhaustion of idiom.
Popular idioms are essentially clichés because a culture of imitation does not simply create, authorize or recognize ‘authenticity’. Japanese symbols or Traditional Maori are woven into worldwide consumerism, where they are continuously restructured, creating a multifaceted hybridization of symbols and meanings.
Globalization has created a combination of tattoos which are paradoxically self-referential and monotonous, and the very hybridity of tattoo type teasingly inquires the legitimacy of these marketable body marks. This wearing away of the obligatory and solemn nature of tattooing as a way of wounding social membership and meaning simultaneously into the skin is an aspect of the wide-ranging secularization of the world (Turner, 2005).
The term ‘plastic surgery’ encompasses a wide range of surgeries that modify the body or the physical appearance. Incorporated in the phrase is an extensive range of reconstructive surgeries, which try to restore or refurbish congenitally amputated, deformed or damaged parts of the body. A subset of plastic surgery is cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery refers to surgery selected mainly for aesthetic purposes or in wishing that a person will become more accepted socially.
Even though feminist usually concur that the stress to match to a wide-eyed, smooth-skinned, slender and youthful frequently Euro-centric look are entrenched in historical discrimination, they disagree on the subject of how to comprehend the function of the person in contributing to the status of cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is commonly believed by feminists as oppressive process. Receiving a cosmetic surgery is influenced by sociocultural perception on physical appearance (Karupiah, 2013). Different methods for tackling the problem of the anxiety to match to a “norm” of beauty are caused by different understandings in the association between the needs and impulses of a person and the dictates of society leads (Goering, nd).
Through cosmetic surgery, women escape from the actuality of change and aging because qualities related with age are considered as unappealing by society. Women desire to evade being themselves, but they assert to perform cosmetic surgery for themselves. These individuals both deny themselves the chance to appreciate our common human state of physical mortality, impermanence and vulnerability. Engaging in cosmetic surgery also emphasize detrimental notions of normality through these surgeries. Cosmetic surgeries amplify anxiety to fit the norm.
However, if people who choose cosmetic surgery are just cultural dopes, then they appear to be absolves from liability for their actions. They only tag along the course of external forces that form their needs.
The most excellent answer to the detrimental notions of normality accepted by the “cultural dope” analysis is to transform cultural anxieties. This may be done through challenging that the marketing businesses demonstrate bigger variety in the body figures of models. We can also support watchful regulation of the promotion industry so as to bind the formation of those fresh markets (Goering, nd).
According to Berberick (2010), the increasing number of cosmetic surgeries shows that the picture of ideal woman affects female self image. Social trends demonstrate how the media and its “ideal” representation of womanliness have influenced women in exceptional ways. The image of women in the media has constantly been exploitative.
Throughout the years, the media has reduced women to be objects that can be won as prizes and toys to be abused. There is a drastic increase of cosmetic surgery because of the destructive “ideal” made known by the Western media and acknowledged largely by American patriarchal civilization (Berberick, 2010).
In the US, demand for cosmetic surgery on racial qualities such as eyelid surgery done on Asian Americans is motivated by humiliation experienced by cultural minorities in a society governed by whites. However, East Asian nations where eye-lid surgery is increasing have multifaceted cultural and economic associations with the West as well as multi-directional streams popular culture, fashion and trade.
The beauty businesses generally defined are main economic occurrence, motivated by a market sense. Nevertheless, an anthropological approach can demonstrate how they are also rooted in the ‘irrational’ representational field of culture (Edmonds, 2008).
Globalization, on the other hand, unquestionably brought an incursion of images of white or frequently whitish beauty to new parts of the world, even as the fashion business reluctantly grip multicultural style. Cosmetic work such as cosmetic surgery procedures with names such as ‘adjustment of the Negroid nose’ or ‘westernization’ surgery signifies cultural imperialism (Edmonds, 2008).
Conclusion
This paper concludes that body modification I s influenced by culture. Tattoos in pre-literate societies were permanent, communal and mostly obligatory. Tattoos were set inside a collective culture of joint meanings. However, tattoos have become a normal aspect of consumer culture, where they insert cultural investment to the body's surface. The body markings of previous cultures are mimicked in modern primitivism and this can be used as additional confirmation in postmodern cultures of what we called as the exhaustion of idiom. The wearing away of the obligatory and solemn feature of tattooing as a way of wounding social membership and meaning simultaneously into the skin is an aspect of the wide-ranging secularization of the world.
On the other hand, cosmetic surgery is influenced by the culture of the destructive “ideal” made known by the Western media and acknowledged largely by American patriarchal civilization (Berberick, 2010). In an anthropological approach, cosmetic surgery shows how it is rooted in the ‘irrational’ representational field of culture (Edmonds, 2008).
References
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Goering, S. The Ethics of Making the Body Beautiful: Lessons from Cosmetic Surgery for a Future of Cosmetic Genetics. The Center for the Study of Ethics in Society , 13 (3), 1-11.
Modification of body: a comparative analysis of views of youth in Penang, Malaysia ans Seoul, South Korea. (2013). Journal of Youth Studies , 16 (1), 1-16.
Peng, Y., Nagaoka, K., & Hata, R. (2014). Human Body in Social Change Practice of Modification and Medicine . Kyoto: Kyoto University .
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