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 purposes. Despite being deemed non-essential in medicine, this kind of surgery can grant significant emotional benefits. Cosmetic surgery has the potential to visually improve areas of their body that patients may feel embarrassed, ashamed or stressed about.
Cosmetic surgery in Brazil (Alexander Edmonds)
Alexander Edmonds’s book Pretty Modern (2010) is an interesting account of Brazil’s emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery. Edmonds conducted research that took him from Ipanema socialite circles to glitzy telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery. He situates plastic surgery within the medical, economic and psychological landscape of consumer capitalism in modern Brazil, unveiling a specific and intriguing sociomedical discourse of the right to beauty. In the following text, he speaks about his ethnography and its findings.
In this book I tell the story of the growth of cosmetic surgery in a developing country with extremes of wealth and poverty. I begin with the event that first attracted my attention to the topic as a graduate student living in Rio de Janeiro: a Carnival samba school paying homage to a plastic surgeon, Ivo Pitanguy. He was a fabulously rich man with a clientele of international celebrities, so why was he being feted in a parade seen as the most vibrant expression of Afro-Brazilian culture? True, Pitanguy did reconstructive surgery on the poor, including hundreds of victims of a horrific circus fire; and he has also made cosmetic procedures more widely accessible. He himself declared: ‘Plastic surgery is not only for the rich. The poor have the right to be beautiful.’
A waiting room in Ivo Pitanguy’s plastic surgery clinic in Rio de Janeiro. (© Alexander Edmonds)
Pitanguy helped realize that vision. He and his team have performed tens of thousands of surgeries in a charity ward, while some public hospitals offer free cosmetic operations and private clinics market financing plans. Brazil became the world’s second largest market for cosmetic surgery. Yet its numerous favelas have become icons of savage capitalism, while the nation struggles with many public health problems. How in these conditions did it become ‘champion’, as the media boasted, of plastic surgery – or plástica, as it’s known in Brazil?
I set out to do ethnographic fieldwork to try to answer this question. I started in the numerous plastic surgery clinics in Rio de Janeiro. I also did research at some of the sites where aesthetic ideals are produced and consumed, such as advertising agencies. I met a wide range of people: divorced housewives, maids and their elite mistresses, favela residents aspiring to be fashion models, trans people, telenovela actresses
