With his lip plate, penis sheath, large holes pierced through the ear lobes from which hang small strings of beads, overall body paint in red and black patterns, plucked eyebrows, eyelashes and facial hair, and head shaved to a point at the crown with the hair left long to the sides and back, the Kayapo male displays many cultural meanings to the tribe.
Turner shows how, for the Kayapo, the body is conceptualized as a ‘social skin’. Turner’s notion of the body as a social skin is connected to the idea that the body is in some ways a microcosm of society. He suggests that decorating, covering and uncovering the human body in accordance with social ideas of everyday expectations or sacred dress, beauty or status seem to have been a concern of every human society. Turner describes and discusses how the surface of the body becomes the symbolic stage upon which socialization is enacted. He argues that bodily adornment, which ranges from body-painting to clothing, from headdresses to cosmetics, becomes the language through which socialization is expressed. Further, he argues that culture is not only the medium through which identities (social status, attitudes, our desires and beliefs) are communicated. Turner describes how the Kayapo possess a complex code of what could be called ‘dress’ or bodily adornment, but which does not actually involve the use of clothing: the bodily adornments listed above (lip plates, body paint, etc.) constitute what Westerners call ‘clothing’ in their society. Here are some of the meanings for Kayapo which turn the biological body into a social body.
Cleanliness
All Kayapo bathe at least once a day; to be dirty is to be antisocial and is even dangerous to the health of the unwashed individual. Health is perceived as a state of full and proper integration into the social world.
Hair
The removal of facial and bodily hair, including eyebrows and eyelashes, transforms the skin from a mere physical body part into a sort of social filter. The length of hair signifies an individual’s bodily participation with others in reproductive processes. The wearing of long and short hair ties into Kayapo ideas about the nature of family relations. Different Kayapo groups have their own distinctive hairstyles, which stand as symbols of their own group culture.
Certain types of people in Kayapo society are allowed to wear long hair, including women who have given birth to children and adult men who have been through initiation rites and received their penis sheaths. The cutting of the hair on the head represents a distinct social code that communicates information about the individual’s stage of development. Those who must keep their hair short include children and adolescents of both sexes. The child’s hair remains short as a sign of its biological separation from its parents.
Body-painting as ‘social skin’
The bodies of Kayapo of all ages and genders are painted according to a code comprising colours, design and style. The painting of the body marks stages and modes of socialization of the body’s natural powers, symbolizing muscular strength and energy, sexuality and reproductivity. Two colours are used in the painting – red and black – and each serves to signify different things. The word for black also means dead, and the colour is associated with taboo and natural states incompatible with normal social existence. Red is associated with vitality and energy. The application of these two paints on different parts of the body is also significant to the social meaning of bodily adornment for the Kayapo.
Pierced ears, ear plugs, lip plates
Just as hair and body-painting become codes that represent a whole system of ideas about the relationship between the individual and society, so the piercing of ears and ear and lip plugs comprise a similar set of complex meanings. The emphasis here is on socialization and self-expression. The Kayapo distinguish between passive and active modes of knowing. The most important aspect of passive understanding is the ability to ‘hear’ language. To be able to hear and understand speech is referred to in terms of having a hole in one’s ear. The piercing of the ear lobes of babies represents this. The lip plate, which is most pronounced in older men, is also symbolic. Only males have their lips pierced, soon after birth, when their lower lips are fitted with a string of beads. The lip plug, and later the disc, is a physical expression of the oral assertiveness and power of the orator. It also embodies the social dominance of the senior males. In short, speaking and ‘hearing’ (or understanding and conforming) are complementary and interdependent functions that constitute Kayapo political and social life, and it is through the medium of bodily adornment that the body becomes a microcosm of the Kayapo body politic.
For the Kayapo, the various stages and types of bodily adornment as described above represent the human lifecycle. The lifecycle is biologically linked to others through social form and expression. Bodily adornments constitute a system of categories and meanings. Turner concludes by acknowledging that bodily adornment, considered as a symbolic medium, is not unique to Kayapo culture, but that every society has a number of such media and languages with which to communicate the relationship between the individual and social bodies.
taboo A custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place or thing
STOP & THINK
How are body paintings in Kayapo culture used to classify status, age and gender?
What is the meaning of hair, ears, face-painting and lip plates in Kayapo culture?
Salsa in the city (Jonathan Skinner)
Jonathan Skinner is a social anthropologist interested in how people use their leisure time. He has looked at tourism and its impact in the Caribbean on the island of Montserrat (Skinner 2004), and more recently engaged in a comparison of social dancing communities in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and in Sacramento (California) (Skinner 2013). Here, he showcases some of the study as to why people dance and what they get from moving their bodies in a particular way.
I started to dance relatively late on, in my twenties. First it was some jive, and then I turned to salsa. I got a buzz from it. It was a release from the everyday working day and an opportunity to discipline my body in different ways – I mean Foucauldian! – as I learned through muscle memory how to move in a structured partner dance, to hold myself and others in posture and with tension, to get accustomed to the feel of the dance, its proprioceptive qualities on my skin and with touch, the embodied visceral nature of this most intimate of fieldwork. I got addicted to it – the flow and loss of self-consciousness that it afforded me - and found myself travelling throughout the UK and sometimes overseas to get my dancing fix. Thinking about my experiences, I saw that my body was learning to move in a particular way at a particular time of day and in a particular environment – on the dance floor. This was a place where anthropological concepts seemed to be coming together in my leisure time: it was a cathartic activity, a release valve as though it served some sort of function for me, the ritual and the rhythmic coming together; it was a socially accepted way of moving, a movement system that was aesthetic and non-utilitarian; it gave me a sense of community in an increasingly isolated society – I was grounding myself quite literally through my feet; and it was a liminal time and space set between day and night, performed in a temporary fashion on a clearly delineated sprung floor, with my clothes being selected for that time with colour, sparkle, glitter to contrast with my everyday outfits of sober jackets and ties. These dance experiences and reflections led to some two decades of dance anthropology research.
For about a decade, I danced, taught, performed, researched, interviewed, observed and participated in social dancing in Belfast
