2. Modern modification

3. Tattoo. Pierce. How come?

4. Hepatitis C

5. To regulate?

Is tattoo taboo?
Body modification has a long history and is widely practiced, says Neil Whitehead, a professor of anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. A specialist in Latin America, who sports a tattoo of Chacmool, the Mayan eater of human hearts, Whitehead told us, "Anthropologists have a deep interest in body modification. Our current cultural craze and interest is a subsection of the larger cultural and historical significance of body modification."

Neil Whitehead poses with his Mayan Chacmool (eater of human hearts) tattoo.

A native of the Island of Tucopea Photo: National Library of Australia Painting by Augustus Earle

The term "tattoo" itself came from the original Polynesian apparatus, which poked various dyes into the skin -- the basis for all tattooing. A couple of centuries back, the tap-tap of a bamboo striker against whale teeth birthed the name tattoo -- and the global expansion of permanent body decoration that was spread by sailors who traveled the Pacific.

But "body modification" includes far more than just tattoos, Whitehead stresses. Body-mod can start with circumcision at birth, and often occurs at other life-cycle events, like initiations. The Mayans and Incas, he adds, flattened the skull by squeezing the head of a growing child between boards. Africans and others practiced facial scarification, male circumcision and female genital mutilation.

Depends on your perspective
Female "circumcision" has attracted controversy and opposition, and for good reason, considering its medical and psychological damage. But even when we consider decorations that don't cause physical harm, perspective matters. In other words, from my cultural perspective, your practice seems freaky. Mine, of course, are normal. "I don't know of any other culture that pays thousands of dollars to have teeth straightened, but it's normalized here," Whitehead maintains. The orthodoxy of orthodonture, he says, "Isn't all about beauty and choice." Americans who don't get warbly teeth straightened, he argues, "are socially marked."

Body modification courtesy of othodontics:

In modern and primitive cultures, mods often reflect "tribal or ethnic ideas of affiliation," Whitehead says, that distinguish "us" from "them." "It marks you as included in one group, but you may be simultaneously excluded from another. What's radical about body marking, why it's so present in initiations, is that it leaves the initiate with very little choice. It becomes a very fierce way to mark out a group identity."

Modern primitive?
You might dismiss this as so much intellectual blather, but anthropology is central to understanding bod-mod. Not only did the practice originate in Polynesian traditions, but in the United States, Whitehead says, tattoos and piercing represent a group identity as a "modern primitive. It's the invocation precisely of the people anthropologists study, as examples of pre-modern freedom, that is adopted by punks as a statement of the freedom to control their own bodies."

In that sense, he says, bod-mod represents a defiant response to modern society's corpus of laws, regulations and expectations about the body, such as restrictions on drug use or abortion.

As an act of rebellion, Whitehead says, body modifications poses the question, "Is this my body or not?"

What is the psychology of body mod?

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