Scary piercings

Plastic surgery, scarification, tattoos and other rites of passage

A decade ago Robert Brain, an Australian social anthropologist, argued that the technology of body modification, borrowed from non-western societies, had been irredeemably trivialised in the West, and used to celebrate only vanity and conformity to the dictates of fashion, rather than, as was the case in the Global South, the physical and social body in its entirety. He pointed out that the most characteristic feature of western body topiary, the face-lift, was an attempt not to inscribe a social role on the person, but its opposite, to erase all marks of time and experience. Face-lifts, in his account, are anti-initiation rites, the inverse of Maori tattoos or scarification rituals among remote communities in Eastern Africa.

All true back then; but current fashions in western recreational body modification – tongue studs, eyebrow piercings and so forth – suggest that some modification of this view is needed now. Whatever modern-day piercing signifies, it’s not an attempt to conceal anything. Tattoos likewise. It has been argued, in fact, that the new do-it-yourself cosmetic surgery shows nostalgia for the supposed solidarity of small-scale societies, a sign of yearning for the rituals of tribal initiation.

I find this tendency easy to resist, having spent time in Southern Sudan with a pastoralist community who, despite the efforts of their town-dwelling kinsmen to dissuade them, still practised extensive scarification of the forehead as a rite of passage into adulthood. This involved a lot of cutting and bleeding for boys subject to it. If one of them flinched during the operation the scar would show it for the rest of his life. Participant observation is the modus operandi of the anthropologist, but I can say that this wasn’t something I was tempted to undergo myself.

I also have the benefit of a passing acquaintance with a Brazilian plastic surgeon, Ivo Pitanguy. He told me that a significant amount of working time at his clinic in Rio de Janeiro was spent explaining to certain prospective patients that it would be better if he did not operate on them. These were people irrationally convinced that cosmetic surgery would change their lives; they were addicted to the scalpel. At his clinic Dr Pitanguy employed a psychologist called Dr Claudia, whose role, among other things, was to advise certain patients that plastic surgery was not the answer to their problems.

I was driving with Dr Pitanguy along the beach front on Ipanema when we passed the high fashion Rio beachwear shop called Bum-Bum, I wondered aloud how many of the customers there had silicone implants in their breasts, inserted by him or some other plastic surgeon. Dr Pitanguy told me I had the wrong idea.

‘In Brazil,’ he said, ‘breast enhancement is not a normal procedure. Brazilians are more interested in a bunda – the behind. In fact breast reduction is much commoner here than breast implants.’

‘It’s Americans who like big breasts,’ he added. ‘Sometime when a patient from the United States come to me for enhancement I say to them “My dear, here in Brazil your body is perfect. Why don’t you just stay in Brazil?”’

I mentioned an accident I’d suffered some months before on São Conrado beach, when a stray surf-board dented the cartilage of my nose.

‘What would you say,’ I enquired, ‘if I asked you to straighten my nose?’

‘I’d say,’ he said, tweaking it, ‘that you’ve got a perfectly good nose.’

‘And,’ he added, ‘if you insisted I might have to send you to see Dr Claudia.’

‘By the way,’ Dr Pitanguy added affably, ‘if you like surfing, why don’t you stay in Brazil?’

Dr Pitanguy himself never had plastic surgery, so far as I know. Me neither. Given time you get used to the way you look. And now, when I feel the passing lure of body modification – a momentary yearning for a tongue stud, say, or a nipple ring, or Maori-style inking – I think about Dr Pitanguy and Dr Claudia. I think of the painful scarification rituals practised by the peoples of Southern Sudan. I observe the strangely adorned limbs of young people, the striking designs of their tattoos, so soon to be blurred and distorted by age. And I find it quite easy to dissuade myself. June 1995 ★