The creatively pierced, multiply tattooed teenagers who hang out at every mall in America probably don't realize it--and neither, undoubtedly, do their unsettled parents--but they belong to a tradition as old as recorded history--probably much older. Ever since our Neolithic ancestors invented art tens of thousands of years ago, humans have been painting, sculpting and otherwise decorating everything in sight. The human body is just the nearest and most intimate canvas. Says anthropologist Enid Schildkrout of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City: "There is no known culture in which people do not paint, pierce, tattoo, reshape or simply adorn their bodies."
Now this universal phenomenon is being celebrated in two separate showcases. Last week a cross-cultural exhibition titled "Body Art: Marks of Identity," curated by Schildkrout and devoted to the past 4,000 years of body modification--"bod-mod" to the cognoscenti--opened at the American Museum. At the same time, photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, based in London, have published African Ceremonies (Abrams; $150), two magnificent volumes documenting the continent's rapidly vanishing kaleidoscope of tribal rites, many of which involve elaborate body decoration.
In the museum show, Schildkrout and her colleagues focus on five types of bod-mod: tattooing, scarring, piercing, painting and shaping. And while some examples may seem bizarre to Western eyes, says Schildkrout, "we want people to realize that everyone, including themselves, performs some form of transformation. We color our hair, wear makeup, put on clothes, have plastic surgery."
Our reasons for doing it, moreover, are largely the same. Traditionally, body art has served to attract the opposite sex, boost self-esteem, ward off or invoke spirits, indicate social position or marital status, identify with a particular age or gender group or mark a rite of passage, such as puberty or marriage. It's this sort of strictly prescribed, highly ritualistic decoration that Beckwith and Fisher depict in African Ceremonies. "We've tried to show how body art is relevant to every stage of development, from birth to death," says Fisher.
But while the traditional, often spiritually based versions of bod-mod are quickly disappearing among indigenous peoples, the impulses behind personal adornment remain unchanged: attracting a mate, signaling status, declaring allegiance to a group.
Or asserting independence from it. While teenagers use pierced tongues and the like to set themselves apart, some in their 20s and 30s have latched on to the "neotribal" look, an amalgam of facial tattoos, piercings and "native" hairdos, and jewelry that borrows from cultures from the South Pacific to the Amazon. Much of this serves the same countercultural function that long hair did in the '60s, observes Rufus Camphausen, an author based in the Netherlands who has written extensively on tribal customs. Says he: "These symbols are a way of saying, 'I don't belong to the supermarket society.'"