Читать книгу Introducing Anthropology - Laura Pountney - Страница 136

Terence Turner (1995) conducted his anthropological research on the Kayapo people of the grasslands of the Mato Grosso, south of the Amazon region, who live in scattered villages comprising several hundred people. He suggests that dress and bodily adornment is a cultural way to communicate personal and social identity. 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.