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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 (Northern Ireland) and Sacramento (California). They are both very different cities: Belfast a city divided and traumatized by The Troubles – an ethnonational conflict lasting the last three decades of the twentieth century; and Sacramento, state capital, an ‘androgynous’ urban space according to one respondent. The salsa dancing of choice in these two urbanscapes looked very similar, and the rhythms, beats and sounds were the same. They did, however, mean very different things to the dancers. In the former, it was a cross-community activity, a leisure practice during which Protestants and Catholics could come together. It was also escapism from Northern Ireland, something exotic and different for the night. In Sacramento, the dancing is also social but is a more Hispanic migrant scene. There, the same moves are performed to the same tracks but with different meanings and feelings: the dancers are Spanish-speaking and so follow, interpret and sometimes sing along with the songs. Many of the dancers feel their movements with a nostalgia from their homelands as dance parties they grew up with. Salsa dancing in Sacramento can thus be a dancing back to their youth, and an expression of identity and solidarity. The expression is that ‘it’s in the hips’, as a natural and, for some, suggested genetic predisposition to move in a particular way. For me, this is very much an interpretative anthropological approach to the dancing as an observing participant and not just traditional participant observer. Participation is essential to this research, to feel it and not just see it. It shows me an involved glocalization ‘at work’ – the local reception and accommodation of global forces, in this case the international commoditization of a movement system. The salsa dancing has even been described as an ‘Esperanto of the body’ by my colleague, anthropologist Joanna Menet (2020), as an international language of the body is learned so that we can communicate with other salsa dancers as we travel around the world. In a deterritorialized hypermodern world, this return to the body for contact and to connect with each other is a welcome return – I feel it is important to keep me grounded as in my second dance decade I have turned to Argentine tango and the complexities and wellbeing nature of the tango embrace.