Cultures of Fetishism (17 page)

Barundi youth. Their carvings into the body were meant to assure that boys and girls would take on the shapes of acceptable manhood and womanhood. Among the Tiv of Nigeria, the scarifications were interpreted by their anthropologist, Bruce Lincoln, as a method of etching the body with a permanent record of the dilemmas of human existence.
2
To Lincoln’s eyes, the scars seemed to posit such contrasts as male
/
female, line
/
circle, lineage
/
age group, ancestors
/
descendants, and most important past
/
future. Lincoln thought that the oppositions were resolved in the scars. In the last opposi- tion, that of past and future, the scar was said to represent the emergence of a present moment that is capable of drawing on the past as it creates the future. He then deepened that interpretation by adding, “The present is not thought of as a hairline between ‘was’ and ‘yet-to-be’ but as a space filled

with history and potentiality.”
3

The scarifications, amputations, excisions, and perforations were perma- nent body transformations. They were marks of membership in a community of peers, signs of incorporation into adulthood. The ritual initiations into manhood and womanhood also typically included a few temporary body transformations, such as paring the nails; pulling out the scalp hair or cutting off a few locks; painting the body with clay, menstrual blood, semen, or saliva; or wearing special garments, masks, or jewelry. Victor Turner, an anthropologist whose data was primarily from the Nbembu of northwestern Zambia, interpreted these temporary bodily transformations as a method of divesting youthful sexual vitalities of their social threat and transforming them into a source of social rejuvenation.
4
Turner did not know “the fetishism strategy” by name, but his interpretations indicated his intuitive appreciation of how such a strategy of divesting a body of its threatening aliveness might influence the initiation rites of the Tiv.

Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst with an anthropological bent, studied the Dakota Indian (previously Sioux) initiation rite. The culminating episode in the rite required the young men to “engage in the highest form of self-torture by putting through the muscles of their chest and back skewers which were attached to the sun pole by long thongs. Gazing directly into the sun and slowly dancing backwards the men could tear themselves loose by ripping the flesh of their chests open.”
5
Erikson traced the origins of the sun dance to the breast-feeding habits of that culture. Every woman’s breasts were freely available to all the tiny warriors of the village. But, after the months of earliest infancy, if a little boy should bite down on the nipple of a breast, then the woman would remove him, thump him on the head, and let him rage with frustration until the next feeding. The devouring rage the infant experienced was later in life directed against enemies, animals, and “loose women”; and, in the sun dance ritual, against his own breast—presumably a stand-in for the mother’s breast.
6

The Dakota girl, in training to give her breasts to tiny warriors, was allowed to participate in the sun dance ritual by bathing the wounds of her brother.
7
The sister-brother bond was composed of entitlements and intimacies that were not accorded to other female-male relationships. The girl was

encouraged to be emotionally close to her brother. The brother was encouraged to be respectful of his sister. She would embroider clothing for his wife and children. The hunter-brother would save the fattest animals and most luxuri- ous pelts for his sister.
8

As for her relationships with other men in the tribe, the girl was taught to be bashful and fearful. As a wife, she was expected to be a hunter’s helper and a future hunter’s mother. She was expected to cook, sew, and to put up tents. She must not look like a loose woman. “She was trained to walk with meas- ured steps, never to cross certain boundaries set around the camp, and—with approaching maturity—to sleep at night with her thighs tied together to prevent rape.”
9

For the Dakota boy, who was in training to be a hunter, those tantalizing tied-together thighs invited physical contact. It was a challenge commensurate with touching a dangerous enemy in battle. The girl’s rite of passage was the Virgin Feast, where she was expected to defend herself against any accusations that she was not a virgin.
10
Various scenarios were enacted that were supposed to compel the girl to admit wrongdoing—on her part. If, for example, a man would claim that he had touched a girl’s genitals, she had to prove her innocence. Thus the Dakota girl did not experience an actual, physical body mutilation. Nor was she expected to endure a self-inflicted bodily torment. However, she lived in dread of a man penetrating her body before marriage. The potential body mutilation must have been always on her mind. And when she slept, she was reminded of that possibility by the pressure of the ropes that kept her thighs bound together.

The permanent and temporary mutilations and penetrations of the body (even those merely feared and imagined) among the hunter-gatherer peoples were gestures fraught with social and celestial implications. Whether the mutilations had the same implications for the hunter-gatherers as they did for the anthropologists who observed them was never exactly clear or certain. It was, after all, a matter of interpretation. As part of their professional indoc- trination, the anthropologists came to believe that they were able to read the meanings of these cuts onto and into the human skin. The human skin could be written on. The cuts into the body were a text, and like any text, they had a latent meaning and that meaning could be deciphered and interpreted.

Sometimes the writing on the skin is done by professionals, tribal elders, surgeons, parents, tattoo artists. Though the psychological meanings may turn out to be the same or similar, it is nevertheless important to distinguish between personally inspired body writings that are often regarded with distaste and social opprobrium and those that are socially prescribed, as with the hunter-gatherer peoples. In between, there is a whole range of personally ambiguous and socially uncertain varieties of writing on the skin—a compendium of writings that are tantamount to body mutilations: amputations, body slicings; skin-cuttings; tattoos; ear, nose, tongue, and cheek piercing; nipple piercing; navel piercing; and genital piercing. And all of them, no doubt you have noticed, entail a per- foration or incision into the envelope of skin that covers the entire human body.

So, let us begin with SKIN.

In the earliest development of the human embryo, the ectoderm consists of the epidermis or outer layer of skin and the dermis inner layer, with its sebaceous and sweat glands and hair follicles. Also present are the organs of special senses such as the eye and the ear, and the nervous system and the brain. Thus skin, nervous system, and brain develop out of the same primor- dial tissue. The epidermis-dermis skin then becomes a two-sided surface that faces inward toward the brain and other organs, nerves, and muscles of the body and outward toward the external world. Directly or indirectly, the nerve, endings of the skin touch every organ, nerve, and muscle inside the human body. And, the human skin is capable of touching and being touched by everything outside the human body.
11

In addition to these biological givens, every human being has fantasies about his or her body from the tip of the scalp to the tip of the toes, and also about individual parts of the body, especially the erotogenic organs of mouth, ears, eyes, vagina, penis, prostate, urethra, uterus, stomach, heart, and lungs.
12
Furthermore, most people have fantasies, concsious and unconsious, about the envelope of skin that covers the entire surface of the body, and the mucous membrane of the skin that even reaches into the entrance of the ali- mentary canal tube that runs from the roof of the mouth to the esophagus and all the way down through the stomach to the anus—another major erotogenic organ.
13

A human being might be blind and deaf and mute and be deprived of the sense of smell but she would still be alive and have fantasies and wishes simply because she (like Helen Keller) would still be capable of communicating through the sense of touch. Because of her skin, she can touch the world and the world can touch her. Skin brings Eros to the brain and to every other part of the human body. Skin is precious. Skin is everything that makes us human. As the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu said in
A Skin for Thought
, “There is no human being without a virtually complete envelope of skin. If one seventh of the skin is destroyed by accident, lesion, or burns, the human being dies.”
14
The epidermis-dermis layers of skin are the envelope of the body. The skin keeps us in touch with what is happening in the rest of our body. The skin also makes palpable those myriad events that take place outside the body. Skin is one of the most important contributors to our body image—an image that we can sometimes visualize, sometimes even hear or smell, but always somehow “feel” no matter how much or how often that image is revised over the course of an ordinary human life. Our body image, a mental or psychological outgrowth of having a skin that transports erotic vitality to the rest of the body, is an internal map of the body and all the body’s individual parts. Our body image delineates the distinctions between the outside of the body—the skin outside,—and the nerves, muscles and organs inside the body. Though it tends to unify tactile, postural, kinesthetic, visual, and aural sensations, the body image is also capable of dispersal, disruption, dissolution, and disunity. The body image is immensely pliable, intensely suggestible, and amenable to all varieties of biological, psycho-

logical, and social transformations of the actual physical body.
15

Our body image also takes its shape from the infinitely various detachable parts of the body—the voice, the breath, the odor, feces, saliva, vomit, hair, nails, menstrual blood, urine, semen, sperm—which though they may become permanently separated from the body, nevertheless remain forever magically linked to the body image. The body image marks out a differentiation of bodily zones, orifices, curves, and convex and concave spaces of the physical body.
16

Many theoreticians of the body represent the skin as if it were a Mobius strip of ribbon that twists around to touch on every organ, muscle, and nerve inside the body, and then spirals about to bring the inside surface outward, so that the inside touches every segment of skin on the outside of the body. One of the great advantages of the Mobius strip model is that we need not make sharp distinctions between mind and body, inside and outside, brain and skin, psychic depth and skin surface. While these entities are actually disparate, they do also have the capacity to twist one onto the other. Elizabeth Grosz, a feminist theoretician of the body, put it this way: “It [the Mobius strip model] enables subjectivity to be understood
not
as the combination of a psy- chical depth and a corporeal superficiality but as a surface whose inscriptions and rotations in three-dimensional space produce all the effects of depth” (my emphasis).
17

Some theoreticians make a distinction between “civilized” body writings, which typically are read and interpreted for their internal psychic meanings, and “savage” scarifications. Referring specifically to the people of Kau in Kenya, Alphonso Lingis explains that the primitive inscriptions on the body surface function to amplify the skin’s erotogenic sensitivity. Instead of read- ing them as messages or as signifiers of hidden meanings buried deep within the person’s psyche, Lingis portrays the welts, scars, cuts, tattoos, and perfo- rations as efforts to increase the surface space of the body, creating hollows and ridges and contours that then give the body an erotic intensity that was not there before:

The savage inscription is a working over the skin, all surface effects. This cutting in orifices and raising tumescences does not contrive new receptor organs for a depth body [as, for example, the prosthetic additions to the civilized body, do]... it extends an erotogenic surface . . . it’s a multiplication of mouths, of lips, labia, anuses, those sweating and bleeding perforations and puncturing... these warts raised all over the abdomen, around the eyes
18

It may very well be that “savage” writings on the skin do serve the function of extending the erotogenic surface of the body. We must keep in mind, how- ever, that Lingis is referring to socially ritualized inscriptions on the body, not to
self
-mutilation, a form of writing on the skin that is personal and àsocial. When, many years ago, I first wrote about self-mutilation, I emphasized that the borders between the more extreme acts of self-mutilation and acts that could pass as “normal” are not clearly or permanently staked out. When we observe an act of extreme self-mutilation, “the mask of Eros that usually

masks the grinning mask of Death is
barely
discernible.”
19
However, even in these instances, Lingis’ observations on “savage” body writings are applicable. Even the most horrific and terrifying acts of self-mutilation express an erotic element. The erotic is not immediately apparent, but if we look hard enough we can detect it—just below the skin.

In the initial chapters, we encountered several examples of body mutilation, beginning with doctors who complied with a woman’s request to carve her foot into a shape that would fit more easily into her open-toe stiletto, so as to make visible the toe cleavage which was so much the in-fashion of the day.
20
The doctors performed the mutilation. But, only on request. Foot-carving surgery, therefore, is at the boundary between the social and the personal. Since it is performed by a professional, it is socially condoned. Yet, at the same time, to “request” this mutilation of one’s own body is a “sort of” self-mutilation.

Similarly, in the case of A-Hsui’s silver Lotus, her mother and her nurse- maid performed the footbinding that would contort A-Hsui’s toes into the size and shape of a Lotus blossom. As a young child, A-Hsui wept and com- plained bitterly about the pain she suffered. At night, when no one was looking, she would try to undo the hand-woven linen bandages for a few moments of relief. But in a few years, like most upper-class Chinese girls of her day, she began to grasp the advantages of bound feet and after- ward became an active participant and collaborator in the mutilation of her body.
21