Body Modification: Anatomy, Alteration, and Art in Anthropogeny

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Summary:
Permanent body modification is an intriguing phenomenon. It is regularly practiced by living humans but is not seen in other extant mammals. It is highly variable within and between cultures. It is also often both expensive and risky. All of these characteristics—its uniqueness, its variability, and its actual or potential costliness—make permanent body modification an important behavior for scientists to understand. However, the scientific study of permanent body modification is in its infancy. The goal of this symposium is to provide a snapshot of where we are at with regard to research on permanent body modification and to identify questions that should be prioritized over the next decade. The symposium will bring together academics from a number of disciplines as well as practitioners from the permanent body modification industry. We will cover a wide range of historical and contemporary permanent body modification practices, including but not limited to tattooing, piercing, finger amputation, and cranial modification. In addition to considering the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of permanent body modification, we will delve into the motivations behind this behavior, considering both the personal justifications offered by participants and the scientific hypotheses proposed to explain it.

Event Sessions:

Speakers	Session
Francesco d'Errico	A multistep evolutionary scenario for the culturalization of the human body
Ellen Gruenbaum	Female and male genital modification
Rosemary Joyce	Permanent body modification in Mesoamerica and Central America
Paul King	The recent history of piercing practices in Europe and North America
Shauna LaTosky	Lip plates in Ethiopia
Matt Lodder	The recent history of tattooing in Europe and North America
Brea McCauley	Permanent body modification: archaeological and early historical evidence
Ryan Nichols	Footbinding: A gene-culture co-evolutionary approach to a one thousand year tradition 'Footbinding' refers to a 1000-year-long practice in which ethnically Han Chinese families would modify the feet of young girls often by repeatedly wrapping the four small toes under the sole of the foot to maintain its small size, often breaking those toes in the process. Various explanations for the origins, maintenance, and cessation of footbinding have been proposed, and two stand out: the Labor Market Hypothesis and an Evolutionary Social Sciences Hypothesis. The purpose of this paper is... read more
John Willman	Dental ablation in Southern Europe, the Near East, and Africa