Finger Amputation in the Ethnographic and Archaeological Record
Several published studies indicate that amputating finger segments, and even multiple entire fingers, for nonmedical reasons has been a surprisingly common practice over the past few hundred years. This chapter reports the results of a study undertaken (a) to shed further light on the occurrence of finger amputation via a survey of ethnographic and historical documents and ethnographic and archaeological objects, and (b) to review the ethnohistoric literature to identify motivations for amputating healthy fingers. Based on information gathered from six online resources using keywords from seven different languages, the survey of ethnohistorical texts revealed that at least 181 remarkably diverse societies engaged in finger amputation as a cultural practice, and that it was not limited to a particular geographic region or type of society. The search for finger amputation-related ethnographic and archaeological objects produced evidence that the total number of societies that engaged in finger amputation in the past may be over 200 and suggests that the practice has a time depth of thousands, possibly even tens of thousands, of years. In addition, the chapter identifies seventeen different reasons for engaging in it other than trying to solve a medical problem with the targeted finger. Among the most common of the nonsurgical motivations were mourning a deceased loved one, appealing to a deity for assistance, and punishment. Taken together, the findings reported in this chapter demonstrate that finger amputation was a widespread cultural practice in the past, one that was invented multiple times, in multiple places, for multiple reasons.
