Reddit mentions of Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (SUNY Series, the Body in Culture, History, and Religion)

and what of neck rings? foot binding? ritual scarring?

>"At archaeological sites in Africa, for example, scientists have uncovered bits of clothing on some of our human ancestors; objects from a wide variety of cultures have displayed and recorded forms of body modification for centuries. Bound feet, flesh permanently marked either by a knife or tattoo needle, elongated ear lobed, stretched necks, deformed skulls, shrunken heads -- these are practices that have long fascinated the West where they have been viewed as exotic distortions of the body, as is suggested in the standard terminology of 'mutilation' and 'deformation' itself. Today, as theorists struggle for critical understanding of the West, of its relations of domination and the ideologies which support and mask them, these practices are newly interesting; they no longer serve as bizarre extremes against which we construct our naturalness, but rather to denaturalize the Western body. They are talismans which help us recognize how the body is always culturally constructed. But, of course, even the concept of denaturalization implies a residual belief in the existence of a natural body it seeks to deconstruct, a body outside of culture, a physical norm that grounds human commonality in the face of vast 'surface' or cultural differences. ...

>"... [T]he underlying message seems... that the unadorned, unmodified body is an unspoiled, pure surface on which culture works. ... [T]his message dehistoricizes and decontextualized the body. It ignores the particular meaning that both the body and specific modifications to which it has been subjected have for the people being represented. It resolves all bodies into the Western notion of the body as prior to culture and, thus, as natural.

>"Contemporary theorizing ... has contributed recently to exposing 'the natural' as a Western cultural construct, calling into question the often taken for granted dichotomy between nature and culture and the ways in which this distinction has acted to reinforce relations of power and domination.

-- "Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body" (Mascia-Lees, Sharp)