Scarification

Scarification involves scratching, etching, burning/branding, or superficially cutting designs, pictures, or words into the skin as a permanent body modification or body art. The body modification can take roughly 6–12 months to heal. In the process of body scarification, scars are purposely formed by cutting or branding the skin by various methods (sometimes using further sequential aggravating wound-healing methods at timed intervals, like irritation). Scarification is sometimes called cicatrization (from the French equivalent). Scarification in Africa Circumcision in Africa Scarification, which is also known as cicatrization in European works, is sometimes included within the category of tattooing, due to both practices creating marks with pigment underneath and textures or pigments on the surface of the skin. In Africa, European colonial governments and European Christian missionaries criminalized and stigmatized the cultural practices of tattooing and scarification; consequently, the practices underwent decline, ended, or continued to be performed as acts of resistance. Between 5000 BCE and 4000 BCE, pastoral communities from the Sahara peopled the region of Neolithic Egypt and Neolithic Sudan. In this shared material culture of the Nile Valley region, figurines with markings have been found, which indicates that tattooing and scarification may have been cultural practices among these pastoral communities. During the early period of the Holocene (9500 BP - 7500 BP), Round Head rock art was created at Tassili N'Ajjer, in Algeria, and at Tadrart Acacus, in Libya, 70% of which is composed of anthropomorphic art forms; male and female art forms feature scarification marks that differ; linear design patterns are exclusive to male art forms, whereas, crescent-shaped and concentric circular design patterns are exclusive to female art forms. Between the 5th millennium BCE and the 4th millennium BCE, the Central Saharan rock art depiction of a horned running woman, who may have been a goddess or a dancer with body scarification markings (e.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (10)

Scarification

Rite of passage

A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage, The Rites of Passage. The term is now fully adopted into anthropology as well as into the literature and popular cultures of many modern languages.

Dinka people

The Dinka tribe (Jiɛ̈ɛ̈ŋ) are a Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan with a sizable diaspora population abroad. The Dinka mostly live along the Nile, from Bor to Renk, in the region of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile (two out of three Provinces which were formerly located in southern Sudan), and the Abyei Area of the Ngok Dinka in South Sudan. They number around 4.5 million people according to the 2008 Sudan census, constituting about 18% of the population of the entire country and the largest ethnic tribe in South Sudan.