Anthro week 4

- Body modification: any physical alteration of the body through surgery, tattooing,
piercing, scarification, and other practices (contemporary and permanent alike)
- Breast implants
- Tattoos
- Cosmetic surgeries
- Who modifies their body and why?
- All cultures across space and time
- Markers of
- Social status
- Demonstrating group affiliation
- transition/life stages/accomplishment (like moving from childhood to
adulthood)
- Expressing personal identity
- Religious devotion
Two body modifications common in cultures
- Scarification (like in Tanzania, among men to represent accomplishment and bravery,
among women to represent readiness for motherhood and/or childbirth)
- Piercing (like in Brazil)
So many common body modifications….
- Application of makeup
- Braces
- Clothing and jewelry selections
- Eye surgeries
- Etc.

Cosmetic surgery
- Developed after WWI
- Injured veterans coming back with major disfigurement due to injuries during the
war
- 3 categories of surgical modification
- 1. Surgeries that repair birth defects, or correct disfigurements from accidents or
injuries
- 2. voluntary/elective/optional cosmetic surgery in pursuit of beauty ideals
- 3. Gender confirming (sex reassignment) surgery
- Manufacturing beauty
- Body contouring (e.g. tummy tucks)
- Breast augmentation (breast reduction in males)
- Breast-, eyelid-, brow-, face-lifts
- Rhinoplasty (nose job)
- Liposuction
- Collagen injections
- Botox, neurotoxin injections
 - Chin augmentations
- Butt, pectoral, calf implants

Reading - cosmetic surgery in Brazil

- Generally speaking, cosmetic surgeries are reserved for and can be afforded by wealthy
individuals, Extensive cosmetic surgeries are costly and uncovered by healthcare
systems
- Brazil however, national health care covers a great number of these cosmetic surgeries
- Considered a human right to be able to access these surgeries
- Cosmetic surgeries become empowerment for poor populations to feel as though they
can gain - common people have access to beauty improvement surgeries as a way to
address social and economic disparity in the country. Doesn’t heal poverty but feels
empowering to the people for them to access those surgeries. Help them access work
and improve on their social standing.

Tattooing
- Rick Genest aka Zombie Boy. canadian, full body tattoos
- People have been tattooing their bodies for thousands and thousands of years
- Earliest evidence > 8000 years old
- Tension between deviancy (non-conformist) and mainstream
- Rebellion and deviancy associated in certain cultures
- Social acceptance
- Who can get a tattoo?
- Is it easy to get a tattoo?
- Will a tattoo promote belonging?
- Will having a tattoo increase social barriers?
- Will a tattoo promote exclusion?

Readings on tattoo
- tattooists adhere to notions of nonconformity, unconventional artistry and
professionalism
- We locate these meanings within the cultural values and aesthetics of ‘cool’ as an
admired set of attributes and displays which enable tattooists to manage some of the
tensions of the work
- Drawing on an ethnographic study of tattoo artists in Sydney, Australia, this article
explores the meanings that tattooists give to their work. As a form of body work
(Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006) tattooing comprises an aesthetic practice that is performed
directly on the body and which, unlike other forms of ‘beauty work’ (hairdressing, nail
salons) involves permanent body enhancement and a particularly invasive form of bodily
encroachment through the stretching and painful penetration of the skin. At the same
time, tattooists engage in body/appearance work or aesthetic labour a) through their own
body markings, dress and comportment – branding their bodies to showcase their
particular artistic genre.
- A cultural history of ‘unruliness’ (Atkinson, 2003) adds a further distinction and specificity
to this work, where tattoos have traditionally been seen as an indicator of antisocial
behaviour, impulsiveness and lack of self-control
- greater regulation and an increase in popularity have helped to challenge some of these
negative cultural assessment
- interrelationships between the embodied labour of workers, the ‘aesthetic qualities’ and
embodiment of clients and a range of other factors including organizational artefacts and
the situation of work. In so doing, we draw on Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984) concept of
‘habitus’ as a set of embodied dispositions and Gagliardi’s (1996) notion of
organizational ‘landscape’ whereby artefacts and space potentially combine to produce
an organizational ‘pathos’ namely, a particular set of meanings and ways of perceiving
and feeling organizational realit
- tattooists create meanings around non-conformity, unconventional artistry and
professionalism
- these form a pathos based on cultural values of a ‘cool’ aesthetic, conceptualized as a
particular, admired set of attitudes, practices and displays (Botz-Bornstein, 2010),
embodied within the habitus and which help manage tensions associated with the work
- Our findings contribute to an integrated understanding of body work as organizational
‘bodyscape’. Used in human geography to metaphorically match the body with features
of landscape (and vice versa), the concept can encourage thinking of the human form in
conjunction with artefacts and space
- The article accordingly develops an understanding of body work which incorporates
elements of landscape, materialized in a set of perceptions and meanings, which takes
‘worked-upon’ bodies into account and the embodied dispositions of body workers –
enabling an appreciation of areas of convergence as well as potential tensions between
them.
- Tattooing can be positioned within the distinct but overlapping fields of ‘body work’,
defined as work that focuses directly on the bodies of others (Wolkowitz, 2002), and
‘body appearance work’ (Gimlin, 2007) whereby workers manage their own looks and
appearance – the latter conceptualized as aesthetic labour (Pettinger, 2010; Warhurst
and Nickson, 2007a) when appearance and comportment are made to fit with an
organizational ‘brand’. Both types of body work have particular relevance for work
geared towards aesthetic enhancement (e.g. tattooing, hairdressing) where the worker is
encouraged to embody the style and nature of the service produced and where
relevance might be found in terms of how they interact.
- With a focus on the former, Wolkowitz (2002) shows how the body/work nexus – where
the body is the immediate site of labour – offers particular meanings and experiences,
providing opportunity to examine social relations, corporeality and work-based
subjectivity. As Wolkowitz suggests, social relations based on subordination and
domination are central to occupations involving work performed on other people’s
bodies, shaped by demographics (e.g. gender, class) and by definitions of the body in
context. For example, the low status of care work, often performed by women, may be
associated with both gender and the ‘dirtiness’ of the job through ‘intimate, messy
 contact’ (Wolkowitz, 2002: 497) with the bodies worked upon – where awareness of
social disadvantage shapes care workers’ experiences. At the same time, the frequently
supine, naked or physically weakened body in these contexts may give rise to
objectification and control by those who administer to them, highlighting the often
ambiguous nature of the social relations involved
- More in line with our research context, other literature has explored the meanings
attached to and the social dynamics involved in body work geared towards aesthetic
enhancement. Black and Sharma (2001) found that workers often expand their roles, for
example by generating understandings of a ‘deficit’ body as lacking in self-love which
workers seek to restore. Gimlin (1996) shows how female hairdressers draw on
specialist knowledge of beauty culture and see themselves as ‘friends and equals’ with
their clients in order to nullify status differences – a positioning easily undermined by the
need to comply with customers’ demands.
- importance of demographic characteristics of the clientele in how the work is carried out,
with middle class, white clients being offered a ‘higher service’ based on physical
pampering while others are given a more routinized body labour with minimum emotion
work involved. This highlights the potential tensions in the relations between givers and
takers of body work (Wolkowitz, 2002) often based on the demographic characteristics
as well as the levels of agency involved
- For Chugh and Hancock (2009) these relations do not just rely on the embodied labour
of employees and their relative positioning but involve a range of aesthetic processes
that find purchase in Gimlin’s (2007) identification of ‘body/appearance’ work.
- Defined as the supply of embodied capacities and attributes at the point of entry into
employment (Warhurst and Nickson, 2007a), aesthetic labour (as a form of
body/appearance work) involves the fashioning of these capacities to fit with a corporate
‘ideal’. Workers invest resources into creating an acceptable working body (Pettinger,
2010) geared towards producing a particular, distinctive ‘style’ of service encounter that
deliberately appeals to customers’ senses
- Resonant with the ‘branded bodies’ of tattooists (who often showcase their work through
their own body markings), Pettinger (2010) notes ways in which sales assistants,
through their appearance, are part of the construction of the store as a branded
environment. In this respect, appearance, style and comportment (the ‘habitus’) have
arguably become ‘material signifiers’ and part of the ‘hardware’ (Witz et al., 2003) of the
organization in terms of the materialization of the corporate idea and on a par with its
physical environment (objects, lay-out, design) that appeal to customers’ senses
- This points to a need not only to consider how body work and body/appearance work
might intersect in shaping work-based meanings, but also to include the potential
interplay between ‘human and non-human’ elements in understandings of how such
work is defined and experienced. However, while Kang (2003) has highlighted some of
the physical dimensions of body work in a nail salon (hot towels, bowls of warm soaking
solution, sanitized utensils) that create a pleasurable sensory experience, few studies,
as Chugh and Hancock (2009) point out, have made these interconnections a central
concern with most research preferring to treat each as a separate dimension. Looking at
 the aestheticization of hairdressing salons, they show the importance of
interrelationships between the ‘embodied agency’ and dispositions of workers, the
aesthetic qualities and bodies of clients as well as a range of artefacts and
‘environmental fabrications’ (Chugh and Hancock, 2009: 461) where size, colour and
layout of the salons elicit a sense of affluence and vibrancy that is ‘brought alive’ by
appearance and comportment of hairdressers and their clientele.
- In the context of tattooing, practices of customer service and art come together in tattoo
studios – where art is inscribed on the bodies of workers and clients and where space
can be seen as lived, embodied and ‘made to mean’ (Tyler and Cohen, 2010: 177),
shaping the service encounter. Following the above, and with this interrelationship in
mind, our research addresses the following questions: what meanings do tattoo artists,
as body workers and ‘aesthetic labourers’, give to their work? How are those meanings
constructed? The former captures perceptions and values that help to make up the
‘pathos’ of an organization or work context while the latter relates to how this world view,
through processes of ‘landscaping’, may be materialized.
- ‘Cool’ meanings: Non-conformity, unconventional artistry and professionalism
- ‘sensorially perceptible qualities’ of the organizational landscape generate and are
illustrative of a pre-existing world view or pathos which can comprise a range of (visual,
aural, olfactory) aesthetic signifiers. From the field notes above, these signifiers support
a set of meanings based on non-conformity (captured in part in the background clamour
of heavy metal music and the female tattooist’s bodily aesthetics and displays),
unconventional artistry (exemplified through the practices of inking the skin) and
professionalism (where commitment to hygiene is evoked through the array of clinical
equipment and the presence/smells of antiseptic sprays). We connect this pathos, as a
schema of ‘perception and taste, models of vision, lenses’ (Gagliardi, 1996: 318) to the
cultural values and aesthetics of ‘cool’, embodied in the habitus, and show through our
data how the concept of ‘bodyscape’ – capturing the interaction of space, artefacts,
dispositions and practice – enables an integrated understanding of this form of body wor
-

Readings brazil
- patients are eager for their operations and there is an excited buzz in the hallways
- The patients, mostly women and children
- They have been waiting anywhere from a few months to several years. Strangers strike
up conversations about their breast surgeries or discreetly lift up their blouses to
compare results.
- Upstairs relatives crowd the corridors waiting to visit patients recuperating in shared
rooms, while a team of forty surgeons perform the full range of cosmetic and
reconstructive procedures.
- Santa Casa, which is funded in part by Catholic charities, in part by the state health
system, charges a small fee to cover anaesthesia and medical materials for cosmetic
 patients. But there are also fully public hospitals in Rio and around the country,
supported by federal or municipal budgets, which offer cosmetic surgery at no cost.2
- A right to beauty is celebrated in a country where human rights are disparaged as
‘privileges for bandits’
- The Brazilian media, however, have been remarkably positive about the growth of plastic
surgery. Some stories cite the international reputation of Brazilian surgeons as a point of
national pride. Others view the growth of plástica as an indicator of economic health, a
flexing of Brazil’s consumer muscle. The fact that more Brazilians are having cosmetic
surgery, Veja reasoned, simply means that more Brazilians are becoming middle class
- But the growth of plástica cannot be explained as a product of economic prosperity.
Wealthier European countries have per capita cosmetic surgery rates only about a fifth
of Brazil’s (Brasil, império do bisturi 2001), and the so-called ‘democratization’ of plástica
occurred during a period of rising economic inequality in the 1980s and 1990s, a period
where the term ‘brazilianification’ became a synonym for ‘savage capitalism’
- Focusing primarily on the West and relying on textual and media materials, several
scholars have argued that beauty practices are an exercise in patriarchal power that
disciplines, normalizes, and medicalizes the female body
- Beauty practices offer a means to compete in what I call a neoliberal libidinal economy
where anxieties surrounding new markets of work and sex mingle with fantasies of social
mobility, glamour, and modernity.
- At a time when plastic surgery is growing in developing countries around the world, from
Latin America to the Middle East and East Asia, the Brazilian case, I hope, will offer
insights into how new configurations of medicine, therapy, and aesthetics are consumed
in the peripheries of capitalism.
- plástica’s key legitimating concept: autoestima or selfesteem. As cosmetic surgery
sought to establish itself as a medical practice in the United States at the turn of the
twentieth century, the central difficulty it faced was how to define the disorder that it
treated
- . Since a botched operation harms an otherwise healthy patient, surgeons who practised
aesthetic surgery risked breaking the Hippocratic oath. Early plastic surgeons
denounced ‘beauty doctors’ as quacks. But after the First World War, surgeons realized
that the improved techniques developed while reconstructing the mutilated faces of
soldiers could successfully be applied for purely cosmetic purposes. All that stood in the
way of the widespread peacetime growth of the specialty was the discovery of a proper
illness.
- The discovery was made not by medicine but by popular psychology. In the early
twentieth century, the notion that appearance is integrally linked to the psyche became
publicly accepted. Concepts such as the ‘inferiority complex’ helped make cosmetic
surgery acceptable by giving it a therapeutic rationale (Haiken 1997: 114-17). But in
Brazil, this therapeutic rationale has been pushed into new territory – in a sense, to its
logical conclusion – as it is deployed in Brazil’s public health system serving a population
described simply as carente, ‘needy’
- ‘In the past,’ he told me, ‘the public health system only paid for reconstructive surgery.
And surgeons thought cosmetic operations were vanity. But plástica has psychological
effects, for the poor as well as the rich. We were able to show this and so it was
gradually accepted as having a social purpose. We operate on the poor who have the
chance to improve their appearance and it’s a necessity not a vanity’
- This reasoning, however, raises the question of why – if patients are suffering
psychologically – they should not be treated by psychologists? In fact, some surgeons
do agree that their patients could benefit from therapy or pharmaceuticals. Pitanguy
employs a psychologist at his clinic who gives all patients a pre-operative interview. But
while she believes that ‘the majority of patients are contra-indicated’, she rarely turns
them away so as not to ‘disappoint’ them. Other surgeons, those struggling to get a
toehold in a crowded market, appeal to the therapeutic rationale as a marketing tactic:
for example, through ads that promise to ‘raise your breasts and your self-esteem’. But
many surgeons I talked to also seem sincerely to believe that plástica is a form of ‘public
health’ to which the poor should have access.
- ‘Look, no surgeon would put in a prosthesis when there’s no need’, the Chief of Plastic
Surgery at a federal hospital told me. ‘There are women with a really fallen ego. After
four children, the breasts are so shrivelled and ugly ... there’s a psychological indication
and so we authorize the surgery’. The surgeons’ sense of confidence seems to be
reinforced by the long lines they see every day at their clinics, by requests for operations
from the wives and relatives of their colleagues, by the fact that female staff at hospitals,
from nurses to coffee vendors, ‘all want operations’. Some patients even revere their
surgeons as artists or geniuses with ‘gifted hands’ – an association exploited in ads that
juxtapose before and after pictures with images of works of art.
- But while Pitanguy acknowledges that ‘there is a lot of art in our field’, he argues that
ultimately plastic surgery is ‘normative’: ‘I cannot – like a Picasso – have three breasts or
whatever. But inside our limitations we can do many things’. Pitanguy, however, does
feel it necessary to warn his less experienced colleagues to be wary of an ‘excess of
self-confidence’. He calls this the ‘Pygmalion complex’, in which ‘the surgeon-artist
repeats the drama of the sculptor, and falls blindly in love with his work’ (Pitanguy 1992:
271). The surgeon falls in love, not with the patient, but rather with the physical form he
creates – a condition that ‘blinds’ him to the patient’s real complaint. More common than
the Pygmalion complex is a kind of patient reaction that surgeons compare to
psychoanalytic transference and projection. The spectre of the complaining patient
haunts plástica more than other medical specialties because defects are psychologically
invested. Post-operative reactions range from depression and crises of regret to
euphoria, exaggerated gratitude, and sexual invitations to the surgeon
- Such reactions prove that surgical incisions do not just alter the face, but ‘go beneath the
skin, touching the psyche too’
- But while they are wary of the ‘scalpel slave’ – the patient addicted to surgery – most
surgeons tend to believe that plástica is simply the most effective ‘therapy’. Thus a
plastic surgeon joked, ‘What is the difference between a psychoanalyst and a plastic
surgeon? The psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic
 surgeon knows nothing but changes everything’. Moreover, surgeons point out,
psychoanalysis has limited efficacy with working-class patients. But the suffering that
plástica cures is, unlike neurosis, distributed across classes. As Dr Herbert put it,‘Faced
with an aesthetic defect, the poor suffer as much as the rich
- In the absence of physical pain, what motivates patients to confront the bureaucracy of
public hospitals, wait on lines along with the disfigured, endure a painful period of
recuperation, and undergo the risk of complications and even death?
- One answer, as we have seen, is low self-esteem. But Dr Afonso also voiced a minority
opinion: ‘Her principal illness is poverty’. The comment indicates that the psychological
suffering that plástica heals has roots in larger social problems. When President
Cardoso was inaugurated in 1995 he announced ‘the end of the Vargas era’. His claim
was that the policy of modernization as defined by the populist leader in the 1940s and
1950s could no longer serve as a guiding vision of national development (Reis 2000:
178). Whether a new incarnation of modernization will emerge – or what new forms of
polity will take its place – remains to be seen. During this time of transition undergone by
Brazil, many have argued that the emergence of new rights has coexisted with a split in
citizenship between the ‘market-able’ and those surviving on the margins of the formal
econom
- While the human rights movement has grown in Brazil, there has also been an increase
in violence and in police terror, and a partial privatization of security
- In the area of health care, the split between private and public sectors of different quality
has deepened, even as the new democratic state ambitiously provided a universal right
to health care
- 4 Thus the right to health care, like many social rights in Brazil, is based on a
public-private division that reproduces the larger inequalities of the market economy.
With the shrinkage of the state and an influx of foreign goods, others have argued that
citizenship is increasingly defined in the sphere of consumer culture
-