Turner: The Social Skin

"Man is born naked but is everywhere in clothes"(Turner)

copy of article here

• Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge.
  
  
  

  • the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well
  • the body (as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual) becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) becomes the language through which it is expressed.
    • Dress and bodily adornment constitute one such cultural medium, perhaps the one most specialized in the shaping and communication of personal and social identity
      
      
      
      KAYAPO "social skin" (Turner)
      

      • Use social skin to indicate all the social distinctions made within the culture as well as accomplish these social distinctions and socialization.
      • form of social expression and social control
      • symbolic nature is not just asthetic
      • Cleanliness (equals health) and acceptance into social world (Douglas)
      • body cleaned of all residue at least once a day
      • no hair on face or body
      • head hair: distinguishes tribes in South America
      • shave hair to top of forehead and the rest is long, but the ability to wear your hair long is an honor
      • head hair is liminal and connotes great internal power. the styling of it is therefore about social control and status expression
      • men grow hair long when they are of an age to reproduce as an expression of this. They are reproducing society

      • Penis sheaths and men
      
      • symbolizes manhood and controls sexuality by preventing public erection
      • socializes sexually, like hair cutting

      • Other socially significant markers
      • Pierced ears, ear-plugs, and lip-plugs comprise a similar distinct complex of social meanings. Here the emphasis is on the socialization, not of sexual powers, but of the faculties of understanding and active self-expression.
        
        
      LIP PLUGS and Men:
     
    

    

    Lip plug for small boy

    
    

    

    adult male lip plug (public speaking important)

    
    

    

    elder male lip plug made of crystal (less public speaking)

    
    

    • Ear Piercing: 
    • Plugs for children so that they have the ability to hear. 
    • Children and adults just wear beaded strings
      
    • Body painting and self expression
    • Black is applied to the trunk of the body, the upper arms and thighs. Black designser stripes are also painted on the cheeks, forehead, and occasionally across the eyes or mouth.  
    • symbol of transition between social and natural world
    • Black is associated with the idea of transformation between society and unsocialized nature. The word for black is applied to the zone just outside the village that one passes through to enter the ‘wild’ forest (the domain of nature). It is also the word for death (that is, the first phase of death, while the body is still decomposing and the soul has not yet forsaken its social ties to become a ghost:ghosts are white).  
    • Red is applied to the calves and feet, forearms and hands, and face,especially around the eyes. Sometimes it is smeared over black designs already painted on the face, to render the whole face red 
    • Red, by contrast, is associated with notions of vitality, energy and intensification. It is applied to the peripheral points of the body that come directly into contact with the outside world (the hands and feet, and the face with its sensory organs, especially the eyes). 
      • The principle here seems to be the intensification of the individual’s powers of relating to the external (that is, primarily, the social) world.

    

    
    

    

    
    

    

    
    

    

    
    

    

    
    

    
     

  •   What does the social skin do? (social function)
  • At one level, the ‘social skin’ models the social boundary between the individual actor and other actors; 
  • at a deeper level it models the internal, psychic diaphragm between the pre-social, libidinous energies of the individual and the ‘internalized others’
  • at yet a third, macro-social level, the conventionalized modifications of skin and hair that comprise the ‘social skin’ define, not individuals, but categories or classes of individuals, (for example, infants, senior males, women of child-bearing age, etc.).

  • at this third level of interpretation, the social skin becomes the boundary between social classes. 
  • That the physical surface of the human body is systematically modified in all human societies so as to conflate these three levels of relations should give us cause for reflection.