Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"The language of the body cannot be denied." This is the key passage in Hewitt's fascinating study on the personal and cultural significance of body modification. Permanent alteration of one's own form involves more strength, conviction, and visceral impact than any verbal statement, and so is infinitely more potent. Hewitt draws together a cornucopia of cultural and spiritual sources including performance art, ritual scarification, decorative and therapeutic tattooing and piercing, religous fasting, shape-shifting, punk fashion, and sadomasochism to trace the motives, meaning, and antecedents of personal change through self-mutilation.
Despite my only casual interest in the subject, I was impressed by Hewitt's discovery of a common foundation to some very diverse practices spanning many cultures and eras. To my knowledge, a project of such breadth and ambition on this topic is unprecedented. The other books I'd read about body modification confined themselves to tribal, biker, and punk subcultures, but Hewitt embraces all traditions, finding bridges between Maasai rites and psychoanalysis, animism and feminism, yoga and Fauvism, fashion trends and Walt Whitman, Christian iconography and Annie Sprinkle. At every level she finds a drive for self-expression, a need to heal oneself or one's society, and a yearning for transcendence.
To its credit, "Mutilating the Body" is not a smooth read, as every other sentence provokes more thought and raises more questions than whole chapters of other books. Despite its academic density, it left me wanting more--I see it as a brilliant framework, soon to be fleshed out into other books treating its insights with more focus. In the meantime, I recommend it unreservedly to anyone interested in body art, "deviant" psychology, pop culture, or anthropology.
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This scholarly discussion places acts of body mutilation within a conceptual framework that explores their similarities and dissimilarities, but ultimately interprets them as acts that ask to be witnessed. The author explores self-mutilation through history and across cultural divisions.
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