Scarification

Scarification is a body modification practice in which patterns of scars are deliberately created on the skin, typically by cutting, branding, or abrading it and sometimes introducing irritants such as ash into the wounds to raise pronounced keloid scarring, producing permanent decorative or symbolic marks. Widely documented across many societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, including among the Nuba, Dinka, and numerous other peoples, as well as in parts of Oceania, Aboriginal Australia, and elsewhere, scarification has served a range of social functions depending on the society and context, commonly marking ethnic or clan identity, recording an individual's passage through initiation and stages of the life cycle, signaling social status, courage, or beauty, and in some contexts serving spiritual or protective purposes. Because scarification shows up more readily than tattooing on darker skin tones, it has been particularly significant as a marker of identity and status in many African societies, and anthropologists studying it generally emphasize reading the practice within its own local system of meaning about the body, identity, and social belonging, rather than through outside aesthetic judgment, even as the practice has declined in many regions under the influence of modernization, formal schooling, and religious change.