" Body Sculpting: Cultural Roots - Cosmetic & Plastic Surgery Advice "
Body Sculpting: Cultural Roots
Historically viewed people have always altered themselves
for beauty or power. Chieftains of certain tribes in Africa remove their left
ears by knife and without anesthesia in a symbolic ceremony unrelated to
hearing fidelity but emphatically related to enhancing the visual recognition
of their power and separateness to the other tribal members. In an analogous
manner other tribes put members through ceremonies resulting in intense
scarification merely to exploit some concept of beauty and style unique to
their culture.
Likewise in American and European cultures people regularly
"alter" themselves by going on diets, working out at gyms, becoming bulimic,
using alcohol or drugs to alter their mind state, or order a surgeon to
lipo-suck excess fat from their bodies. The beauty that people seek is that
point of difference, the fine line between the marvelous and the monstrous.
Likewise, advances in modern medicine permit humans to further play the role of
God, while making decisions about who should survive and who should lose. We
use antibiotics to stop the flu. We vaccinate against myriad diseases. We
actively seek to wipe smallpox off the face of the earth.
Is there actually a concept of essential forms as once
stated by Plato, or is the post-modern sensibility grounded in the constantly
changing and re-defining of ourselves? Perhaps cosmetic surgery reflects deeper
social issues concerning individuals' sense of coherence and connection. Absent
any deep-seated cultural anchors, people can regularly shift entire belief
systems several times in a lifetime, switching from Catholicism to Buddhism,
regularly re-birthing in some new self descriptive modality. We pop Prozac and
Ritalin in order to suppress as well as alter mental states. People are
flexible, changeable and creative and plastic surgery speaks to these inner
drives, quite literally embodies this tendency. So, are people seeking to alter
themselves merely superficial, pandering to their own short term whims or tare
they leading edge front runner types signaling deeper trends which will
manifest more profoundly in the future?
Plastic surgery changes the soul, changes people's
perception of self and others, therefore it has as much to do with neurosurgery
and the bending of mind, which patients are oh-so-willing to do and pay for.
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