Anthropos 85.1990: 431^445
Body Personal and Body Politic
Adornment and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Christopher B. Steiner
Abstract. - In an effort to discover why particular body deco
rations are practiced in certain societies, this essay attempts to
demonstrate that specific forms of adornment are often corre
lated with types of political leadership. Drawing on a range of
ethnographic examples, the analysis explores the relationship
of four types of body arts (body painting, tattooing, masking,
and crowning) to the political systems in which they are found.
[Melanesia, Polynesia, West Africa, personal adornment, polit
ical organization, body painting, tattooing, masks, crowns]
Christopher B. Steiner, earned a joint honors BA/MA degree
in history and anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University
in 1984. He is currently a Ph. D. candidate in anthropology at
Harvard University where he expects to complete his disser
tation in 1990. He is the co-editor of “To Dance the Spirit.
Masks of Liberia” published in conjunction with an exhibition
at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. He is also the author of a
number of articles on the anthropology of visual arts.
The relationship between the human body and the
social collectivity is a critical dimension of con
sciousness in all societies. Indeed, it is a truism
that the body is the tangible frame of selfhood in
individual and collective experience, providing a
constellation of physical signs with the potential
for signifying the relations of persons to their
contexts (Comaroff 1985: 6).
The adornment of the social body consists of
the construction of the individual as social actor.
Encoded on the skin are a wide variety of signs
communicating information about such things as a
person’s rank, authority, ethnicity, group member
ship, gender, and ritual condition. “The surface of
the body,” writes Terence Turner, “as the common
frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-
biological individual, becomes the symbolic stage
upon which the drama of socialisation is enacted,
and bodily adornment ... becomes the language
through which it is expressed” (1980: 112).
Much of the literature on the decoration of the
human body has tended to emphasize the most fan
tastic and exotic elements of self-decoration. In a
manner often glossed as “Frazerian anthropology,”
studies of this sort have attempted to explain one
society’s form of body mutilation or ornamentation
by demonstrating the existence of what appears to
be a similar practice in another part of the globe.
Edmund Leach has rightly criticized studies of this
sort that disaggregate cultural practices from their
ethnographic context and compare them among
far-separated societies across the world. In so do
ing, Leach has emphasized the arbitrary nature of
the symbolism of the body, and has argued that in
body decoration the relationship between signifier
and signified has no necessary, “natural,” or prede
termined logic that can apply across the boundaries
of different cultures. In his famous essay on “Mag
ical Hair,” Leach argues against the significance
of worldwide similarity of certain symbol-referent
configurations, and dismisses from consideration
the question of why a culture chooses one item and
not another for its symbols. He writes: “Europeans
wear black for mourning. Chinese wear white. In
each case the special status of the mourner is
indicated by the wearing of special dress. But the
question of why one culture selects black for this
purpose and another white is surely both irrelevant
and unanswerable” (1958: 152).
Leach’s point serves as a useful critique of
studies that rely for their data on the exercise of
mindless globe-trotting. I would argue, however,
that his point may unfairly dismiss the possibility
that the details of some practices of ornamenta
tion may be something less than arbitrary. In an
essay entitled “The Meaning of Body Ornaments,”
Anthony Seeger has taken up the very challenge
that Leach sets out, and has attempted to show that
when viewed within the total context of a culture
it may be possible to postulate that certain body
decorations have similar meanings in different eth
nographic milieus. “If instead of lifting a single
trait out of a society for examination,” argues
Seeger, “one looks for structures of interrelated
symbols, then the problem of why one culture uses
black and another white can perhaps be explained