iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

Maybe I should be posting in a different section of the forum... anyhow, the wheres and whyfores of scarification are not my business, I'm sure, but I do notice that some men have chest scarification, some shoulder, and I gather that circumcision is also not obligatory. I don't notice women having any scarification.

I saw a little film clip where Bobby Bununggurr (who is a REALLY wonderful artist and musician!!) says that only sharp stones were used, and he got circumcised and the chest scars (sometimes people have one, sometimes two), but he didn't seem to get the shoulder scars.

I don't know what the different scarifications mean, but I will assume there are good and well-thought-out reasons for these choices... so, Guan, if there's anything you know that it would not be out of line to post here...(?)

The ever-inquisitive,
Cindy

Hi Cindy,
You're right about the significance of where the scarification is.
What I can tell you is :
Indeed, they'd better use sharp stones... than blunt stones haha

That's exactly how much I know...

But agreed about the stones!! Ayiiii!! Fortunately, stones can be very sharp! I wonder what they use for sharp stones in Northern Australia...

When I was in college, I tried to teach myself to knap flint. I never got very good at it - it's apparently not one of those technologies that you can just teach yourself over the course of a semester. You kinda need to learn it from someone who is good at it... but in any case, I would trade services in the archaeology lab for pieces of flint, or even obsidian if I was really lucky (that stuff is sharper than surgical steel, and I saw a micro-photograph once to prove it).

There is no source of flint in Maine, at least not around here. But the English ships that used to come to trade would use it as ballast, and they'd dump it in Casco Bay (where I live) before loading up with whatever they were taking back to England - so sometimes you can actually find flint here in the bay!

Anyhow, I'd be knapping away, and I never made anything very beautiful, but my whole little dorm room, including my bed, was dusted with these tiny little sharp chips of flint. Yikes!

I did make my sister some nice earrings out of a deer femur with the 'tools' I produced.

Scarification means different things to different people depending on where they are located, could be purely decorative or something more. Circumcision isn't/wasn't practised throughout all of Australia, indeed, not all of Arnhem Land either. Where it is practised, it is mandatory and the individual has no say in it.

G

That puts me in mind of a music video called 'Evil Boy' by a South African band called Die Antwoord (so this is not about Australia but about circumcision). They took a little heat after the vid came out because the young tribal fellow who joined them for it was sounding, allegedly, homophobic (keep your hands off my penis, I am not going in the woods with you, etc.) but he was actually talking about something going on in his real life. He had been chatting with the two members of Die Antwoord in a bar or something, and commented that he was scheduled for a ritual initiation ceremony that involved circumcision, and he didn't want to do it. And ultimately he decided not to do it, in spite of huge pressure, and the real risk of ostracism by his community. Once you know what he's talking about, his words make sense ('I don't want to be a man')

Plus the video is outrageous and hiliarious and pretty wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbW9JqM7vho