I was recently following a thread of curiosity across the wide universe of the internet, full of ideas both wonderful and boobish, when I came across some random forum discussion of skulls exhibiting cranial deformation that caused the heads to be very elongated and freakish-looking.  Some people were demonstrating that cranial deformation a) can be caused by normal genetic variation, b) can happen as a result of disease or malnutrition or other accidental circumstances, and c) many ancient cultures and a very small amount of modern ones practiced intentional cranial deformation, meaning they sculpted their babies' heads into weird, elongated shapes with boards, bandages, and stones.  Then, of course, there were the people insisting that they were aliens, and that there are rabbit holes going as deep as a fifty-year-old hooker's fish taco and wool has been used to pull out our eyes with spoon-fed Matrix pills in Droogtown or something, and one of their supporting arguments was, "Even if people could do that, why would they?"

Why indeed.  Why would the people of a culture want to mold their heads into conical, stretched-out NBA-qualifying potato shapes?  That's certainly too weird to believe, much weirder than than stretching out necks with multiple rings, breaking children's feet to make them into deformed stubs that fit into shoes the size of hamsters, permanently cutting ink  marks into our flesh, making patterned wounds on our bodies for decoration, putting hooks, rings and studs through our skin, ironing a young girl's growing boobs to her chest or inflating a grown woman's not-huge-enough tits, cutting off bits of genitalia or converting them into their sexual opposites altogether, lifting our facial skin surgically or restructuring our noses, wearing clothing so tight it causes ribs to crush against lungs, getting a diamond drilled into your tooth, splitting your tongue in half, sticking a giant disc in your lip, suspending yourself from wires that are attached to piercings in your body, except WAIT, it's actually not at all weirder than any of that.  It's actually on par with most of that, and in some cases might be slightly less weird depending on your standards.  (I also thought of plenty of ridiculous things we do and have done not related to body modification, but that list right there is excessive as it is.  And it's not even comprehensive.)

Yes, it's true, people did in fact shape their babies' heads to look alien.  The most famous examples have occured in the civilizations of South and Central America, but in fact it has been practiced in most parts of the world at some point, possibly as far back as Neanderthals go.  It is one of the few methods of deforming ourselves that is dying out, because, presumably, our conceptions of beauty have changed, and it is also something very hard to hide for business meetings.  Also, it is not something you can do to yourself as an adult (as by that point the skull has hardened into its shape), and doing it to a child outside of an accepting culture (which today are very rare) would be abuse.

Here are a bunch of pictures: Chief Danga, Mangbetu, Vanuatu, Adult, Manbetu Man, Skulls 1, Skull 2.

Foot binding was a beauty practice for women that started to become popular around the late 900 years in China, and continued in popularity up to the end of the imperial era, in the beginning of the 1900s.  The premise was that a) tiny feet were gorgeous, b) so were the tiny adorable shoes, and c) the more impossibly, inhumanly tiny, the better.  Even if you had to break them and make them into painful nubs.  The best time to do this was in the girl's early childhood, before the feet had grown to full size, to stop the growth and to get the girl used to tottering around on permanently broken feet.  Although this was done with the best available hygienic processes of the day, it was generally not done with anesthetic, and by all accounts it sucked very hard indeed.

These are two kinds of body modification that have died out, or are close to doing so.  But other ancient types of body modification are alive and well in tattoos, scarification, tooth filing, branding, piercings, and even more extreme new forms of self-alteration. If you've ever been a fan of National Geographic or the Discovery Channel, you've probably seen lip plates and neck rings.  If you're into modern curiosities and sideshow types, you might have heard of Stalking Cat or the Lizardman.  Technology and medical advances have allowed body modifications to go even further with eyeball tattoos and implants and extensive plastic surgery.  I went through a brief list earlier, and I could take up pages of space going on with examples, but I wanted to just give you a taste of the more unfamiliar sides of body modification rather than those that have become mainstream, such as tattoos and piercings.

Why would we do such things?  Why, in the words of my mother, would someone permanently scar their body?  It makes no sense, from a logical perspective. 

Of course, that assumes that humans are logical animals, driven by reason.  Which we are not.  We are emotional, ideological, sensitive things, that enjoy carnal pleasure and emotional rushes, and sure, logic can inform those things, but it's not really what floats our boat, I would argue. 

The core of the reason for body modification is what I think I could safely call a universal human trait, and that is our desire to belong to some higher ideal that is bigger and grander than our individual persons.  That ideal could be God or religion, or beauty, or fashion, or a certain culture or village or ethnic identity, or familial obligation, or tradition, or history, or personal transformation, or perfection, or maturation, or simply being rich and powerful and having lots of ass to tap at your whim.  We all, in some regard, engage in this desire to answer to a higher ideal; it is behind war, patriotism, art, religion, grooming yourself in the morning to look nice, working, and so many other human activities.  But though most of us practice temporary modification of our bodies (cutting our hair, shaping our eyebrows, putting on makeup, whitening our teeth, putting on deodorant or clothes or perfume) to fit into some ideal, many of us do not practice permanent and/or dramatic alteration.  So how does one go from this very common root to this very specific kind of expression of it? 

This part I'm a little shakier on.  I suspect, like most things, the motivation behind it is a complicated mash of one or more elements:

• The person (or their parent) wants or needs to be a full member of a culture (or counter-culture)
• The person sees the body modification as a permanent symbol of a permanent ideal
• The person has artistic leanings and the idea of making the body into art is appealing
• Where material possessions for whatever reason do not serve well or are deemed unsatisfactory as status symbols, body modification can issue declarations about status and commitment to particular ideals
• The body modification offers a means of permanent and visible distinction in an individual among many members of a society
  
• The body modification is an imposition of a mind-borne ideal onto the physical body, indicating the mind or soul's mastery over the body
• The person is drunk and bored

Of course, this is all hypothesis.  The only definite fact is that body modification is a time-honored tradition amongst scattered nations and times in human history, and it shows our innate obsession with the abstract, the ideal, and the symbolic.