You're a Wienie ...

... if you haven't had it peeled yet.

Nigel Barley on penis peeling and pain.

"They came in the night and grabbed me, took me outside and tore my shirt off. That annoyed me - you know how hard it is to get a decent shirt in the village - but they were all masked so I didn’t know who it was. Then one of them beat me on the back with those sharp reeds that really cut you and pushed me in the bullrushes - you know the ones whose sting lasts for days. Then they dragged me down to the lake to a muddy bit where the crocodiles live and threw me in the water, shouting that the crocodiles were coming. They held my head under the water till I nearly drowned and something sharp grabbed my leg and when I was hysterical they ran away, laughing. I dragged myself home and collapsed. The cuts all got infected and I couldn’t move for three days. The pain was terrible and I got a fever that nearly killed me. It was a wonderful spiritual experience."

... Anthropologists have been beaten and scarified, circumcised and starved, spat on and rubbed in excrement, all in the name of getting inside the skin of local people, understanding the way they think and feel. Pain is the ultimate proof of seriousness of purpose, of sympathy and empathy, the absolute core of the participant observation that is virtually the only intellectual capital of the subject. It is assumed that people who go to Africa or Asia to study exotic cultures must feel pain as the ultimate "being there." You just know that any anthropologist worth the name who was working on Christianity would absolutely insist on being nailed to a cross.

Yet, as my colleague’s words show, you are not supposed to make too much of it. It was a wonderful experience ... To live amongst a people, suffer pain and hardship at their hands and not love them and their way of life is to be simply an ungrateful tourist who failed to grasp the local viewpoint. You are the equivalent of someone who went to Paris and couldn’t be bothered to go up the Eiffel Tower. I once worked among a people where the central rite of a man’s life was to have his penis peeled for its entire length. It literally sorted the men from the boys. Without undergoing it, you were a snivelling child, wet and smelly, as contemptible as a mere woman. After the transformation, you were a real man, the finest thing God had created and allowed to swagger and swear oaths on the knife of circumcision. I sat up all one night worrying about whether to become a "real" man or - more seriously - a "real" hairy-chested anthropologist. Then, I paid a fine of six bottles of beer to the men to be classed as "honorary circumcised." I still think it is the best deal I ever made.

Wait, there's more.

Then there is the pain of the «natives». That, too, is everywhere. Pain is a resource that is deployed lavishly in human culture. In the Third World, we think immediately of a government monopoly of pain, the torturers in their dark rooms who live hand in glove with military dictatorships and absolutist regimes and deploy their batons, castor oil and electrodes in the loyal service of the state. One day, we smuggly believe, progress will sweep them away and everyone will enjoy universal human rights.

Yet pain is not just an aberration within imperfect nation states. In villages and townships, cattle camps and nomadic encampments, pain is proudly and openly deployed in traditional ways. Boys have their penes cut to open like flowers when they have an erection or drive pins through their noses and tongues. Men slash at their genitals with glass. Girls have their clitores sliced off, their lips pierced and their feet hobbled. Backs and faces and stomachs are pricked and carved and tattooed with blunt nails. People are mutilated and maimed and disfigured.

Human culture drips with blood and inflicted pain and the surprising thing is that most of it is voluntary. For pain is an important cultural resource and even in the West, we are raised in an economy of pain. As a child, I was assured that Christ suffered for me. I was to be redeemed by suffering myself and when I suffered I should accept it and offer up my pain to him. The explanation and colonisation of pain is a principal concern of all religions. I once bought a poignant T-shirt. "Shit happens," it declared. "Catholics say shit happens because of original sin. Jews say shit happens because I don’t love my mother. Protestants say shit happens because I don’t work harder. Hindus say here’s that same old shit coming round again. Buddhists say: What shit?"

-- Anthropologist and pain scholar Nigel Barley.

UPDATE: If you care to comment and/or get your penis peeled, the party's shifted over to www.julescrittenden.com.