Paper short abstract:

A medical ethnography of body painting teaches us a great deal. It sheds new light on the anthropology of the body, it unites issues of ecology, health and creativity and it shows that art can generate pragmatic solutions while scientific fields can be creative.

Paper long abstract:

What can we learn from a medical ethnography of body painting? For the agro-pastoralist Mun (Mursi) of Southwest Ethiopia, body painting is the cornerstone of their preventive and curative healing practices. In trying to understand why and how, it generates several theoretical insights. Firstly, it unites two sub-disciplines -the anthropology of body arts and medical anthropology—both of which have generated innovative ideas about the body. By bringing these two areas of anthropology together, new perspectives about 'the body' arise; in particular, in this paper I develop ideas about the body ecologic (Hsu 1999, 2007, 2009) emerging from medical anthropology. Secondly, it brings together art, healing and local ecology—emphasising the symbiosis between all three. After all, the substance of body painting is the earth. However, the substances of body painting have often been overlooked by anthropological studies, unlike archaeological studies (Boivin and Owoc 2004). Finally, it explores medicine as an art, rather than as a science, and reveals that art can be a creative way to find pragmatic solutions for living healthily.