Stick Fights And Lip Plates Essay

Abstract: In the country of Ethiopia, there live a group of people called the Surma. They all live very closely to one another. In this culture, the two popular practices they do are stick fighting and lip plates. For the men stick fighting is a type of fighting that is done in order to marry one of the girl in the village. The winner of the fight wins a wife and the loser ends up getting really hurt and ends up with no wife. For the women in this culture, lip plates is a common practice that is done in order to attract the male to get them to marry them. It is said that the bigger the lips the more likely hood that the women is going to get marry and that her family will get more cows as well.
Main Points: The Surma people live in a remote
For the women that had large lips it was extremely important for them that they take care of their lips. Since it was so huge, the lips were easily able to get any kind of infectious disease from it. Also, the more the lips were stretched the more easily it could break. It took around six hours or more to place lip plates around the female's lip because if it was not done correctly then the lips would break. According to the video, it is said that the lip plates took about six months to prepare. During the six months the women there would start wearing smaller lip plates in order to get ready for the larger lip plates. When a lip break it means that no marriage could ever occur for women for the rest of her life. As more and more people are growing, the new generation of the women there dislikes this kind of practice and believe that a women does not need to do this in order to get marry. For the younger generation, the girls there likes to paint their body with clay all over them. Their clay bodies is considered a way of attracting the men in the village to marry them. Of course this is not a efficient compare to a women who has a lip plate around her