“The Decorated Body” is a short read about how societies across the world choose to decorate their bodies, as the title says. It also deals with the taboo some cultures place on nakedness, and how that negatively affects people. In “The Decorated Body,” body modifications from around the world are explored. The first body modification to discuss is the tight swaddling of western children in the nineteenth-century. This was to keep the babies limbs straight, but it is now considered unsafe to swaddle a baby too tightly, because it can cause suffocation. As well as tight swaddling, some cultures have sophisticated contraptions to alter their physical appearance. The American Indians “cradleboard” crushed the skull to flatten it, which was considered
