I am pleased to announce that after many trips over a 3 years period and then 6 months in production, my first book will be
Available on August 2008.

Best Regards,

Jean-Michel

26×23 cm, 88 pages. French – English Text.

The practice of scarification seems to be as old as civilisation itself.
Anthropologists have discovered that it was the Australian Aborigines who developed it to its present form and adapted it to mark the rites of passage to adulthood. Such initiation ceremonies were essential to the functioning of Aboriginal society because they enabled each individual to know his or her place and role in that society.
Scarification spread to other cultures with varying degrees of success. Doctors in the ancient and mediaeval worlds were inspired by it to develop bleeding techniques. Later, it would be used to treat skin diseases such as rosacea.
Today, in Europe and in the United States, scarification is associated with the pathological condition called self-mutilation. Adolescents scarify themselves to “drive out” their fears and distress or to replace emotional pain with (more bearable) physical pain, or to mark their membership of a gang or other group.
Nowadays, scarification has only retained its original function, as practised by the Aborigines, in a few parts of the world, such as West Africa, especially in Northern Benin, where around forty tribes still practise it for various reasons, of which one is the most important: to tell us more about those who bear the scars.

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