While we have come a long way since civilization began, some communities are stuck with age-old traditions. Despite the truth that they once served a purpose, it is hard to digest the fact that they exist even today. These practices or traditions are downright crazy and will make you go WTF! Here are seven of the extremely weird practices from around the world that are still carried out today by various tribes and communities.
1. Finger Cutting of Dani Tribe
The Dani (or Ndani) tribe is the indigenous people that inhabit the fertile lands of the Baliem Valley in West Papua, New Guinea. The death of a family member in the Dani tribe heralds a vast amount of emotional and, for women, physical pain.
When a person in Dani`s tribe passes away, the members of this tribe cut off their fingers as a way of displaying their grief at funeral ceremonies. Before being amputated, the fingers are tied with a string for thirty minutes to numb them. Once amputated, the new fingertips are burned to create new scar tissue. Along with amputation, they also smeared their faces with ashes and clay, as an expression of sorrow.
The number of fingers that will be cut off depends on how many persons he/she loves even though he/she will lose all of her hand`s fingers. This custom, one of the world’s most bizarre cultural practices, is performed as a means to satisfy ancestral ghosts, and is rarely, but still sporadically, practiced in the tribe.
2. Lip Plates
There are some tribes in Africa who fit huge lip plates/discs in their mouth that are either made of clay or wood and can reach a size as large as a human head. Yes, you heard ir right!
It is uncertain how this bizarre custom came into being. One theory is that lip plating originated as a deliberate disfigurement designed to make women and young girls less attractive to slave traders. Some researchers claim that the size of the lip plate (the bigger the better) was a sign of social importance or wealth within the tribe. Another analysis indicated that the bigger the size of the lip plate, the bigger the dowry a bride would receive on her wedding day (the girl’s family receives a contingent of cattle based on the respective size of the disk).
3. Endocannibalism: Burial Ritual
The Yanomami tribe (Venezuela and Brazil) are known for their tradition of endocannibalism: consuming the flesh of a member of one’s own tribe, usually after they’ve died.
The bizarre cultural practices surrounding endocannibalism involve wrapping the corpse in leaves and allowing insects to pick at it. 30 to 45 days later, the bones are collected, pulverized, and mixed into a banana soup to be consumed by all. After a year, the villagers consume the ashes, which are mixed with plantain soup. According to tradition, the ritual helps ensure that the souls of the dead find their way to paradise.
4. Not All Dead Bodies Are Simply Cremated Or Buried
They say the dead live on in our hearts and minds – but in one Indonesian province, the deceased continue to walk the earth in a rather more literal, zombie-like fashion. The Toraja people of Indonesia dig up the bodies of their dead relatives before washing, grooming and dressing them in fancy new clothes. Even the bodies of children and bodies that are decades old are exhumed.
Damaged coffins are fixed or replaced, and the mummies are then walked around the province by following a path of straight lines. The ritual is called Ma’nene, or The Ceremony of Cleaning Corpses, which is mainly carried out to ceremonially return the corpses to their home village. That is, if someone died outside the village, the corpse will be taken to the spot of death, then walked back to the village, as an act of returning home.
5. Skin Mutilation: The Skin Cutting Ritual Of Kaningara Tribe
Kaningara tribesmen, who inhabit the Blackwater River, a major tributary of the river Sepik in Papua New Guinea have a rather bloody rites of passage ritual. The Blackwater River is infested with crocodiles and is pitch black in its depths because of the decaying plants. Kaningara celebrate and revere crocodiles, which serve as a pretext to the initiation ceremony for young men – skin mutilation to make it look more reptilian and to emphasize their adulthood.
The initiates (referred to as little girls during the rite) may be from 12 to 35 years old and these rites are performed in the Spirit House, where women are not allowed. After they are stripped naked, the cutter makes about 450 razor cuts, starting from the chest, which results in a lot of bleeding. After the chest cutting, the initiates are led outside the Spirit House to have their backs cut in front of the relatives and the rest of the tribe, accompanied by cheers of encouragement. After enduring this process, which leads to not insignificant blood loss, initiates become weak and some of them find it difficult to even walk or stand up. The ritual lasts for days, sometimes even weeks, with further humiliation, cutting and even whipping of the boys until they emerge from the process as men in the eyes of the tribe.
The aim of the ritual is to remove any traces of their mother’s blood by skin-cutting and to fill them with the power of the crocodile spirit.
6. Neck Rings
Thailand’s Karen tribe is fascinated with long necks and looks like they can go a long way to achieve them. Women from the tribe wear rings around their neck to get a large neck, which they find to be a symbol of beauty and elegance. Girls start wearing rings around their necks when they are all of 5 and more rings are added as they grow up. These rings that have gone viral among the youth works by pushing the ribs and the collar bone down and compressing it down to the point that breathing becomes quite difficult.
7. Chinese Foot Binding
In China, little girls aged between 3 and 14 were forced to bandage their feet so that they did not grow bigger. The procedure of foot binding was gross. To bind feet, feet were first soaked in a warm bowl of herbs and animal blood, which caused the dead flesh to fall off. Toe nails were cut back as far as possible to prevent ingrown toenails and infection. Cotton bandages were dipped in the solution and were wrapped tightly around the feet after the toes were broken. Because of tight wrapping of feet, girls couldn’t walk even short distances.
The barbaric practice of Chinese foot binding began in the 10th century during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and fortunately ended after a thousand years.