Abstract
Based on 22 semi-structure interviews and content analysis of carefully selected relevant advertisement magazines, this article investigates the place of religion in the practice of cosmetic surgery in Iran, a country that has been reported to have the highest rate of rhinoplasty in the world. Although a remarkable opposition to or negligence of Islamic teachings related to the human body was observed that supports cosmetic surgery as a secular action, the body, prone to cosmetic surgery, is not totally disengaged from religion in the Iranian context. Islam, in effect, plays a key role in cosmetic surgery for individuals who undertake it on three different levels : as a barrier to having cosmetic surgery; as a source to legitimize the surgery as necessary and thus, acceptable; and as setting religious conditions for the course of the operation. Particular attention is given to the place of ‘sin’ in this context and how ‘sin’ can be understood as a crucial mechanism that dys-appears the body for the pious individual.
A particular emphasis will be given to one special case where at first my subject welcomed the idea of knives cutting her skin and bone to make her more beautiful and she had had a successful surgery. But after about a year she felt that her operation was not religiously acceptable and hence underwent a second surgery to obliterate her ‘sinful nose’ and to ‘restore’ her previous less-attractive but sinless nose. Employing the conceptual and theoretical framework of cultural phenomenology of embodiment I will attempt to shed some light on the significance of the notion of ‘sin’ and its relationship with religion and the body in this context. Briefly, ‘sin’ becomes the centre of the believer’s attention when his or her ‘pious body’ fails to consistently perform in accordance with religious criteria due to the intrusion of sin, and re-establishment of the integrity and piety of his or her body becomes the core objective. In this respect, it is quite possible that empirical descriptions of how the body seeks to reconstitute reality in religious ways might furnish new approaches to understanding how we should think about the sacred character of our worldly embodiment.
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