ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the analytic frame needs to be re-conceptualized when moving to different cultural and economic contexts in the developing world. It focuses on plástica in the same spirit of cultural relativism that ethnographers adopt in trying to understand, say, the scarification of the Nuba: to view it, that is, as a social practice grounded in a local context of meaning. The chapter shows how the culture of beauty is intertwined with changes in the experience and 'management' of motherhood and sexuality in a rapidly modernizing nation, tacking between analysis of structural change and local meanings. Medical beauty practices reflect traditional corporeal aesthetics as well as the market inequalities of a highly stratified nation, but they also respond to new desires incited by the transformations of capitalist development. The chapter indicates the mingling of economic and erotic desire, the embrace of high-tech medical services, and the division of the body into pathologized fragments.
