ABSTRACT
Henry Ling Roth, as a collector, curator and ethnographer, had wide-ranging interests, writing about insects, agriculture, the sugar industry, trade, textiles, archaeology and indigenous people in Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and South East Asia. He was one of many in the nascent discipline of anthropology intrigued by the body modifications encountered among 'primitive races' in the era of Britain's most aggressive colonial expansion. Precursors of modern anthropology like Ling Roth used body modification to construct a notion of the primitive that suited the agendas of colonial administrations in Australia and the Andaman Islands. At the extremities of empire, travellers were astonished to witness extensive, lengthy, dangerous and extremely painful body modification regimes based on tattoo and scarification. Implicit in the classification was an evolutionary development from the most primitive form of body modification to the most sophisticated. In the path from savagery to civilisation, scarification was a 'primitive' form of tattooing.
