Why do people wound themselves? Are there advantages in parsing these practices as art, religion, politics, war, psycho-pathology, anthropology, and/ or sociology? Are the subincisions of Indigenous Australians more or less acceptable than the penis-cutting options offered on BMEzine.com (body modification) or events advertised on torturegarden.com? And “acceptable” or not for what reasons? How can one parse the categories and grammatize the practices, separating art from ritual from politics from mentation from sickness from popular culture? Why not accept overlapping practices and complex functions? Ought there to be ethical and/or legal limits to self-wounding? What is “self-wounding” anyway? Only wounds caused by the person herself? Or would voluntarily sought wounds performed by others such as tattooing, piercing, and cosmetic surgery count? What about “simple” suicide? Or the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War? Or “martyrs” who suicide themselves as acts of terrorist war? Must an injury stop short of death to be called a wound? Indeed, what constitutes a “wound”? Tissue damage? Or should we also admit subjective experiences – imaginary wounds – within specific cultural contexts and practices? What chain reaction of art did Chris Burden’s 1971 Shoot (more on that later) set off? Can all these different kinds of violence-against-the-self, some of desperation, some artworks, some religious ritual, some in the service of politics, some for beauty-fashion – what a range of “functions” – be accommodated by a single theory?1