2017 Volume 2017 Issue 27 Pages 638-644
There are Kayan people in four villages near the Thai border of Myanmar's remote Kaya State. The custom of Kayan women of wearing neck rings persists here.
They go through their daily life wearing long rings weighing as much as 3 kg for their entire lives. To the outside world, this is a very strange custom. Why do they wear neck rings? What does it mean to them? To answer these questions, we used Semantic Differential Method (SD Method) on 30 pairs of contrasting words describing different perceptions of the neck rings. We interviewed and compared results from three groups: women who wear or have worn neck rings (A group), women with no experience wearing neck rings (B group), and men (C group). Our results show that wearers are proud of their neck rings, seeing them as a beautiful and preferable ornamentation and extension of her body.
Culture is very relative. We can interpret that this ‘strange’ custom of the Kayan women is not strange to themselves, but a part of creating a beautiful body through ornamentation.
