| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Rather tiresome academic text about human skin that ponderously relates its history.
Skin reflects our culture, personality, emotional states and how we wish to be seen by others and, in the modern period, the survival value of skin comes down to a full appreciation of the dangers arising from physical accidents, ultra-violet radiation and White supremacism.
This book becomes more interesting when it unsticks itself from its obsession with science to grapple with the political implications of skin - particularly the way in which it is adorned to present ourselves to others, as a form of communication. This reflects the fact that humans are more concerned to adapt themselves than they are to change the world around them, through their largest and most intimate sensory organ - their skin.
As regards color, skin pigmentation is adaptive to environment and so it tells us something of the history of ones ancestors, not of ones identity or character. Skin color has nothing to do with “race” but is largely related to climate. Yet in the self-serving effort to rationalize the slave trade and colonize Africa for raw materials, skin color was used by Whites to claim undesirable character traits, moral deficiencies and a lack of sexual desirability in the darker-skinned.
Today, the complementary dangers of skin-lightening creams for Asians who need dark skin to protect them from the sun, and tanned European Whites who increase their chance of contracting skin cancer by lying in the sun, is as historically ironic as it is physically dangerous.
Other keys issues raised relate to touch and emotions. In touch-averse Western cultures - where non-touching is encouraged by laws to punish proven pedophile abuse - children are often deprived of the tactile stimulation necessary for normal physical and behavioral development; leading to lifelong negative biological and psychological stress - unless treated. Higher levels of irritability & illness and lower levels of growth suggest a reason why so many dictators are socially-awkward, erotophobic & short!
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