Prehispanic flip
2006-05-10 13:37:58 UTC
Following the conquest of the Philippines by Spain in 1565 and the
onset of evangelisation, Hispanic missionaries introduced
self-flagellation in the archipelago in the late sixteenth century.
Given events in Spain, this is not at all extraordinary. In fact, it
would be remarkable if the friars had not introduced flagellation in
the Philippines, as they had already done in Mexico (Clendinnen 1990:
123-24). According to Pedro Chirino (1969: 285), a Jesuit who arrived
in the Philippines on 20 June 1590, the disciplina was first introduced
on the island of Panay by canon Diego de León. No form of religious
self-mortification was practised in the Philippines prior to
colonization, yet Chirino (1969: 285, 343, 403, 457) describes how
Filipinos of all walks of life took to flagellation (a voluntary
practice) with such "extraordinary" enthusiasm (see also Ribadeneyra
1601: 49-50) that physical restraint was sometimes necessary, "so eager
and fervent" were the indios. On more than one occasion, a man
disciplined himself so violently that he collapsed and was believed to
have died (Chirino 1969: 352). Whereas initially flagellation only took
place during Lent, the practice was extended to all Fridays, every one
of which, according to Chirino (1969: 419), was "attended by many
people, of high rank and of every condition and profession". By the
mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuit, Ignacio Alcina, lamented that if
Filipinos chose to scourge themselves, they did so regardless of
physical ailments or attempts to stop them. "We are unable to remedy
this," Alcina admitted, "since we learn about it when it is all over"
(Koback and Fernandez 1981: 165). In Samar and Leyte at least,
self-flagellation was no longer exclusively under Spanish jurisdiction.
The virtual absence of references to self-flagellation in later sources
(San Antonio, Santa Inés, Martínez and Colín), has prompted the
suggestion "that Filipino interest [in the disciplina] rapidly abated".
On the contrary, it was Spanish interest that waned as ecclesiastical
attitudes towards self-flagellation changed in seventeenth and
eighteenth century Europe. For later generations of missionaries the
disciplina was an anachronism, the enthusiasm of Filipinos an
embarrassment. The absence of references to flagellation was a
deliberate act of self-censorship by the friars, not an indication of
indigenous disinterest or disavowal. Among Filipinos, flagellation
continued unabated.
Two centuries after flagellation was introduced in the Philippines, the
Provincial Council of Manila held in 1771 decreed that: "Nobody should
flog himself publicly in the streets or in churches during Holy Week"
(Barrion 1960: 304, 307). Two years later, the Synod of Calasiao
prohibited the disciplina with an explicit ban on "all bloody penances"
(Smith 1970: 203). Significantly, flagellation survived as a custom,
but was performed with increasing discretion. At the turn of the
twentieth century, in the wake of Spanish colonialism, Lt. Charles
Barney (1903: 5) observed that flagellation (which even then was "not
done in penance") "has been so discouraged of late years by the Church
that it is performed only in the smaller villages of the interior and
of the outlying barrios [villages] of the larger towns, more or less
secretly, away from the sight of white men". In fact, during the first
half of the twentieth century, amidst the American (and Japanese)
occupation of the Philippines, flagellation became even more
clandestine and less widespread; nor did the ritual attract particular
attention beyond the perennial echo of colonial criticism and
condemnation. There was no forewarning of the revival to follow.
A Two-Tiered Revival
The revival of religious self-flagellation in the Philippines began in
the 1950s and gathered momentum in the early 1960s. Performance ceased
to be covert or inhibited, as tens of thousands of Filipino men
scourged themselves during Holy Week in a dramatic spectacle of public
blood-letting. Rather than outline macro social and economic changes in
the Philippines during and preceding this period, culture-specific
developments which may have contributed to the origins of the revival
of flagellation, I shall focus here on the nature of the revival, how
it was sustained, and why it survived despite potent opposition. In
particular, I shall look at the role of the educated elite, the
Philippine press and the Department of Tourism, all of which have
deliberately or inadvertently contributed to the development of the
revival over a period of decades. A revival ceases to be a revival if
and when it fails to evolve, and thereby loses the momentum fundamental
to its success. After almost half a century, the renaissance of
religious self-flagellation in the Philippines is still ongoing and
dynamic.
A religious revival is a complex process involving historical
continuity (more often in form than meaning), cultural innovation, and
the social differentiation of knowledge. Regarding the latter
diffraction, the revival of self-flagellation in the Philippines has
been two-tiered: both participatory in a performative sense, and
actively non-participatory, in terms of ritual representation outside
performance. First and foremost, there was a participatory revival
among predominantly lower-class males in central Luzon. This began in
earnest after world war two and independence from the United States,
marking the end of four centuries of colonialism. Wallace (1956: 265)
has defined a revitalisation movement (a generic term, which includes
religious revivalism) as "a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by
members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture." Although
conscious and deliberate, the participatory revival of religious
self-flagellation in the Philippines lacked organisation. Flagellants
did not form brotherhoods or fraternities (as in Spain or New Mexico).
Collectively, the group was acephalous: flagellants possessed no
leaders, either formally or informally, although a charismatic
individual, a cultural innovator called Arsenio Añoza (who I shall
return to later) played a pivotal role in the 1960s by inventing a new
religious self-mortification ritual in the Philippines. Nor was there
any attempt to recruit membership; no campaign of conversion. Without a
social or political structure, the revival was unusually fluid:
flagellants met solely for and during ritual performance, itself an
annual occurrence (during Holy Week), thus temporally precise,
predictable and intense. Moreover, unlike the revolutionary uprisings
of peasant brotherhoods in nineteenth and early twentieth century
Philippines, insightfully analysed by Reynaldo Ileto (1989), the
renaissance of self-flagellation was not politically-oriented. Although
flagellation was and still is performed predominantly by the lower
classes, the indigent and illiterate (as opposed to the penurious), the
ritual itself is not, at least not explicitly, a form of social
activism or political protest (again, I shall return to this point
later). Finally, on a theological front, if left in peace, and this has
not always been the case, flagellants are not and never were
intentionally heterodox or confrontational vis-a-vis the Catholic
Church, which today neither condemns nor condones the ritual. Almost
all the flagellants I have met consider themselves Catholics, and not
in any sense a breakaway movement from the Catholic Church.
The second tier of the rebirth of self-flagellation began in the early
1960s and peaked in the late 1970s. During this period, a surge of
interest in self-flagellation, which was often ambivalent, developed
among educated middle or upper class Filipinos, including the literati.
Although this active non-participatory interest was triggered by the
performative revival of flagellation, minimal interaction took place
between the two parties, even on Good Friday; a state aptly symbolised
by an affluent Filipino who once told me: "Every Holy Week, as a child,
I used to stare at the bleeding flagellants through the tinted windows
of our air-conditioned car [in parts of central Luzon, flagellants
parade along highways] as we drove north from Manila to Baguio for our
family vacation." Upon arrival in the summer capital, the family used
to inspect the white paintwork of the car for blood.
The crucified Christ, impaled in agony and dying on a cross, is a
multivocal or polysemic symbol in the Philippines, capable of
supporting, if not unifying a wide range of disparate, even
contradictory cultural meanings (Turner 1986: 28, 50). Fernandez'
(1965: 922) distinction between social and cultural consensus is useful
here. Social consensus involves agreement to interact (and how to
interact), for example during ritual performance. Cultural consensus
signals agreement regarding the meaning of symbols. A high degree of
social consensus, Fernandez argues, often implies a low degree of
cultural consensus: protagonists agree to disagree, if you like, on the
meaning of events. In the Philippines, the situation has added
complexity. Despite the organisational fluidity of the participatory
revival, flagellants exhibited both high social and cultural consensus,
the latter based on similar performance motives. Holistically, however,
the two-tiered revival demonstrated low social consensus (class-based
ritual participation versus active non-participation), although
interest in flagellation was uniformly high; as well as low cultural
consensus: that is, the unanimous supposition of penance, an orthodox
Western view deriving from Catholic theology, ironically adhered to by
an educated Filipino elite exploring nationalism, contrasted sharply
with the ritual exegesis of flagellants themselves. Although at odds
with one another, both indigenous interpretations continue to co-exist
within Philippine society.
Without doubt, the non-participatory revival of interest in
self-flagellation was linked to the independence of the Philippines and
the painful process of decolonization that ensued, as the educated
elite attempted to define or redefine cultural and national identity.
Flagellation was perceived, initially at least, as intrinsically
Filipino (despite its Spanish ancestry): a rural tradition bound up in
four hundred years of cultural heritage. Although flagellation belonged
to a protracted colonial past, it was temporarily embraced as part of
an experimental present and an imagined future, and like it or not (and
many nationalists did not), represented a small step towards answering
the question: who is the Filipino, or at least who is this Filipino? To
add a twist to the tale, an historical participatory twist to the
non-participatory revival: until the early twentieth century,
self-flagellation used to be practised on Good Friday, indoors and in
private, by upper class Filipino men.
The Non-Participatory Revival
Ethnographic examples of the non-participatory revival of interest in
flagellation among middle and upper class Filipinos are multifarious.
By way of illustration, I shall present a selection from primary
education, the Philippine press, as well as national arts and
literature, drawing throughout on indigenous materials. Emphasis here
is on largely ephemeral accounts, written, artistic and performed
representations of religious self-flagellation, each of which has
potential access to a sizeable and spacious audience. Throughout this
overview, it is important to remember the ritual exegesis of the
flagellants themselves, for their insights are absent and excluded
here, particularly the protagonists explicit rejection of repentance as
a motivational factor.
The first indication of renewed interest in flagellation came in March
1957, when Philippine Educator (official organ of the Public School
Teachers of the Philippines) published an article about Easter, of
which objective D was to learn more about Filipino religious practices,
including self-flagellation. Flagellation was defined as "submitting
one's self to pain": the flagellant is "whipped and beaten, knocked and
pushed about with every means of torture available; thongs with nails,
spiked clubs, stones or boards are used for torturing; [the] flagellant
does not whimper for this is supposed to be a sacrifice - a fulfilment
of a vow; when the torturing is over, [the] flagellant goes to church
and prays." A decade later, in March 1967, Home Life magazine published
a Lenten "self-examination" quiz for children. The focal point of the
article was a photograph of a procession of hooded flagellants. "What
practice is this? On what occasion?", readers were asked. The following
answer was provided: "Flagellation is practised among devotees
specially in Luzon provinces during Good Friday. Although this is not
encouraged by the Church, men imitate the scourging of Christ by going
through the streets half-naked and barefooted and inflict themselves
with wounds from whipping."
Between 1937, when the first article on flagellation was published in
the Philippine periodical press, and 1991 (when the survey I conducted
ended), 104 articles on flagellation appeared in 36 different
periodicals, ranging from travel magazines, such as Orient Tours, to
the government propaganda of New Philippines (distributed during
martial law), and from domestic magazines, such as Woman and the Home,
to hard-line political organs, most famously Philippines Free Press. Of
the 104 articles (this figure excludes articles in the daily press),
only 8 were published before 1960; the remaining 96 articles appearing
between 1961 and 1991, reflecting a significant increase of interest in
flagellation in this period. The breakdown of articles by decade, which
I shall return to later, is as follows: 1930s - 1 article, 1940s - 2
articles, 1950s - 5 articles, 1960s - 24 articles, 1970s - 43 articles,
1980s - 23 articles, 1990-1991 - 6 articles.
Flagellation has appeared in many guises in the Philippine periodical
press. During the 1960s, the ritual cropped up in a spate of high-brow
editorials. In 1962, for instance, the leading article in Philippines
Free Press postulated that: "On Holy Friday it is the custom for some
people to whip themselves or to have another whip them in payment for
their sins. Thus, they would show God how sorry they are for having
offended Him Crime must be followed by punishment, guilt erased by
suffering. It is not enough to be sorry; one must also expiate." In
1967, an editorial in the Manila Times Variety magazine described the
flagellant on its front cover as "subjecting himself to inflictions of
bodily pain and hoping thereby to do reparation for his many sins."
Again, I stress that this supposition of sin and atonement is not
adhered to by the flagellants themselves.
Flagellation was an ardent subject of debate in readers' letters
published in national periodicals during the non-participatory revival.
In 1967, in Philippines Free Press, a reader from Bohol asked:
"Flagellants punish themselves severely to atone for their sins, but do
they ever attend Sunday Mass or receive the sacraments?" In 1978, in a
letter to the editor of Philippine Panorama, an indignant correspondent
demanded to know why the Catholic Church did not advise "the countless
flagellants all over the country", who "inflict wounds on themselves to
atone for some personal shortcoming", to "stop this practice once and
for all".
onset of evangelisation, Hispanic missionaries introduced
self-flagellation in the archipelago in the late sixteenth century.
Given events in Spain, this is not at all extraordinary. In fact, it
would be remarkable if the friars had not introduced flagellation in
the Philippines, as they had already done in Mexico (Clendinnen 1990:
123-24). According to Pedro Chirino (1969: 285), a Jesuit who arrived
in the Philippines on 20 June 1590, the disciplina was first introduced
on the island of Panay by canon Diego de León. No form of religious
self-mortification was practised in the Philippines prior to
colonization, yet Chirino (1969: 285, 343, 403, 457) describes how
Filipinos of all walks of life took to flagellation (a voluntary
practice) with such "extraordinary" enthusiasm (see also Ribadeneyra
1601: 49-50) that physical restraint was sometimes necessary, "so eager
and fervent" were the indios. On more than one occasion, a man
disciplined himself so violently that he collapsed and was believed to
have died (Chirino 1969: 352). Whereas initially flagellation only took
place during Lent, the practice was extended to all Fridays, every one
of which, according to Chirino (1969: 419), was "attended by many
people, of high rank and of every condition and profession". By the
mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuit, Ignacio Alcina, lamented that if
Filipinos chose to scourge themselves, they did so regardless of
physical ailments or attempts to stop them. "We are unable to remedy
this," Alcina admitted, "since we learn about it when it is all over"
(Koback and Fernandez 1981: 165). In Samar and Leyte at least,
self-flagellation was no longer exclusively under Spanish jurisdiction.
The virtual absence of references to self-flagellation in later sources
(San Antonio, Santa Inés, Martínez and Colín), has prompted the
suggestion "that Filipino interest [in the disciplina] rapidly abated".
On the contrary, it was Spanish interest that waned as ecclesiastical
attitudes towards self-flagellation changed in seventeenth and
eighteenth century Europe. For later generations of missionaries the
disciplina was an anachronism, the enthusiasm of Filipinos an
embarrassment. The absence of references to flagellation was a
deliberate act of self-censorship by the friars, not an indication of
indigenous disinterest or disavowal. Among Filipinos, flagellation
continued unabated.
Two centuries after flagellation was introduced in the Philippines, the
Provincial Council of Manila held in 1771 decreed that: "Nobody should
flog himself publicly in the streets or in churches during Holy Week"
(Barrion 1960: 304, 307). Two years later, the Synod of Calasiao
prohibited the disciplina with an explicit ban on "all bloody penances"
(Smith 1970: 203). Significantly, flagellation survived as a custom,
but was performed with increasing discretion. At the turn of the
twentieth century, in the wake of Spanish colonialism, Lt. Charles
Barney (1903: 5) observed that flagellation (which even then was "not
done in penance") "has been so discouraged of late years by the Church
that it is performed only in the smaller villages of the interior and
of the outlying barrios [villages] of the larger towns, more or less
secretly, away from the sight of white men". In fact, during the first
half of the twentieth century, amidst the American (and Japanese)
occupation of the Philippines, flagellation became even more
clandestine and less widespread; nor did the ritual attract particular
attention beyond the perennial echo of colonial criticism and
condemnation. There was no forewarning of the revival to follow.
A Two-Tiered Revival
The revival of religious self-flagellation in the Philippines began in
the 1950s and gathered momentum in the early 1960s. Performance ceased
to be covert or inhibited, as tens of thousands of Filipino men
scourged themselves during Holy Week in a dramatic spectacle of public
blood-letting. Rather than outline macro social and economic changes in
the Philippines during and preceding this period, culture-specific
developments which may have contributed to the origins of the revival
of flagellation, I shall focus here on the nature of the revival, how
it was sustained, and why it survived despite potent opposition. In
particular, I shall look at the role of the educated elite, the
Philippine press and the Department of Tourism, all of which have
deliberately or inadvertently contributed to the development of the
revival over a period of decades. A revival ceases to be a revival if
and when it fails to evolve, and thereby loses the momentum fundamental
to its success. After almost half a century, the renaissance of
religious self-flagellation in the Philippines is still ongoing and
dynamic.
A religious revival is a complex process involving historical
continuity (more often in form than meaning), cultural innovation, and
the social differentiation of knowledge. Regarding the latter
diffraction, the revival of self-flagellation in the Philippines has
been two-tiered: both participatory in a performative sense, and
actively non-participatory, in terms of ritual representation outside
performance. First and foremost, there was a participatory revival
among predominantly lower-class males in central Luzon. This began in
earnest after world war two and independence from the United States,
marking the end of four centuries of colonialism. Wallace (1956: 265)
has defined a revitalisation movement (a generic term, which includes
religious revivalism) as "a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by
members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture." Although
conscious and deliberate, the participatory revival of religious
self-flagellation in the Philippines lacked organisation. Flagellants
did not form brotherhoods or fraternities (as in Spain or New Mexico).
Collectively, the group was acephalous: flagellants possessed no
leaders, either formally or informally, although a charismatic
individual, a cultural innovator called Arsenio Añoza (who I shall
return to later) played a pivotal role in the 1960s by inventing a new
religious self-mortification ritual in the Philippines. Nor was there
any attempt to recruit membership; no campaign of conversion. Without a
social or political structure, the revival was unusually fluid:
flagellants met solely for and during ritual performance, itself an
annual occurrence (during Holy Week), thus temporally precise,
predictable and intense. Moreover, unlike the revolutionary uprisings
of peasant brotherhoods in nineteenth and early twentieth century
Philippines, insightfully analysed by Reynaldo Ileto (1989), the
renaissance of self-flagellation was not politically-oriented. Although
flagellation was and still is performed predominantly by the lower
classes, the indigent and illiterate (as opposed to the penurious), the
ritual itself is not, at least not explicitly, a form of social
activism or political protest (again, I shall return to this point
later). Finally, on a theological front, if left in peace, and this has
not always been the case, flagellants are not and never were
intentionally heterodox or confrontational vis-a-vis the Catholic
Church, which today neither condemns nor condones the ritual. Almost
all the flagellants I have met consider themselves Catholics, and not
in any sense a breakaway movement from the Catholic Church.
The second tier of the rebirth of self-flagellation began in the early
1960s and peaked in the late 1970s. During this period, a surge of
interest in self-flagellation, which was often ambivalent, developed
among educated middle or upper class Filipinos, including the literati.
Although this active non-participatory interest was triggered by the
performative revival of flagellation, minimal interaction took place
between the two parties, even on Good Friday; a state aptly symbolised
by an affluent Filipino who once told me: "Every Holy Week, as a child,
I used to stare at the bleeding flagellants through the tinted windows
of our air-conditioned car [in parts of central Luzon, flagellants
parade along highways] as we drove north from Manila to Baguio for our
family vacation." Upon arrival in the summer capital, the family used
to inspect the white paintwork of the car for blood.
The crucified Christ, impaled in agony and dying on a cross, is a
multivocal or polysemic symbol in the Philippines, capable of
supporting, if not unifying a wide range of disparate, even
contradictory cultural meanings (Turner 1986: 28, 50). Fernandez'
(1965: 922) distinction between social and cultural consensus is useful
here. Social consensus involves agreement to interact (and how to
interact), for example during ritual performance. Cultural consensus
signals agreement regarding the meaning of symbols. A high degree of
social consensus, Fernandez argues, often implies a low degree of
cultural consensus: protagonists agree to disagree, if you like, on the
meaning of events. In the Philippines, the situation has added
complexity. Despite the organisational fluidity of the participatory
revival, flagellants exhibited both high social and cultural consensus,
the latter based on similar performance motives. Holistically, however,
the two-tiered revival demonstrated low social consensus (class-based
ritual participation versus active non-participation), although
interest in flagellation was uniformly high; as well as low cultural
consensus: that is, the unanimous supposition of penance, an orthodox
Western view deriving from Catholic theology, ironically adhered to by
an educated Filipino elite exploring nationalism, contrasted sharply
with the ritual exegesis of flagellants themselves. Although at odds
with one another, both indigenous interpretations continue to co-exist
within Philippine society.
Without doubt, the non-participatory revival of interest in
self-flagellation was linked to the independence of the Philippines and
the painful process of decolonization that ensued, as the educated
elite attempted to define or redefine cultural and national identity.
Flagellation was perceived, initially at least, as intrinsically
Filipino (despite its Spanish ancestry): a rural tradition bound up in
four hundred years of cultural heritage. Although flagellation belonged
to a protracted colonial past, it was temporarily embraced as part of
an experimental present and an imagined future, and like it or not (and
many nationalists did not), represented a small step towards answering
the question: who is the Filipino, or at least who is this Filipino? To
add a twist to the tale, an historical participatory twist to the
non-participatory revival: until the early twentieth century,
self-flagellation used to be practised on Good Friday, indoors and in
private, by upper class Filipino men.
The Non-Participatory Revival
Ethnographic examples of the non-participatory revival of interest in
flagellation among middle and upper class Filipinos are multifarious.
By way of illustration, I shall present a selection from primary
education, the Philippine press, as well as national arts and
literature, drawing throughout on indigenous materials. Emphasis here
is on largely ephemeral accounts, written, artistic and performed
representations of religious self-flagellation, each of which has
potential access to a sizeable and spacious audience. Throughout this
overview, it is important to remember the ritual exegesis of the
flagellants themselves, for their insights are absent and excluded
here, particularly the protagonists explicit rejection of repentance as
a motivational factor.
The first indication of renewed interest in flagellation came in March
1957, when Philippine Educator (official organ of the Public School
Teachers of the Philippines) published an article about Easter, of
which objective D was to learn more about Filipino religious practices,
including self-flagellation. Flagellation was defined as "submitting
one's self to pain": the flagellant is "whipped and beaten, knocked and
pushed about with every means of torture available; thongs with nails,
spiked clubs, stones or boards are used for torturing; [the] flagellant
does not whimper for this is supposed to be a sacrifice - a fulfilment
of a vow; when the torturing is over, [the] flagellant goes to church
and prays." A decade later, in March 1967, Home Life magazine published
a Lenten "self-examination" quiz for children. The focal point of the
article was a photograph of a procession of hooded flagellants. "What
practice is this? On what occasion?", readers were asked. The following
answer was provided: "Flagellation is practised among devotees
specially in Luzon provinces during Good Friday. Although this is not
encouraged by the Church, men imitate the scourging of Christ by going
through the streets half-naked and barefooted and inflict themselves
with wounds from whipping."
Between 1937, when the first article on flagellation was published in
the Philippine periodical press, and 1991 (when the survey I conducted
ended), 104 articles on flagellation appeared in 36 different
periodicals, ranging from travel magazines, such as Orient Tours, to
the government propaganda of New Philippines (distributed during
martial law), and from domestic magazines, such as Woman and the Home,
to hard-line political organs, most famously Philippines Free Press. Of
the 104 articles (this figure excludes articles in the daily press),
only 8 were published before 1960; the remaining 96 articles appearing
between 1961 and 1991, reflecting a significant increase of interest in
flagellation in this period. The breakdown of articles by decade, which
I shall return to later, is as follows: 1930s - 1 article, 1940s - 2
articles, 1950s - 5 articles, 1960s - 24 articles, 1970s - 43 articles,
1980s - 23 articles, 1990-1991 - 6 articles.
Flagellation has appeared in many guises in the Philippine periodical
press. During the 1960s, the ritual cropped up in a spate of high-brow
editorials. In 1962, for instance, the leading article in Philippines
Free Press postulated that: "On Holy Friday it is the custom for some
people to whip themselves or to have another whip them in payment for
their sins. Thus, they would show God how sorry they are for having
offended Him Crime must be followed by punishment, guilt erased by
suffering. It is not enough to be sorry; one must also expiate." In
1967, an editorial in the Manila Times Variety magazine described the
flagellant on its front cover as "subjecting himself to inflictions of
bodily pain and hoping thereby to do reparation for his many sins."
Again, I stress that this supposition of sin and atonement is not
adhered to by the flagellants themselves.
Flagellation was an ardent subject of debate in readers' letters
published in national periodicals during the non-participatory revival.
In 1967, in Philippines Free Press, a reader from Bohol asked:
"Flagellants punish themselves severely to atone for their sins, but do
they ever attend Sunday Mass or receive the sacraments?" In 1978, in a
letter to the editor of Philippine Panorama, an indignant correspondent
demanded to know why the Catholic Church did not advise "the countless
flagellants all over the country", who "inflict wounds on themselves to
atone for some personal shortcoming", to "stop this practice once and
for all".