Les Padaung

After talking about women, I thought about women giraffes, it always impressed me to see pictures of these women, it's still quite impressive as a physical transformation.

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The Padaung, also known as Kayan, are a subgroup of the Karenni people, a Tibetan-Myanmar ethnic minority in Burma. In 1990, because of the conflict with the Burmese military regime, many Kayan left for Thailand.

They live near the northern border, with an uncertain legal status, in villages that make them tourist attractions because of their particular body modifications. These consist of a kind of brass spiral necklace wrapped around women's necks, which led observers to call them "Giraffe women" or "Long-necked tribe". The Burmese name these women, women with long necks because they do not want to identify them with animals.

There are also giraffe women in South Africa, in the Ndebele people. Their ornaments can weigh up to 25 kilos.

The spiral necklace

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The women of this tribe wear ornaments around the neck that can be called spiral necklace. It is around the age of five that girls receive their first spiral necklace and this is replaced by a longer spiral as they grow, so they are not rings that the we add, but the whole spiral that we change.
Contrary to popular belief, these spirals do not affect the vertebrae of the neck to lengthen them, but they weigh on the ribs that evolve by leaning downwards.

Thus, the more the ribs bend, the more the collar falls on the shoulders, which makes it too wide and not big enough to wrap the whole neck again. It is at this point that it is replaced by a longer spiral, in order to continue the process.

These spirals must be removed in order to be replaced by longer ones, as well as during medical consultations, which invalidates the idea that removing them would be deadly dangerous for the woman. Indeed, they will not die even if their muscles are weakened.

However, most women still keep them because the skin and bones of their necks are bruised and discolored by the fact that they have always been hidden by these necklaces. Moreover, the habit of wearing them continuously makes them almost an extension of the woman's body.
Many hypotheses have been made by anthropologists about the reason for wearing these spiral necklaces.

It could be to protect against tiger bites; to make women less attractive to other tribes so that they do not marry outside of theirs or enslave; to give them a resemblance to a dragon, which is an important figure of kayan folklore but most of these assumptions are not verified and the true origin of this tradition remains a mystery. Currently, it is not only to perpetuate this tradition that these spiral necklaces are still worn, but it is also because they represent a strong part of the cultural identity of this ethnic group, in which is anchored a certain idea of beauty, which is reinforced by the attraction they exert on tourists.

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Unless

The government of Burma discourages the perpetuation of this tradition because it wants to try to give a more Western image of this country and it is followed by a number of padaung women.

However, since this practice generates tourism and thus brings money directly to the tribe, it does not completely lose its vitality. The largest kayan village, Nai Soi, in Thailand, receives about 1,200 tourists a year and takes an entrance fee of 250 baht, about 5.6 euros per person.

(Text source)

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Do you prefer to be a plateau woman or a giraffe woman? A real dilemma, I do not know what I would choose and you?