CULTURE OF PEOPLE OF SOUTHEASTERN PANAMA 99 



The nose-rings and earrings worn by the Choco, Cuna, and Tide 

 women involve a mild form of mutilation of the lower septum of 

 the nose and of the ear lobes. Among the Tule the nose-rings are 

 attached even to suckling baby girls, are allowed to remain through- 

 out life, and are not removed at death. Then, the practice was ob- 

 served by Marsh and Markham among the Tule, of binding the 

 lower legs and to a lesser extent the arms with tight ligatures of 

 beaded bands and with bracelets in the manner of the tribes of 

 Guiana and Brazil, so that the flesh with the muscles underneath be- 

 comes dessicated and shrunken. In the broad intervals between 

 these bands the muscles bulge abnormally. The Choco similarly 

 use for this purpose strands of white beads sewn closely together 

 on a piece of strong canvas. This broad cuff encircles the arm at 

 the wrist, another narrower band encircles the arm just below the 

 elbow, while the legs are encased each in three tight bands bound to- 

 gether by three vertical strings. Marsh describes the Tule custom 

 thus : 



The girls when little children have their lower legs tightly wrapped with 

 colored cords or thongs, extending from just above the ankles to the base 

 of the calf— then there is a skip of two or three inches, then another tight 

 wrapping a half inch wide, then another skip of about an inch, and a third 

 narrow tight wrapping just below the knee. 



These thong wrappings are put on tight when the girl child is 

 quite young; they have different colors interspersed at different 

 spacings of the cord, so that the finished wrappings depict some 

 fixed design or pattern and are kept at the same degree of tightness 

 as the girl grows to womanhood. The tightly wrapped leg bands 

 promote thickness of legs considered beautiful by the San Bias 

 women. The result is a hideously deformed lower leg, with the 

 wrapped portions of extreme smallness and the flesh of the un- 

 wrapped portion bulging and often overlapping the wrappings. 

 Likewise the arms are wrapped at the wrists and just below the 

 elbows, but these arm-wrappings are neither so tight nor so dis- 

 figuring as those on the legs. 



In western Panama, in the Provinces of Chiriqui and Veraguas, 

 the Indian hill tribes still file the teeth to needle like points. It 

 is more a process of chipping than of filing : a dull knife is placed 

 against the back of the tooth while the front is tapped with a stone 

 until the desired chipping of the tooth is completed. 



Hairdress and body painting. — As to the mode of ornamentation 

 obtained by hairdressing and hair cutting among the Darien tribes 

 of the interior Wafer (p. 132) observes: 



Both sexes have straight, long, black hair, lank, coarse, and strong, which 

 they wear usually down to the middle of the back, or lower, hanging loose 

 at its full length ; only the women tie it together with a string just behind 



