Among the Hill Tribes
People’s cultures vary so widely from place to place. It’s very interesting to see what traditions people hold dear and how absurd they may seem to us, mainly because, other people may be thinking the same about traditions we hold dear.
In the White Karen village for example, girls and women that are unmarried have to wear white. Once they’re married (sometimes as young as 13 or 14), then they can wear other colors like red or blue. They also require the bride’s wife to give a pig to the husband’s family as dowry so all families who have daughters have to also keep pigs! Maybe it’s a secret revenge by the women in the tribe, saying the men are pigs for making them wear white till they’re married. 
Another odd tradition is the metal waist band (see picture above) worn by the Palong tribe women. By wearing that they hope that they won’t be considered a candidate for heaven and thus won’t die!
Or what about the Long Neck Karen girls who have metal rings placed around their necks since they are around 5! They only remove these rings once a year to add a new ring till they have a total of 25-27 rings! What these rings do is push their collar bones down and make them look like they have an elongated neck! Doing this to children seems abusive to me!
And why does it seem like most of these restrictive traditions involve women?
(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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I don’t think those women should be wearing the torturous neck rings. Why do so many cultures associate beauty with things that harm women?
It’s always tragic to see cultures that practice gender based discrimination and even more so when that translates to harmful practices like this!
I like their colorful costumes
It’s sad that women are abused worldwide. I think we are just reaching a point of common knowledge where we see many of these things were forced on them by more physically powerful males when cultures were generally very ignorant of the world. Even in cultures that have access to knowledge, ancient culture continues to exert a lot of power. Very interesting article.
You’re absolutely right! Even very well educated people sometimes have cultural “baggage” that can be very chauvinistic, and of course some of the tribes that still live like they did for centuries haven’t changed much.