Bedouin Wasm and Daqq

Archiefnotitie

Bedouin body marking has two registers that anthropological accounts keep apart. Wasm is a tribal brand or incision mark, applied chiefly to camels and other livestock and in narrower cases to people as a sign of affiliation; it is branding or scarification, not pigment tattooing. Daqq, also called washm in classical Arabic, is women's facial, lip, chin, and hand tattooing, placed with hand-poked needles, thorns, or awls using soot, charcoal, or kohl-derived pigment worked into the body. Daqq carried beauty, protection, tribal identity, and life-stage meaning across Bedouin and neighboring Arab communities. Classical Arabic sources distinguish the roots for branding and tattooing, and Islamic legal tradition preserves the hadith prohibition of washm. By the late twentieth century, sedentarization, religious reform, and state modernization had pushed women's daqq mostly onto elder bearers, while livestock wasm persists.

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