There can be nothing more traumatic than being burnt. The pain of the initial injury might give way to shock, blistering, further pain and possible infection. The extent of the injury-the depth of burning through layers of skin, the pro portion of the body surface caught in the flames (scalds share some of the same effects, but not all)-can determine whether a patient is likely to survive or succumb to death. Secondary effects, such as inhaling smoke, can severely damage internal organs or cause the person to lose consciousness, delaying or preventing their escape from the fire. Above all, burns are disfiguring-even modern surgical technologies utilizing skin grafts and prosthetics cannot restore the 'before' appearance of a person. As burns survivor James Partridge, founder and CEO of the UK charity Changing Faces has commented, 'Success fully changing faces amounts to completely facing up to your new face ... and effectively persuading all those whom you meet that behind your mask is a perfectly normal person....'1 The trauma caused by burns, then, can be cata strophic in both physical, psychological and social terms, yet the historiography of burning and being burned in the medieval period seems mainly to focus on the use of fire as a tool to destroy heretical bodies or books,2 or as a means to dispose of corpses,3 or, most devastating of all, as a tool of warfare, discussed below. Whether consigning both to the flames was intended to evoke images of burning in hell has recently been open to question: certainly fire did not totally 1 James Partridge, Changing Faces: the Challenge of Facial Disfigurement (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 4. Although his comment is about a severely burnt face, the change he refers to could apply-though possibly less dramatically-to any visible part of the body that is burned. 2 An early example of fire as a tool of execution is discussed by Michael D. Barbezat, 'The fires of hell and the burning of heretics in the accounts of the executions at Orleans in 1022' ,
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Time magazine's cover photograph in August 2010 of a noseless Afghan woman beside the emotive strap line, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan," fuelled debate about the "medieval" practices of the Taliban, whose local commander had instructed her husband to take her nose and ears. Press reports attributed the violence to the Pashtun tradition that a dishonored husband "lost his nose." This equation of nose-cutting with tradition begs questions not only about the Orientalist lens of the western press when viewing Afghanistan, but also about the assumption that the word "medieval" can function as a label for such practices. A study of medieval nose-cutting suggests that its identification as an "eastern" practice should be challenged. Rather clearer is its connection with patriarchal values of authority and honor: the victims of such punishment have not always been women, but this is nevertheless a gendered punishment of the powerless by the powerful. Beginnings: 2010In August 2010, Time magazine published on its cover the image of a young Afghan woman, Aisha Bibi, whose nose and ears had been cut off by her husband after she had fled from his violent family's house in a region controlled by the Taliban. Left to die and bleeding heavily, she eventually found shelter in a women's refuge in Kabul, where her story and plight were revealed to a wider audience, including Jodi Bieber, a South African photographer. The photograph Bieber took of Aisha, praised because it "addressed violence against women with a dignified image," won World Press Photo of the Year in 2010. 2 Aisha, meanwhile, was flown to the United States, where a philanthropic body, the Grossman Burn Foundation, agreed to fund the reconstructive surgery necessary to restore her facial features. Time ran the cover photo beside the emotive strapline, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan."As a medieval historian, I was already familiar with the phenomenon of nose-cutting, but the manipulative use of Aisha' s photograph profoundly disturbed me, bringing to mind the feminist theorist Madeline Caviness's piercing analysis of medieval images of mutilated women as sado-pornographic. 3 Despite reassurances from her media handlers that she was a strong woman who wanted her story told, it was hard not to feel some sense that Aisha, a victim of extreme domestic violence, was being doubly objectified by the intrusive lens, as had been the undoubted beauty of her compatriots who earlier formed the basis for a photo report on the country itself and its need for protection (by the West). 4 As some commentators pointed out long before Aisha's case came to prominence, the safeguarding of women from violence in Afghanistan had barely registered on the consciousness of the West
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