From cutting off fingertips to living with the dead, humankind has come up with some incredibly strange cultural practices.
Some are taboo, some are cringe-inducing, some are downright revolting, and all are extraordinarily bizarre.
From the weirdest things we put in our bodies to the weirdest things we lop off our bodies to the weirdest things we do with our dead bodies, here are seven of the strangest cultural practices from around the world that are still carried out today:
Cutting Off Fingers
The death of a family member in the Dani tribe of Indonesia heralds a vast amount of emotional and, for women, physical pain. Aside from the inevitable emotional grief, women of the Dani tribe physically express that grief by cutting off (by compulsion) a segment of one of their fingers.
Before being amputated, the fingers are tied with a string for thirty minutes to numb them. Once amputated, the new fingertips are burned to create new scar tissue.
This custom, one of the world’s most bizarre cultural practices, is performed as a means to satisfy ancestral ghosts, and is rarely, but still sporadically, practiced in the tribe.
Next up: The big one. The one you knew was coming…