desty and decency not primitive.+ At the earliest stage of the
treatment of the body we find motives of utility and ornament mixed with
superstition and vanity and quickly developing connections with magic,
kin notions, and goblinism. Modesty and decency are very much later
derivatives.

+459. What parts of the body are tabooed?+ Cases may be adduced to prove
that the taboo of concealment does not always attach to the parts of the
body to which it attaches in our traditions. Hottentot women wear a head
cloth of gay European stuff. They will not take this off. The Herero
"think it a great cause of shame if a married woman removes this
national head covering in the presence of strangers." They wear very
little else. A woman who stood for her photograph "would more readily
have uncovered all the rest of her body than her head."[1432] The
Guanches thought it immodest for a woman to show her breasts or
feet.[1433] Yakut women roll cord on the naked thigh in the presence of
men who do not belong to the house, and allow themselves to be seen
uncovered to the waist, but they are angry if a man stares at their
naked feet. In some places the Yakuts attach great importance to the
rule that young wives should not let their husband's male relatives see
their hair or their feet.[1434] In mediaeval Germany a respectable woman
thought it a great disgrace if a man saw her naked feet.[1435] The
Indian woman of those tribes of the northwestern coast of North America
which wear the labret are as much embarrassed to be seen without it as a
white woman would be if very incompletely dressed.[1436] The back and
navel are sometimes under a special taboo of concealment, especially the
navel, which is sacred, as above noticed, on account of its connection
with birth. Peschel[1437] quotes private information that a woman in the
Philippine Islands put a shirt on a boy in order to cover the navel and
nothing more. In her view nothing more needed to be covered. Many
peoples regard the navel as of erotic interest. Instances occur in the
_Arabian Nights_. It is very improper for a Chinese woman who has
compressed feet to show them. Thomson[1438] gives a picture which shows
the feet of a woman, but it was very difficult, he says, to persuade the
woman to pose in that way. Chinese people would consider the picture
obscene. No European would find the slightest suggestion of that kind in
it. An Arab woman, in Egypt, cares more to cover her face than any oth