These latter encourage the practice for their own selfish purposes by every artifice in their power. Scarification, tattooing, piercing and branding, often signal rites of passage. Tattooing, branding, scarification and piercing have long been regarded as bizarre, if not deviant practices in mainstream Western society. Modernity and globalizaton have impacted on traditional attitudes toward primitive body decorations. In West Africa many countries have tried to make facial scarring illegal.
Many urban elites see facial scarring as connecting people to an unenlightened past.
No matter how beautiful, scarification symbolizes something which the new urban elite want to be identified with. Similarly, traditional tribal tattoo designs in Bali and parts of Indonesia have been outlawed and replaced with the flash icons of modern Western societies. Through acculturation, local values are depreciated and replaced by the Western ideology of the natural body. As with every culture, the subcultures in the West use permanent marks to set themselves apart from the mainstream. European ethnocentrism extends to the origins of body marking.