The Long-Necked Karen

In many tribes of Karen people, in Burma and northern Thailand, long necks are seen as beautiful. The women wear rings around their neck from childhood, gradually adding more rings as they grow older. Adult women may have as many as 30 rings around their necks. Traditionally, Karen married women wear black and red, while unmarried girls wear white. Some groups of Karen also wear ivory tusks through their ears, which are inserted in childhood and are gradually replaced with large earrings as the earlobes elongate until they are finally about 4cm. Some groups of Karen do not traditionally wear the distinctive rings around their necks. Karen are generally matrilineal societies, so two adult women (eg. a mother and married daughter) will not live in the same house together. In some groups only certain people can wear the rings, for example, a girl born on a full moon on a Wednesday, who is highly valued.

Although the practice is often depicted as cruel or sexist, I am mainly interested in how other cultures see beauty including those that have quite different concepts to our own. Although it does result in physical alteration and impedes physical movement, the same could be said of breast implants which are far more physically invasive and becoming common in our own society.
Karen groups are persecuted by the government of Myanmar (Burma), which is displacing them and commiting a kind of genocide by destroying the areas where they live. They are also under threat in Thailand, where some Thai tour operators keep them in a compound. There they are a human zoo where Western tourists that do not understand their culture gawk at them and at the same time pity them.