Years ago my Thai cousin Jim who is doing now her Ph.D. in Social Studies introduced me to such a sub-discipline as the "language of body parts", how non-verbal communication takes place by what meaning we as a society ascribe to our body parts and how it differs culture to culture and so on.
Bizarrely enough, before too long I had the opportunity to see how it works across cultures. I had my head shaven when on vacation in Bulgaria - locals were teasing me by chanting Hare Krishna wherever I went. A while on, when I went to the Thai Embassy in Moscow, they all took me for a Buddhist novice monk. But next day when I lingered on near the Yaroslav Railway Station in Moscow looking to buy something to bite on, I nearly got arrested by Russian police because they seem to have assumed that I was a freshly released criminal.
That was the last time to date when I had my head shaven.
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