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