Abstract
The study deals with the issue of artificially made changes of living human body. From the position of socio-cultural anthropology as an interpretative science based on the premise of cultural relativism, it levels criticism at two of the most often used terms which specify these practices, namely body adornment and mutilation.
It shows the aforementioned used terms are ethnocentric and assessing, confusing or too wide, thus fully inappropriate to specify the intentional non-pathological changes of living human body, which bear a certain meaning that is understandable culturally. Based on this criticism, it suggests using the term of “body modification”, which is not related to any assessing connotation, is not confusing and is used by the subculture that carries out these practices in the contemporary Euro-American society.