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Overview
Tattoo Culture explores these questions from historical, cultural and media perspectives, but also from the heart of the culture itself, from the dynamics of the tattoo studio, the work of the artist and the world of the tattoo convention, to the perspective of the social actors who bear designs to investigate the meanings which lie being the images. It critically examines the ways in which tattoos alter social actors’ sense of being and their relationship with time in the semiotic ways with which they communicate, to themselves or to the wider world, key elements of their bodily and personal identity and sense of being.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783488285 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 204 |
| File size: | 579 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Tattoo Culture
Theory and Contemporary Contexts
By Lee Barron
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Lee BarronAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-828-5
CHAPTER 1
From Ötzi to Trash Polka
Reading Tattoos
Writing in the early 1970s on the 'mystery' surrounding the practice and culture of tattooing, Ronald Scutt and Christopher Gotch reasoned that tattooing constituted a social 'oddity', one that produced a range of social reactions 'from curiosity, through degrees of interest, amusement and envy, to downright contempt, pity or disgust' (1974, p. 13). In the decades following this appraisal, attitudes to tattooing have transformed and, certainly in the Western world, tattoos are now less of an oddity and have arguably attained an unprecedented level of social ubiquity and cultural visibility. This ranges from social actors encountered in everyday life, increasing numbers of tattoo studios in urban spaces, a marked increase in tattoo-themed Reality TV shows and images of extensively tattooed globally famous Hollywood superstars such as Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, to respectable professionals such as the European Space Agency 'rocket scientist', Dr. Matt Taylor, the project scientist responsible for the historic landing of the Philae probe on a comet. Moreover, an evocative contemporary expression of the cultural significance of tattooing is that of Amy Bleuel's Project Semicolon, a web-based initiative established in 2013 in tribute to her father who committed suicide and which serves as a movement offering hope to people experiencing depression, addiction, suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviours. Potently, this ethos is symbolised by supporters across the world obtaining semicolon tattoo designs to symbolise hope and positive change because the 'semicolon is used when a sentence could have ended, but didn't' (Bolton, 2015, p. 1). Hence, from bodily ornamentation to political activism, the tattoo in the West has carved out a visible and pervasive cultural position, but it hasn't always been this way.
The social and cultural history of tattooing has witnessed the tattoo evolve through symbolic expression of community and personal status, an expression of self-mutilation, an exterior signifier of a deviant or criminalpersonality, as an individualised symbol, as a major contemporary art form and a sign of gendered self-determination (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, 1992; Favazza, 1996; Atkinson, 2003a; Adams, 2009; Thompson, 2015). As such, the story of tattoo culture is one that is a chronicle of a human bodily art form characterised by processes of ceaseless flux and transformation, from tattooing techniques to societal attitudes to individuals who wear tattoo designs. As Doralba Picerno observes, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, tattoos are now seemingly culturally ubiquitous and have arguably attained a status of social acceptance that is unprecedented, and yet, she observes, one does not have to venture too far back to a time when 'tattooed people were regarded with distaste, suspicion, or downright contempt, associated as they were in the public consciousness with gang culture, crime and irresponsibility' (2011, p. 6). To illustrate, in his assessment of the practice of tattooing in the 1950s, Hugh Garner caustically concluded that
[a]mong all the forms of mass masochism practiced by that frailty known as man, none is quite as silly as the acquiring of tattoos. This egocentric perversion has had its devotees since the dawn of time, and in inverted sequence, it has been a tribal custom, penal stigma, class craze, snobbish adornment, and finally a vulgar affectation. Among the Maoris and various Hindu sects it is still a mark of caste and beauty, but among most Western peoples, it is at best a juvenile indiscretion, and at worst a thing of shame and loathing to those of us who are tattooed. It can, and does, slow a person's social life to a crawl. (Cited in Vassileva and Hristakieva, 2007, p. 367)
Certainly, as academic-turned-tattooist Samuel Steward argues in his 'street corner' social history of tattooing, the classic cultural reaction has closely reflected Garner's view, whereby media representations classically stressed an unambiguous connection between the acquisition of tattoos and the engagement with criminal or 'derelict' behaviours. However, in assessing motivations behind tattooing, Steward found a myriad of reasons underlining the decision to be tattooed. Certainly, the desire for a tattoo as a marker of herd instinct and gang affiliation was a common element in Steward's studio, from distinctive gang-designed symbols to a more unfocused sense of nonconformity and rebellion in which tattoos reflected the stance of 'anti-social "rebels without a cause" or inarticulate revolt' (1990, p. 66). However, in Steward's experience, he found that motivations to have a tattoo design far exceeded statements of social subversion or anti-authority marginalised social positions. For instance, some clients sought tattoos in imitation of a tattooed figure from popular culture or sought to copy a design seen in everyday life, while others were tattooed in the pursuit of narcissistic enhancement, arguing that tattoos would render an already beautiful body even more aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, other customers wished to wear tattoos simply to decorate their bodies and for the designs to serve as symbols of exhibitionism, underscored, in some instances, by a marked sense of possessiveness related to the permanence of the design whereby the client could claim 'it's mine; no one can take it away from me' (1990, p. 48). Certainly, later psychological research has also pointed to 'sensation seeking' and aesthetics as primary motivating factors in tattoo acquisition (Armstrong and McConnell, 1994; Stirn, Hinz and Brähler, 2006; Swarmi, 2011; Tiggermann and Hopkins, 2011). This latter category raises an especially significant relationship that some of Steward's clients had on examining their completed tattoo, and a particular emotional response at the conclusion of the tattooing process, which was to describe being tattooed as representing a distinctively existential act. This conception of tattooing stemmed from a client who was a university graduate familiar with the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but it resonated beyond this particular philosophically informed individual. For Steward, although the majority of customers had no inkling of the nature of existentialism, nevertheless, their tattoo experience constituted an existential act, a deed carried out in a solitary fashion and which once done was ostensibly irrevocable. Accordingly, Steward reflected of a client's at the end of a session, 'I had many times seen them tense at the end of a tattoo, flex the muscles, look at the completed design, and mutter something like: "By God, it's there for always"' (1990, p. 59).
The idea of a tattoo altering a sense of self at the level of existential being will be further developed in chapter 3, but Steward's myriad motivations for obtaining tattoos, in addition to multifaceted societal reactions to the wearing of tattoos, depicts the nature of tattoos as being complex and often contradictory aspects of human culture. As such, tattoos are a permanent bodily adornment that can be desired simply as pure decoration, to visually signify specific group membership or wider social and cultural mores, or to symbolise deeply individualised values and attributes, ranging from religious and political affiliations to a fervent fandom of Star Wars, assorted Marvel and DC superher oes (but with recent spikes in tattooed depictions of Deadpool and Margot Robbie–likeness Harley Quinns), Harry Potter, or Game of Thrones (to indicate but a few). Moreover, wider social reactions to tattooing have periodically, and in some instances continually, vacillated between acceptance (and in some societies, insistence), toleration, or censure and rejection. Hence, Nikki Sullivan captures the dynamic nature of tattoo culture cogently when she states that 'in our culture, at least, the tattooed body is a spectacle that incites a plethora of responses, but rarely indifference' (2001, p. 1). Accordingly, as Jane Caplan contends, in the pantheon of irreversible body modification practices that have been practiced by human cultures, such as scarification, piercing, and branding, tattooing is arguably the oldest, and it has been found to have been performed 'in virtually all parts of the world at some time' (2000, p. xi). Consequently, tattooing is a custom that spans the entirety of human culture itself.
TATTOOING THROUGH THE AGES
From a historical and anthropological perspective, A.W. Buckland dubbed tattoos as a near-universal 'painful mode of personal adornment' (1888, 319), and subsequent archaeological research has established that tattooing has always been a global practice and a truly ancient custom. Although, in the view of Charles Taliaferro and Mark Odden (2012), the development of tattooing is difficult to exactly trace given the multiplicity of human cultures that practiced it, from ancient Egypt, Greece, Africa and Siberia to Alaska, the Arctic, Latin America, China, India, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Japan and the Middle East. However, tattooing cultures predate these societies, because archaeological data suggests that tattooing, the insertion of ink into the deep layers of human epidermis, was extensively practiced in the Stone and Bronze Ages. As Clinton R. Sanders argues in this regard, 'proof of the antiquity of the practice is derived from the mummified body of a priestess of Hathor (dated 2000 BC) that bears parallel line markings on the stomach, thought to have had medicinal or fertility functions' (2008, p. 9). As such, archaeologists have provided evidence of yet older tattooing, and actually identified the oldest known human being to bear tattoos, the man dubbed by scientists as Ötzi, the European 'Iceman' discovered beneath a glacier on the Austrian–Italian border. Dated to have been buried circa 3250 BCE, Ötzi's naturally mummified body (due to the extreme cold of the glacier) was found to have sixty-one tattoos designs positioned across his body and displacing (by some five hundred years) the Chinchorro mummy of Chile as the oldest recorded tattooed human. Moreover, it is argued that Ötzi's tattoos possessed distinctive symbolic functions. As such, within antiquity tattooing distinctively and deliberately 'acted to negotiate relationships between individuals and their society, nature, and the spiritual realm' (Deter-Wolf et al. 2015, p. 19). Yet, while Ötzi currently retains the unique status of being the oldest known tattooed human, given the symbolic meanings and motivations of his bodily designs, he cannot be the first human to have been tattooed. As such, 'Ötzi's 61 marks represent physical actions performed on his body as part of established social or therapeutic practices that almost certainly existed within his culture well before his birth' (Deter-Wolf et al. 2015, p. 23). In this regard, tattooing is a practice rooted within the earliest manifestations of human culture, but also, crucially, it has been utilised as a means by which to visibly reflect personal symbolic meanings given that most of the designs would have been obscured by clothing. (Scheinfeld, 2007, p. 362)
From a sociological perspective of the body, Bryan Turner (1991) argues that the 'premodern' body was a primary site for the display of a range of key cultural factors such as, social status, family position, tribal membership, age, gender and religion. The issue here was that early tribal societies physically marked out status differentials through scarification and the act of tattooing. Such marks signified key moments in an individual's life, particularly with regard to rites of passage between differing statuses (age being a prime example). With regard to tribal tattooing in the Pacific, this was, argues Juniper Ellis, not simply a bodily practice, but 'a distinct philosophy' because 'Pacific tattooing is created ritually in community, by community' (2012, p. 17). As such, early histories of tattooing fully explored this social function of the practice, for example, Wilfrid Dyson Hambly's anthropological The History of Tattooing (originally published in 1925), which traced the roots and cultural function of tattooing back to religious, magical and status-communicating practices and examined tattooing as a practice that was quintessentially a religious and magical practice, but also a literal marking of life stages, such as the tattooing of women in some cultures when they reached puberty as a visible preparation for matrimony (in ancient Egypt, women were the predominant recipients of tattoos in relation to fertility). With reference to the New Zealand Maori warrior Moko tattoo operations, Hambly argued that the designs of tattoos were not for ornamentation but functioned to signify specific meanings such as prowess in battle and to convey advancing levels of social status within tribal groups and as such, there was a 'wealth of meaning attached to the body marking process' (2009, p. 46). Moreover, the distinctive Maoris facial designs also possessed a post-death function as the patterns would be recognisable to their spirit guide, a spirit the Maoris believed would enable them to navigate their way to the next world following their death. Accordingly, numerous early cultures regarded the practice of tattooing as serving vital social and cultural tribal purposes, but also acting as protective symbolic totems and spiritual mechanisms against evil and misfortune to the extent that tattoos enabled 'people to remake themselves in their eyes and in the eyes of their god or gods' (Scheinfeld, 2007, p. 365).
Nevertheless, as Willowdean Chatterson Handy's (2008) anthropological research (published in 1922) on tattooing practices in the Marquesas established, being tattooed or non-tattooed did not always necessarily have a community-based symbolism. For example, that only the economically powerful Marquesas were tattooed as opposed to the tattoo-free fishermen was frequently read as a symbolic feature of the society in which tattoos deliberately articulated social distinction. However, following further research, the reality was somewhat more prosaic, because, as Chatterson Handy discovered, the reason for the disparity in tattooing was more material than symbolic as the extent of tattooing was simply based upon the ability to be able to pay for the skills of an artist, and as the community's lowest class, fishermen were not tattooed simply because they could not afford tattoos. So, while the symbolic nature of tribal tattooing is an intrinsic aspect of tattoo history, economics in the form of the affordability of tattooing is also a factor, then, and now.
Moving on to early European cultures, tattooing was also highly evident and extensively practiced. For example, the Picts, the ancient tribal groups populating the British Isles (whose name derived from the iron tools used to create tattoo designs) adorned themselves in animal tattoo designs to inspire fear in their invading Roman enemies, and which were dubbed by the Romans as 'Stigmata Britonum' – the 'Mark of the Britons' (Alayon,2004, p. 17), and the Pictii, or 'the painted ones' (Hemingson, 2009, p. 73). Significantly, in an evocative early example of the imitation motivation for tattoo inspiration, far from instilling fear in the Roman Legionnaires, it actually inspired many of them to adopt the tattooing practice themselves, until forbidden by the Emperor Constantine on the grounds that tattoos 'violated God's handiwork' (Sanders, 2008, p. 13). This antipathy between religious authority and tattooing continued for hundreds of years in early British history. As Hemingson illustrates, in the fourth century AD, Saint Basil the Great (St. Basil of Caesera) forbade Christians to wear both long hair and tattoos as it placed them in behavioural and spiritual proximity to the Satanic 'heathen' who marked themselves with 'thorns and needles'. For many tattoo commentators, the religious prohibition against tattooing in Europe has been routinely linked to a passage from Leviticus, in the Old Testament, that commanded followers that, 'You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead, or tattoo any marks upon you'. It has been argued that the rationale for this forbidding of tattooing was as a means by which the Jews could distinguish themselves and their monotheistic faith from alternative polytheistic belief systems and ethic cultures (Taliaferro and Odden, 2012, pp. 4–5). Yet such censure against tattooing would change as something of a Christian volte-face occurred in AD 787 when the Council of Northumberland issued an edict which stated that the Fathers of the Church drew a distinction between profane or sacrilegious tattoos and Christian-inspired tattoos. Indeed, it was contended that religiously inspired body art, unlike magically inspired tattooing, could actually serve to connect the wearer to the Christian faith. As the Church Father reasoned,
[w]hen an individual undergoes the ordeal of tattooing for the sake of God, he is greatly praised. But one who submits himself to be tattooed for superstitious reasons in the manner of the heathen will derive no benefit therefrom. (2009, p. 74)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tattoo Culture by Lee Barron. Copyright © 2017 Lee Barron. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
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