On the Cover

On the Cover hotographer and Arizona State University anthropol- Pogy student Lars Krutak, who has worked for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and has written extensively on the medicinal uses of tattooing, shot the cover photograph of a Yup’ik (Alaska native) woman, Anna Aghtuqaayak, on Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island in 1997. She later died in a house fire at age 94. Aghtuqaayak’s facial tattoos were done in stages, partly because of the enormous pain involved. The nose was tattooed at age 12, the chin at puberty, and the cheeks soon after. The three lin- ear bands that curve along the cheek and that frame the circles were believed to induce fertility. Aghtuqaayak said of her tattoos, all of which were done in the 1920s, “We did it to be beautiful, so we would not look like men. We wanted precious pictures for the afterlife.” The tattoos were hand stitched into the skin by using bone slivers as needles and thread made from rein- deer or seal tendons soaked in a pigment of soot, graphite, animal urine, and seal oil; in recent years steel needles have been used. The skin is stitched at a depth of 1/32 in. Immediately afterward, soot is rubbed into the stitches to enhance pigmentation. Krutak has researched the 2,000-year-old Yup’ik tra- dition of tattooing, from its origins (some 3,500-year- old Yup’ik mummies show signs of face painting) to its gradual decline among young members of the Yup’ik tribe. Yup’ik traditions, as well as those of hundreds of cultures worldwide, hold that tattoos guard against evil head was a way to capture the soul, as well as to spirits and summon good ones, assist with fertility, and ensure fertility for crops and family. Traditionally, after ease passage into the next life. According to Krutak, the Iban tribesmen returned home from headhunting, only two Yup’ik women on the island—ages 96 and tattoos were applied in celebration and honor, often 98 years—bear the traditional, hand-stitched tattoos. depicting anthropomorphized images of animals. Krutak’s photograph at right, taken in 2002 during Tattoos have become ubiquitous in Western cultures, the filming of a television documentary for the alarming clinicians with the potential risk of transmission National Geographic Channel, shows extensive tattoo- of bacteria and viruses—specifically, HIV and hepatitis B ing (which indicates high tribal status) in an elder with and C viruses. A recent study by the Centers for Disease the Iban tribe of the Ngaju Dayak native people of Control and Prevention (reported on in the New York Borneo, Indonesia. The man, who is more than Times on February 1) found that one in five college stu- 80 years old, was dressed in traditional tribal attire dents has at least one tattoo or body piercing on a body for an adoption ceremony. Tribal tattooists call on spir- part other than the earlobe. Said Miriam Alter, lead itual guides to help them create designs, according to author of the study: “Regardless of whether or not we Krutak. Although women traditionally apply the tattoos can demonstrate that bacteria or viruses are spread in in many Dayak tribes, men apply the tattoos among this manner, anything that pierces the skin and has the Iban, who were the most feared of headhunters on blood on it can potentially spread an infection.” Borneo until the Indonesian government outlawed For information on another potential risk of tattoos, headhunting a century ago. The Iban believed the see Practice Errors, page 65.—David Belcher, associ- soul inhabited the head, and so taking an enemy’s ate editor [email protected] AJN ▼ March 2005 ▼ Vol. 105, No. 3 67.

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