Marked Bodies Are Viewed Most Fruitfully Through a Global Lens

Empire, Boundaries, and Bodies: colonial tattooing practices1 Clare Anderson [I] In recent years the body has become a fashionable mode of enquiry into the nature of colonial societies. Historians have used a Foucauldian or Saidian framework to focus on the relationship between power and the body (notably within colonial institutions, but also those embodied in cultural practices), and/or on representations of the body (for instance in ethnographies of colonial difference). As Abby Schrader puts it, ‘the body itself constitutes a central text of cultural history.’2 India and Africa in particular have proved fertile ground for explorations of the colonial body, for it was peculiarly central to colonial understandings of societies in which the organizing principles of caste and tribe – with their seemingly incomprehensible array of ritual practices and taboos – seemed so important.3 In examining colonial tattooing practices and their representations, this chapter draws upon this empirically and theoretically pertinent set of historiography. It presupposes the surface of the skin – and its apparently permanent and always potentially visible inscriptions – as an important element of the embodied practices and representations that historians and anthropologists have described.4 Underlying this chapter are three assumptions. First, though tattooing leaves permanent marks, those marks can be read in multiple ways and so acquire multiple meanings. Even the most certain physical mark of identity – the apparently immutable tattoo – is subject to debate and (re)interpretation. As Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick 1 Research for this article was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, to whom I am very grateful. Michael Sappol provided a stimulating sounding board for earlier drafts. I also thank staff at the National Archives of Mauritius and India Office Library, London, and Jordanna Bailkin, James Bradley, Jane Caplan, Marina Carter, Ian Duffield, Tony Farrington, Tony Gorman, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, and Peter Stanley, for so generously sharing their knowledge of tattooing. 2 Abby Schrader, ‘Branding the Other/Tattooing the Self: Bodily Inscription among Convicts in Russia and the Soviet Union’, in Jane Caplan (ed.), Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, London, Reaktion, 2000, p. 175. 3 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, London, University of California Press, 1993; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: rethinking colonial encounters in world history, Durham, Duke University Press, 2005; E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, London, Polity, 2001; Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (eds), Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2006; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 1995. 4 For an overview of mainly anthropological literature on bodily inscription, see Enid Schildkrout, ‘Inscribing the Body’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), pp. 319-44. Also Juniper Ellis, Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008. 2 Cooper argue in their theoretical consideration of the Tensions of Empire, the ‘otherness’ of colonized persons is neither inherent nor stable.5 And yet – and this is my second point – tattoos were (and still are) nevertheless an important means of establishing identities. As I will show, these could be either individual or collective in nature – and sometimes a rather messy and conceptually inconsistent combination of both. Third, and perhaps most importantly, tattoos transcend the geographical boundaries that are commonly associated with state formation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed they represent the complex slippages in the relationship between Britain and its empire, and between colonies themselves. They also speak to the multiple cultural connections of European colonization in North America and, as such, might be considered one of the intimate domains that figured in the making of both cultural categories and imperial rule.6 As we will see, during the ‘long’ nineteenth century of this volume, marked bodies are viewed most fruitfully through a global lens. Though tattooing is the main focus of the chapter, I will also refer to other modes of bodily marking that break the surface of the skin – scarification (or cicatrisation), piercing, and branding – recognising too that nineteenth-century practices sometimes included aspects of each.7 [II] Tattooing is believed commonly to have arrived in Europe after James Cook returned from the South Seas in the late eighteenth century, giving rise to a derivative description from the Polynesian word tatu, or tatau. (Figure I). That tattooing in Europe in fact dated from medieval times has led Jane Caplan to describe it as a ‘promiscuous travelling sign’, always represented as having arrived from somewhere else.8 Though Cook’s voyages did not introduce the practice into Europe, they certainly reinflected it at a time when the 5 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkley, University of California Press, 1997, p. 7. 6 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted By Empire: geographies of intimacy in North American History, Durham, Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 1-22. 7 The colonial discourses that accompanied the physical marks left by ‘tropical’ diseases have been explored elsewhere. See Arnold, Colonizing the Body, ch. 3; Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp. 177-85. Note also the contention that late nineteenth-century fears about leprosy in Europe emerged in tandem with racial thinking that constructed lepers as colonial ‘others’. See Z. Gussow and G.S. Tracy, ‘Stigma and the leprosy phenomenon: the social history of the disease in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 44, 5 (1970), pp. 425-49. For studies of colonial Australia and Africa respectively, see Alison Bashford and Maria Nugent, ‘Leprosy and the management of race, sexuality and nation in tropical Australia’, in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (eds), Contagion, London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 106-28; Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, pp. 77-99. 8 Jane Caplan, ‘Introduction’, in Caplan (ed.), Written on the Body, p. xv. 3 continent was open to its enthusiastic reception.9 Early-modern encounters between Europeans and tattooed Polynesians – both in Europe and the South Seas – and their multiple artistic and discursive representations are beyond the temporal scope of this chapter. However, I would like to note two things. First, that Pacific practices involved on occasion the tattooing of symmetrical lines and patterns on the face. This was different from the position and form of European tattoos which were did not usually incorporate facial designs and were more image / object based forms of representation. Second, that because by the beginning of the nineteenth century tattooing in Europe was largely associated with the overseas travel of sailors and soldiers, it might best be described at that time as a product – or a symptom – of the colonial encounter.10 James Bradley, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, and Ian Duffield show that during the nineteenth century tattoos were a means through which marginalized Europeans made sense of a fast-changing world. Religious or individual mementos allowed sailors, soldiers serving overseas, and convicts transported to penal colonies in Australia to cope with dislocation, to remember kin networks, or to mark significant moments in their journeys overseas. One British jockey-turned-soldier court-martialled in Bombay and sent to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1845 embodied the prospect of his transportation through tattoos of a kangaroo, a man with a spear and a dog, each inscribed above the words advancée australia.11 Tattoos like these were intensely personal; representations often included strings of letters or dates, the sun, moon and stars, flowers, and hearts, all of which held individual or social meaning. The repetition of particular designs such as the crucifix or the hope and anchor reflected religious beliefs or broader social relationships with occupation and the cultural dynamics of colonial journeying.12 British soldiers for example commonly sported regimental crests, and those serving in Burma sometimes acquired elaborate Southeast Asian designs, indicating that tattooing was also a type of 9 Juliet Fleming, ‘The Renaissance Tattoo’, in Caplan (ed.), Written on the Body, pp. 61-82; Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole and Bronwen Douglas (eds), Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West, London, Reaktion, 2005, p. 21. 10 Juliet Fleming, ‘The Renaissance Tattoo’, in Caplan (ed.), Written on the Body, p. 68. 11 Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: race, criminality and colonialism in South Asia, Oxford, Berg, 2004, p. 79. 12 James Bradley, ‘Body Commodification? Class and Tattoos in Victorian Britain’, in Caplan (ed.), Written on the Body, pp. 136-55; James Bradley, ‘Embodied Explorations:

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