Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
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This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty. Page 2 of 11 In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
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This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be Page 3 of 11 understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of Page 4 of 11 object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolizePage 5 of 11 the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
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Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army Page 6 of 11 deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking.Page Here, 7 theof 11 individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- Page 8 of 11 convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
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This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713
Page 9 of 11 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC-CLIO, LLC
This content may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes only. https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713
Page 10 of 11 Tattoos and Body Adornment
Activity
Inquiry Question Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
As is the case with many cultures throughout the world, the tribal peoples of New Guinea have a long tradition of tattooing their bodies to mark various stages of life. The New Guinean woman in the right-side image bears traditional tattoos of her tribe that indicate that she is available to be married. This practice, which is part of a long history of body adornment, is an important part of her tribe's marriage and courtship practices. Similarly, the young Western woman shown in the left-side image is illustrative of the values and cultural aesthetic of her society: her pierced nose and lip, while previously unusual in Western society, became increasingly accepted and commonplace by the late 20th century. Her piercings, like the tattoo of her New Guinean counterpart, can tell us something about the time, place, and culture in which she lives.
Over the millenia, people around the globe have modified and/or adorned their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and other forms of ornamentation. Many of these practices are culturally specific and often signify one's place or status within a group. Henna, for example, has been used by various cultures in North Africa and Southern Asia for body decoration. Many sub-Saharan peoples wear lip plates and/or lip plugs to signify their place in society. Although traditionally reserved for criminals and members of the military, tattoos are now commonplace in the Western world. Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body adornment?
Background Information
Tattoos and Body Adornment Humans have been adorning and modifying their bodies for thousands of years, most likely since humans became human. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to meet their cultural standards of beauty, as well as religious and/or social obligations. In addition, people modify and adorn their bodies as part of the complex process of creating and recreating their personal and social identities.
Body adornment refers to the practice of physically enhancing the body by styling and decorating the hair, painting and embellishing the fingernails, wearing makeup, painting the body, wearing jewelry, and through fashion. Body adornments are by definition temporary. Body modification, on the other hand, refers to physical alteration of the body through the use of surgery, tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, genital mutilation, implantation, and other practices.
Today, tattooing, scarification, piercing, body painting, and other forms of permanent and temporary body modification are found in every culture around the world, and are often visible markers of age, social status, family position, tribal affiliation, and other social features. Scholars who have studied the ways in which humans mark their bodies note that bodily displays create, communicate, and maintain status and identity. This has been found not only in traditional societies, but in modern, pluralistic states as well. Succinctly put, the modification of the body is the simplest means by which human beings are turned into social beings—they move from "raw" to "cooked" as the body goes from naked to marked. According to theorist Michel Thevoz, "there is no body but the painted body," because the body must always be stamped with the mark of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the channels of social exchange.
In reality, human bodies are never culturally "blank," or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female, young or old. In these ways, too, social position is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society. Even then, however, some societies dictate that the body needs more in terms of marking in order to make them truly culturally and socially intelligible.
Many cultures that practice piercing, scarification, tattooing, and other permanent body modifications believe that one is not fully human if the body is not properly adorned or modified. Permanent and temporary, all of the ways in which the human body has been altered historically can be seen as markers of civilization, of culture, and of humanity. The more altered the body, often the more human and civilized. Body adornments and modifications are symbolic as well, symbolizing a great many subtle and not-so- subtle social features about the wearer.
Because the body has always been used as a means of expression and self-construction, it is not surprising that we find an enormous variety of techniques and procedures by which the human body is transformed. In every society, each individual marks off his or her social position by clothing, adornments, and modifications to the body. Temporary markings, such as body painting, are often used in a ritual context to make the individual different, extraordinary, and is often used to celebrate or mark a specific cultural or ritual event. Permanent markings, on the other hand, such as tattooing, scarification and genital mutilation, are generally used to mark a permanent status onto the body, such as adulthood, marriageability, or class or caste status.
In traditional societies, the marking of the body was a sign of inclusion in the community, but with the development of agriculture and the state, markings such as tattooing, scarring and branding became signs of exclusion and stigmatization, while in modern societies, these same markings have become a means to individuate the self from the social group.
In traditional societies, for example, tattooing and other practices have multiple purposes, but the most central among them include decoration and the marking of social position. Temporary adornments are most typically used to mark transitional statuses or for specific social events, whereas permanent modifications are more commonly used to mark permanent changes in status, permanent affiliations, and cultural concepts of beauty.
In early modern societies, we see for the first time the state and elites marking power onto individual bodies. Through the use of tattoos and brands to punish criminals and to denote slave status, state power was inscribed directly onto the body, as a way to control unruly or criminal bodies. At the same time, elites used very different adornments and modifications—such as elaborate hairstyles, jewelry made of precious stones, beautiful clothing and cosmetic surgery—to demonstrate their elevated status. The differential marking of criminals and the lower classes continued into the 20th century in many societies, and of course the use of specialized adornments among the elites to distinguish themselves from the other classes continues as well.
Today, we have seen the development of non-normative body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, stretching, branding, scarification, and genital modifications, which allow individuals to step outside of the bounds of the normal social order, and mark membership in alternative subcultures, such as bikers, punks, convicts, gang members, or among those who practice alternative sexualities. Also in the 20th century we saw the development of a movement that not only uses non-normative and often extreme body modifications but relies on them for aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, and personal growth. This movement, known as the modern primitives movement, borrows body modification techniques and religious and cultural beliefs from non-western societies to resist and challenge modern social practices. Ironically, however, while the traditions borrowed in the modern primitives movement generally serve to mark traditional peoples as belonging to the social order, those practices, when used in the contemporary West, serve instead to separate the wearers from society, rather than integrate them. Even more ironic, perhaps, is the fact that many of these traditional forms of body modification have now disappeared from the societies in which they were practiced, often stamped out by Western imperialism, and only exist now only in cannibalized form among modern primitives.
Contemporary members of the body modification movement who use extreme modifications in non- normative ways see themselves as taking control of their own bodies and actively transforming the self, although mainstream society typically views them in a very different light, as practitioners of disfigurement or mutilation.
Margo DeMello
MLA Citation: DeMello, Margo. "Tattoos and Body Adornment." World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC- CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1525715. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021. Source
Commentary
Identity
Tattooing, according to the subtitle of Catherine Grognard's book, The Tattoo (1994), should be understood as a form of "graffiti for the soul" as the external expression of a unique inner self. While in the contemporary West, most people conceive of tattooing in this way, and hence mark their bodies with symbols that they believe will communicate a particular message to others, this understanding of tattoos, their function, and the motivation behind their procurement, is far from universal. Indeed, tattooing has been understood and experienced in a range of ways, each of which tells us more about the ontological context in which such beliefs and experiences occur than it does about tattooing per se. In short, then, any response to the oft-posed question of what the purpose of, and the motivation for, tattooing is, must necessarily acknowledge that there can be no single all-encompassing answer: as a historico-cultural phenomenon, tattooing functions and is understood and experienced in heterogeneous and contextually specific ways. While purpose and motivation are not reducible to one another, they are clearly linked, as can be seen in the following commonly posited functional explanations of tattooing listed by psychiatrists Edgerton and Dingman in a 1963 article entitled "Tattooing and Identity."
Some people have suggested that tattooing is simply one form of ornamentation among many, and that it is a process that has achieved the status of "fashion" and/or "anti-fashion," of high art and/or criminal practice in particular historico-cultural contexts. This claim no doubt has its merits, but in-depth studies of tattooing seem to suggest that while tattooing in one sense, may be decorative, it rarely, if ever, functions solely as ornamentation. This is because ornamentation, in its many and varied forms, is always imbued with particular cultural values and meanings. For example, in his 1908 account of what he saw as the intrinsic association of ornamentation with crime Adolf Loos stated "[t]hose who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent criminals. . . . If a tattooed person dies at liberty, it is only that he died a few years before he committed a murder."
In 1933 Albert Parry drew on psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the sexual significance of tattooing. He argued that the act of tattooing is sexually symbolic since the needle, like the penis, introduces fluid into a cavity. Thus he concluded that when both parties involved are men, the process of tattooing may easily take on a homosexual aspect. On the other hand, argued Parry, tattoos in women negatively signify (in the context in which he was writing) sexual experience ("nice girls" don't get tattooed/let themselves be penetrated!). Similarly, in Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos, Samuel Steward, gathering information for Alfred Kinsey, suggests that the most common motives for tattooing are sexual. Of the 29 motives he identifies, 24 involve or are connected with what he sees as sexuality. He also suggests that being tattooed excites sexual desire, and that it is extremely common for people to have sex soon after being tattooed. But while there may be associations between tattooing and eroticism in some cultural contexts, there clearly are not in others. For example, prisoners of war who are tattooed with numbers that reduce them to the status of object are unlikely to experience being tattooed in the same way that someone who has chosen to 'ornament' themselves will. And interestingly, during the long drawn-out process of facial tattooing in Maori culture, sexual intimacy, along with the eating of solid foods, was prohibited.
In a large number of significantly different cultural contexts it is common for particular symbols to be inscribed on the body in the belief that they will offer talismanic protection for their bearer. Apparently in Burma, a tattoo acquired at a Buddhist temple was believed to ensure protection particularly if placed over the heart; the Haida (of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, and northern Alaska) tattooed themselves with animal figures particular to the history of their families and clan; for the Kayan of Borneo tattoos functioned as a passport to the next world; in the 19th century British merchant sailors tattooed their bodies in order to protect themselves against drowning; and symbols of religious devotion are allegedly common amongst Catholic women in Bosnia today. An element of talismanic tattooing may also be apparent in contemporary gang tattooing and military tattooing. One might even say that it informs reclamatory accounts of tattooing such as the following in which Karen discusses her dragon tattoo: "I came out of an abusive childhood. I was sexually abused by an uncle . . . So, the dragon [tattoo] was my way of reclaiming my body, claiming my breasts. . . . [H]aving a dragon put on my breast was a way of saying 'this is mine.' It was an evolution of that whole process of keeping myself safe and keeping myself whole."
Tattoos have been read as a sign of the ability to endure pain, of masculine courage, of the achievement of adulthood (for example, in Samoa, Tahiti, among the Dayak of Borneo, the Ayatal of Taiwan), as a "map" of ones' high social rank and genealogical status (Māori Moko), and so on. They are also read, in specific contexts, as a sign of a commitment to a particular group and/or set of beliefs. For example, in a 1994 issue of Skin & Ink, a woman testifies that, "I . . . have a blue iris . . . that symbolises . . . a sense of spirituality that's . . . directed towards feminism. Feminism is a very important motivating force in my life." Similarly, Daniel Wojcik, author of Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art argues that "in altering their bodies in symbolically powerful ways, both punks and neo-tribalists may proclaim their discontent [and] challenge dominant ideologies."
In many ways, each of these functional explanations of tattooing gestures toward the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that tattooing plays in the formation of identity (both individual and communal). In the contemporary West, this aspect of tattooing is foregrounded, and framed in individualistic terms, whereas in other historico- cultural contexts tattoos function to inscribe a person's position within a group and its history (rather than to express his/her unique individuality). Following from the claim that the tattoo is a sign of the establishment of identity, and of one's relations with others, Edgerton and Dingman argue that it is possible to identify three types of tattoos, common in the contemporary West, that exemplify these functions in varying ways. First, there are tattoos that signify a relationship with a group or category—for example, gang emblems such as those worn by members of the Hell's Angels, military insignia worn by servicemen, or Moko, which symbolizes a Māori person's social position and cultural heritage. Second, there are tattoos that signify and/or memorialize a relationship with another individual, such as "Mother," the name or portrait of a lover, friend, family member, or a celebrity one admires, and so on. And third, there are tattoos that embody the name or description of the self—for example, "John," "Bobby's Girl," "Rebel," "Killer," or that may symbolize the self in purely imagistic terms—for example an animal, an astrological figure, and so on.
Clearly, tattooing has functioned in a wide range of ways and has been motivated by a variety of desires, fears, commitments, and beliefs. Nevertheless, it is valid to suggest that tattooing is, by and large, inextricably bound to the formation of identity.
About the Author
Nikki Sullivan Nikki Sullivan is an associate professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of a number of academic works including A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003) and Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, Pleasure (2001). Sullivan's contributions to edited works include "Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s)," in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's The Transgender Studies Reader (2006); and "Tattoos," in Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle's The Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities (2007).
Source
Commentary
Prison Tattooing
In state-level societies around the world, prisoners have been tattooed by the state as punishment for their crime, to identify them as a criminal, and to stigmatize them throughout their lives.
Some trace the evolution of this practice to the Biblical story in which God places a mark on Cain, the first murderer, to brand him as a criminal and social outcast, but corporal punishment had been practiced by the Persians, Thracians, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, all of whom marked criminals and runaway slaves (usually on the face) with tattoos that denoted the nature of their crime, or sometimes the punishment. The Greeks and Romans both called these tattoos stigmata, and punitive tattooing remained in the Roman world through the ninth century.
Because Christianity was prohibited throughout much of the Roman Empire prior to the 4th century, Christians were arrested, tattooed and often sent to work in the mines. Some Christians gave themselves voluntary tattoos, which were modeled after the wounds of Christ as a sign of their faith, and as a mark of group membership into the Christian religion. When Constantine became Emperor of Rome and embraced Christianity in the fourth century, he banned the practice of tattooing criminals on the face. He did allow criminals to continue to be tattooed on the legs, however, although Christians were no longer punitively tattooed. The Council of Northumberland in 787 noted that Christian tattoos, unlike "pagan" tattoos, were worthy of praise.
Punitive tattooing traveled through the Roman world to Europe where it was used in Germany, England (and the colonies in America and Australia), France and Russia to mark slaves, prisoners, adulterers, army deserters and the like. A cross on the left hand, for example, was used to mark Russian military deserters so it would be easy to catch them if they escaped again.
Tattooing was a preferred form of punishment in all of these cases because it was a dual-purpose punishment: one purpose was to inflict pain, but another was to permanently, and often very publicly proclaim the crime, either through the words or letters used, or simply by the fact that forehead tattoos were associated with criminality.
At the same time that criminals were marked with punitive tattoos, many prisoners, probably beginning with Roman Christians, began marking themselves as well. Sometimes the convict would alter his punitive tattoo to erase the original sign, covering it with something else. But other times, prisoners would create their own systems of tattoos in order to demonstrate group affiliation or pride in their crime or social position.
With the rise of professional tattooing around the world, tattoos that are created in prison, because of the technology used to create them, the style in which they are worn, and the imagery portrayed, can be easily distinguished from professionally-executed tattoos.
The most primitive method of tattooing is known as hand plucking or hand picking. Here, the individual typically takes a sewing needle, wraps it in string, and dips it into ink. The needle is then stuck into the skin over and over until a line is achieved, and then the design is shaded in (the string acts as a reservoir for the ink). In juvenile detention system, by far the most common method of applying tattoos is by hand, and by the time an individual graduates from the juvenile justice system into adult prison, he usually graduates to machine made tattoos as well, and often begins to cover up his old hand plucked tattoos with better quality, machine tattoos. The second method of execution is the homemade rotary machine, made of a motor, taken from portable electronics, connected to a guitar string or sewing needle which vibrates up and down in the barrel of a ball point pen. The whole machine is then hooked up to a battery, and it's ready to tattoo.
Tattooing is illegal in American prisons, and the ramifications when caught tattooing include having one's equipment confiscated, having one's privileges removed, and being locked down in solitary confinement. The work is carried out in secret, typically during the day when other inmates are exercising or playing cards.
Stylistically, prison tattoos differ sharply from professional tattoos. Prison tattoos are black or blue only, because prisoners have no access to tattoo inks, and instead use the black or blue ink in a ball point pen. Because of the single needle format of the rotary machine, they tend to be fine lined as well, allowing for fairly intricate shading.
The type of imagery that a convict will choose for a tattoo is based both on where the convict came from as well as on his present situation in prison. One of the most popular tattoos in prison is the loca, which gives the name of the convict's neighborhood of origin, or else his gang affiliation. These tattoos are extremely important in prison, as they serve as a reminder of the community to which the displaced convict belongs. They also identify him as a member of a certain group which has important social ramifications when he encounters members of rival groups. Likewise, having an ethnic affiliation ("White Power," etc.) tattooed on one's body is another means of identifying with a particular community as well as differentiating oneself from other groups in prison. Jailhouse iconography is also popular among convicts, and includes bars, the scales of justice, barbed wire, and other themes that echo the prisoner's own experiences behind bars, including the images from the convict's actual prisons.
Perhaps the most powerful prison tattoo in the United States is the tear, tattooed just below the outside corner of the eye, which could indicate number of times imprisoned, or number of men killed. Other popular American prison designs include spider webs, clock faces, or tombstones, all of which indicate doing time or time served.
Christian imagery is also extremely popular in prison, due to the influence of Chicano prisoners who favor such imagery, and includes the Passion of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands, and crosses (such as the "Pachuco cross," tattooed on the hand between thumb and forefinger). Finally, tattoos of women, Harley Davidson imagery, skulls, fantasy imagery, and anti-social slogans are also popular.
The convict body, through its tattoos, incorporates both the context of imprisonment and the particular affiliations --gang, ethnic, personal--of the convict. Prison tattoos, then, mark the body as a convict or ex- convict, with important ramifications for the convict on the inside, and in the outside world. For convicts in prisons outside of the United States, tattoos work the same way: as a sign of group affiliation, resistance to authority, and badge of honor. Prisoners in Russia, Mexico, and Europe all use tattooing in similar ways, although images will be drawn from individual countries' and cultures' symbolic repertoires. Where barbed wire, skulls and spider webs are common prison images around the world, for example, other designs are more culturally specific, such as the use of cathedrals in Russian prisons or the Virgin of Guadalupe for Mexican inmates.
About the Author
De Mello, Margo Margo DeMello received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 1995, and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007) and Feet and Footwear (2009). She has recently had articles published in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights, and A Cultural History of Animals: The Modern Age. Her newest book is the edited collection Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, and she is under contract to write Animals and Society (2010).
MLA Citation
"International Activity: Historically, What Has Been the Purpose of Tattoos and Other Forms of Body Adornment?" World Geography: Understanding a Changing World, ABC-CLIO, 2021, worldgeography.abc- clio.com/Support/InvestigateActivity/1525713. Accessed 25 Sept. 2021.
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Name Name Class Class
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Other Notes
Define
Types
Purposes
Examples
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Name Name Class Class
Historically, what has been the purpose of tattoos and other forms of body Inquiry Question adornment?
Response
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