Body Piercing and Tattoos Essays

Body Piercing and Tattoos Essays Body Piercing and Tattoos Paper Body Piercing and Tattoos Paper but many scholars believe that Nubians brought the practice to Egypt much earlier. There was little anthropological attention to tattooing in the early part of the century because of preconceived notions of its insignificance to cultural analysis. (Robert S. Bianchi, 1988, 21-28). Archaeological evidence indicates that the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec cultures performed tattooing and scarification, and that the practice is thousands of years old in Asian cultures. Although tattooing was practiced in pre-Christian Europe, the word tattoo does not appear in English until Captain John Cook imported it after a journey to the Pacific Islands in the eighteenth century. Captain Cook claimed the Tahitians used the word tatua, from ta, meaning to strike or knock, for the marks they made upon their bodies. Captain Cook recorded this word as tattaw. The Polynesian word tapu, from which the word taboo derives, indicates the status of the person while being tattooed. Although no connection has been made between the words tattoo and taboo, it seems highly likely that they are related. While enduring the process of acquiring socially meaningful marks, the tattooee is being formed and shaped into an acceptable member of society. Prior to the completion of the tattoos the person is not only physically vulnerable because of the possibility of contamination during the penetrating process of tattooing but symbolically vulnerable as well. No longer without a tattoo, but without a finished tattoo, the persons body and therefore the self are not yet completed. The person is a liminal entity not yet in society and therefore taboo. (Per Hage, Frank Harary, Bojka Milicic, 1996, 89) Although the origin of tattooing is uncertain, anthropological research confirms that tattooing, as well as other body alterations and mutilations, is significant in the spiritual beliefs of many cultures. Various peoples tattoo or scarify during puberty rituals. In traditional South Pacific Tonga society, only priests could tattoo others and tattoos were symbolic of full tribal status. Eskimo women traditionally tattooed their faces and breasts and believed that acquiring sufficient tattoos guaranteed a happy afterlife. In many African cultures scars indicate social status and desirability as a marriage partner. Scarification patterns often identify the bearer as a member of a specific village. Many of these practices are changing and fading as Western influences enter African cultures. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Cree Indians living on the Great Plains tattooed for luck, for beauty, and to protect their health. Cree men with special powers received tattoos to help them communicate with spirits. A dream conferred the privilege of receiving a tattoo, which would be inscribed during a ceremony conducted by a shaman authorized to tattoo. The tattooing instruments were kept in a special bundle passed on from shaman to shaman. The ability to withstand the painful and tedious process of tattooing, which often lasted two to three days, confirmed the tattooees courage. Blood shed during the process was believed to possess magical power and was absorbed with a special cloth and kept for future use. tattoo. about. com In a Liberian initiation ceremony the novices are resuscitated to a new life, tattooed, and given a new name they seem to have totally forgotten their past existence. (Mircea Eliade, 1958, 31). The ritual recreates the flesh bequeathed to initiates by their parents and experienced during childhood. The physical change marks a symbolic rebirth into a new spiritual, social, and physical reality as well as a real physical change. This magical use of the body reiterates the idea that physical and spiritual existence and their interactions are deeply entwined. The trajectory of piercing from an underground activity to a fashion in mainstream magazines illustrates the American adoption of marginalization as a trendy practice. Piercing various parts of the body, which is a more or less painful procedure depending on the body part, has become more popular and commercialized in the past two decades, and extremely fashionable in the past few years. Although some people self-pierce, most individuals go to a boutique that pierces and sells piercing jewelry. Clients frequently request nipple, navel, and nose piercings, and less commonly obtain eyebrow, lip, cheek, or tongue piercings. Piercings through various glans or skin folds of the genitals are even less common. dmoz. org/Arts/Bodyart/Magazines_and_E-zines Although one can construct histories of self-mutilatory beautification practices, such as leg-shaving, hair-tweezing, and body sculpting, body piercing practices in Western cultures remain virtually undocumented. James Myers, an anthropologist at the University of California remarks on the stigma attached to body piercing and discussion of Western nonmainstream body mutilation, and notes that the general public conceives of people who pierce, scar, brand, and burn themselves as psychological misfits. Myers refutes any connection between these practices of body modification and pathological self-mutilation, and he discusses body modification as a cultural rite of passage. Although Myers attempts to normalize the perception of body modification, his ethnographic research is problematic because it is conducted with a select group of participants, a greater than average proportion of whom are gay and involved in sadomasochistic activities, therefore already marginalized by society. A more representative sample of the general population might show that certain forms of piercing have now become popular in mainstream culture, whereas the more extreme pierces have gained popularity with individuals who engage in what dominant culture defines as deviant. (James Myers, 1992, 90-92) Nose and navel piercings have become more common in the general population. It is probable that until now few individuals pierced ornamentally, and those who did rigorously hid their unusual adornments from sight. Ear piercing, once considered barbaric for women and a badge of homosexuality for men, is now an accepted, common practice for women, and has lost much of its stigma for men also. Punk subculture introduced multiple ear piercings to the public eye, and fashion spreads quickly popularized the look with a large percent of the population. The marginalized groups that contributed to popularizing ear piercing, homosexuals and youth subculture, are also responsible for introducing other body piercings into the public arena. As of 1993 a well-known and burgeoning piercing Los Angeles boutique, the Gauntlet, which originally catered to a large gay population when it opened in 1975, performed 18,000 piercings a year. www. gradeatattoos. com Piercing practices have been pathologized as expressing sexual perversity and affiliation with marginal members of society, and as with tattooing, it is difficult to separate myth from reality. Tattooing has most often been mythologized as a proof of masculine heterosexuality, but the association of tattooing with gay culture has some validity, as tattooist Samuel Steward, also known as Phil Sparrow, notes. In his diary accounts of his years as a tattooist, which he kept for Alfred Kinseys research at the Institute for Sex Research, Steward estimates that fewer than 1 percent of his clients were obvious homosexuals and perhaps a total of 20 percent were gay. Although Steward acknowledges that his customers sometimes exhibited homoerotic motivations, masochistic pleasure, and even fetishistic tendencies toward tattooing their own bodies or others, his experiences as a tattoo artist in Chicago in the 1950s led him to conclude that the homosexuals he knew were reluctant to tattoo because they considered it marring the body unaesthetically. (Samuel M. Steward, 1990, 56) Reference: Brumberg Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House, 1997, 132 James Myers, Nonmainstream Body Modification: Genital Piercing, Branding, Burning, and Cutting, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 21. 3 (1992): 290-92. Michael Atkinson, Tattooing and Civilizing Processes: Body Modification as Self-Control; The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 41, 2004 Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture, trans. Williard Trask (New York: Harper, 1958), 31 Per Hage, Frank Harary, Bojka Milicic, Tattooing, Gender and Social Stratification in Micro-Polynesia; Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 2, 1996, pp 89 Robert S. Bianchi. Tattoo in Ancient Egypt, Marks of Civilization (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, 1988), 21-28. Samuel M. Steward, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1990), 79. www. adrenalinetattoos. com tattoo. about. com www. gradeatattoos. com dmoz. org/Arts/Bodyart/Magazines_and_E-zines