Anthropology of Tattoos
The Body as a Canvas
Scarred across her back are raised bumps forming intricate designs of lines and angles, a reminder of who she is and where she is from. She thinks back on the ceremony in which she was marked with the painful scarification. She remembered feeling a sense of calm as the village artist pierced her back with a small arrowhead, stretching the skin away from the body and swiftly but skillfully cutting a slit in her back. He repeated this several times as a ceremonial pot was filled with gathering soot from the burning fire. After the artist finished his tedious design, he rubbed soot from the pot bottom deep into the slits, planting the bacteria that would infect the skin, raising the scars into their meaningful design. She felt accomplished that she withstood the agonizing pain while other members of her clan could not. Her newly inherited body art signified the birth of her first son, and left her with a renewed sense of beauty. This is the way of life common to people indigenous to the motherland of Africa. Scarification, however, is not the only form of body art that is used. Body painting, tattooing, and branding are all similar forms of body art, which can be found in Africa and other cultures throughout the world. The word “tattoo” comes from the Tahitian word “tattau”, which means “to mark”. Tattoos have evolved from being symbols of punishment that were given to identify criminals and slaves in the early ninth-century Chinese culture, into a pop-culture trend of using he skin as “a way of describing the exotic uncivilized other” within ourselves (Schildkrout 2004:324). For centuries, the body has been used as a “visible way of defining individual identity and cultural difference” (Schildkrout 2004:319). This cultural difference becomes apparent when studying the evolution of body art over time, especially when focusing on the differences between the Western and Non-Western cultures. People have been adorning their body with
Scarred across her back are raised bumps forming intricate designs of lines and angles, a reminder of who she is and where she is from. She thinks back on the ceremony in which she was marked with the painful scarification. She remembered feeling a sense of calm as the village artist pierced her back with a small arrowhead, stretching the skin away from the body and swiftly but skillfully cutting a slit in her back. He repeated this several times as a ceremonial pot was filled with gathering soot from the burning fire. After the artist finished his tedious design, he rubbed soot from the pot bottom deep into the slits, planting the bacteria that would infect the skin, raising the scars into their meaningful design. She felt accomplished that she withstood the agonizing pain while other members of her clan could not. Her newly inherited body art signified the birth of her first son, and left her with a renewed sense of beauty. This is the way of life common to people indigenous to the motherland of Africa. Scarification, however, is not the only form of body art that is used. Body painting, tattooing, and branding are all similar forms of body art, which can be found in Africa and other cultures throughout the world. The word “tattoo” comes from the Tahitian word “tattau”, which means “to mark”. Tattoos have evolved from being symbols of punishment that were given to identify criminals and slaves in the early ninth-century Chinese culture, into a pop-culture trend of using he skin as “a way of describing the exotic uncivilized other” within ourselves (Schildkrout 2004:324). For centuries, the body has been used as a “visible way of defining individual identity and cultural difference” (Schildkrout 2004:319). This cultural difference becomes apparent when studying the evolution of body art over time, especially when focusing on the differences between the Western and Non-Western cultures. People have been adorning their body with