Selected Readings

The practice of tattoo itself has a long history, dating back to archeological findings of 5000 year old mummies. “There is no known culture in which people do not paint, pierce, tattoo, reshape or simply adorn their bodies.” (Gay and Whittington 2002, 14). Due to the lengthy duration of the practice, as well as the immense cross-cultural existence, there is a plethora of scholarly literature on the subject in/of tattooing. One well informed book that I have in the past used as a reference is Kathlyn Gay and Christine Whittington's Body Marks: Tattooing, Piercing and Scarification. It is a comprehensive overview of the art of tattoo (and piercing and scarification).

The contemporaneous work concerning tattoo is less historically driven, and more analytical of tattoo's position within social contexts. Nikki Sullivan's Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics and Pleasure is an exemplary tome on the subject in/of tattooing in the postmodern theoretical era. Instead of offering a chronicle of what the tattooed "other" signifies, she defies the expectations of a researcher, presenting a nuanced tattooed body, proposing the very notion of searching for concrete textuality as duplicitous. "My aim, rather, is to seduce, to affect, the reader and to open up the possibility of diverse and infinite voyages to destinations that are beyond the scope of my imagination and this book, rather than to convince the reader, through traditonal means of argument, that knowledge is possible, and that since I discovered it, all that is left for you to do is to witness the truth of my claims" (Sullivan 2001, 11).

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the tattoo process is essentially mutilation of the skin; tattooing is inserting pigment into punctures in the epidermis, commonly with a needle, (though any sharp object may be employed) to produce a permanent design. The process is painful, and sometimes dangerous. Armando Favazza’s Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry and Kim Hewitt’s Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink provide psychological discourses of elective pain. Favazza defines self-mutilation in his preface as, “the deliberate destruction or alteration of one’s body tissue without conscious suicidal attempt” (1992). Favazza is the founder of cultural psychiatry, and approaches the vagueness of self-mutilation within the overarching web of culture. He divides self-mutilative behaviors into two groups, culturally sanctioned and deviant. To him, tattoo exists in the former category. Kim Hewitt focuses mainly on selfmutilative actions such as tattoo, "as acts that asked to be witnessed- acts not only of self-expression but self-innitiation and sometimes self-medication" (Hewitt 1997, 2).

Two other sources worth mentioning are actually scholarly articles from anthrosource.net. The first is Mary Kosut's "An Ironic Fad: The Commodification and Consumption of Tattoos", an interesting take on the popularization of tattoo, and how the once underground or underclass practice has transformed into an art form of "highculture". She concentrates on how tattoo is portrayed by the media, and in turn how the media shapes mass culture. The second is Judith Sarnecki's "Trauma and Tattoo", an article that touches on my own inquiries and research in the world of tattoo. The article proposes certain motivations behind recieving tattoos, presupposing the desire to be tattooed as the tattoo recipient's psychological coping strategy for dealing with traumatic experiences.

Favazza, Armando R. 1996. Bodies under siege : Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gay, Kathlyn and Whittington, Christine. 2002. Body Marks: Tattooing, Piercing, and Scarification. Twenty-First Century Books.

Hewitt, Kim. 1997. Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Kosut, Mary. 2006. "An Ironic Fad: The Commodification and Consumption of Tattoos". Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 6 (December): 1048, 1035.

Sarnecki, Judith. 2005. "Trauma and Tattoo". March 17. http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/ac.2001.12.2.35.

Sullivan, Nikki, and Nikki Sullivan. 2001. Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.