Literature Review

Pain as a subject matter has a plethora of theoretical literature (Coakley and Kauffman, Favazza, Hewitt, Scarry,). Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the Word, discusses communicative roles, or the lack there of, during the confrontation of physical pain. She begins her book claiming pain’s inexpressibility; “not only is it difficult to describe in words, it also actively destroys language”(Scarry 1987, 4). She notes that pain reduces its sufferers to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry’s research is on a wide range of sources, including medical case histories and documents on torture, all instances of involuntary pain. Even though I’m interested in elective pain, Scarry’s analysis provides a useful resource in understanding how people cope with pain.

The tattoo process is essentially mutilation of the skin; tattooing is inserting pigment into punctures in the epidermis, commonly with a needle, to produce a permanent design. The action involves displacement of flesh and profusion of blood with ink. The procedure is painful, and every so often risky. 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” (Favazza 1996, xix). 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.

Micheal Atkinson’s Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art regards psychological analysis of tattoo to be biased, in that the lens itself only allows for a depreciatory interpretation. In laymen’s terms, psychoanalysis is designed to find out what is wrong with its subjects, not to celebrate what is right with them. Nikki Sullivan takes the argument a step further, dedicating an entire chapter to the mistakes made by the theoretical analyses of the past. In Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics and Pleasure, Sullivan puts psychological discourse on tattoo in the same category as criminological discourse of the last century and a half. Specifically, she examines the work of Lombroso; his brilliant theory was determining the criminal by his physical traits.

The atavistic nature of tattoo is displayed with the utmost fortitude in the Unites States through a group that call themselves “modern primitives”. In their world the book by Vivian Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives, is a tattoo and body modification bible, and Fakir Musafar is the guru philosopher, or founding father of the movement. Their intensity and fascination with the ritualistic aspects of tattoo/body modification provides a fixed theory that works for their worldview as to the subject of pain. Essentially, through pain they transcend their bodies to attain a level of spirituality equal to shamanistic or ritualistic rites of the past.
The subject of pain leading up to the acquisition of tattoo is the theme of Judith Sarnecki’s essay Trauma and Tattoo. This is an ethnographically informed analysis of tattoo and the traumatic events and motivations that might lead up to the decision to get tattooed. Sarnecki believes trauma and tattoo to be linked under most circumstances.

In Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture, an essay by Tu Weiming speaks of the Confusion philosophy of pain and the body. The Confucian idea of humanity is buren, a common expression in Chinese medical books explaining the paralysis of the arms and legs, which literally means the absence of humanity. “In this view, the sensation of pain is an essential feature of being human; an inability to feel pain is considered a major deficiency not only in terms of health but also morality. It is human to feel pain, while an inability to do so is detrimental to our humanity” (Coakley and Kaufman 2007, 221). My research will be examining tattoo pain from the perspectives of the interface of biology and culture, and the performance of ritual on the body.

What's at Stake?

I'm currently working on an essay, tentatively titled "Tattoo and Pain". The thesis is roughly, pain is undeniably apart of the tattoo process, what does pain have to do with tattoo? There is a history of deviance being associated with tattoo, and pain indeed plays a part in that line of thought. The psychological analyses on the subject of tattoo has cast the ritual in a pejorative light. The essay seeks to employ post-structuralist and postmodern approaches to the subject of pain's association with tattoo. What is at stake? First, problematizing psychology as a discipline, and second, leading the reader into a non-definitive space. I will draw on my own personal ethnographic research as well as existing literature broaching the subjects of pain, of tattoo, and of pain and tattoo. I will not be posting the actual essay simply because it reveals too much about me, and I am a fiercely private person. However, I will be posting a literature review.

As to the Topoi

I want to briefly mention something here about the"fun resource flakes" topoi widget I had mentioned in my "tour of pageflake" posting. If you haven't heard of it, the Topoi is an antiquated method for thinking. It was invented by Aristotle, and refers to place, like places in your brain, or even places your brain goes when thinking about certain topics. Even more to the point, the topoi mimics how we think of things.

The topoi widget provides a list for analysis:
• change
• contrast
• cause/effect
• form/structure
• values
⁃ morality/ethics
⁃ pragmatic
⁃ social
⁃ spiritual/metaphysical
⁃ political

The topoi is a tool to help you develop your hypothesis. To use different perspectives and stretch out ideas.

It is hard to look at this list and see how this could possibly be helpful, it is better to put the topoi to practice. So here:

Hypothesis:
As tattoo is becoming popularized, does it run the risk of changing from a subcultural practice to an ordinary, mainstream, or even banal convention?

Morality
Tattoo and deviance have historically been impenetrably linked, the question then becomes will deviant behavior become a mainstream convention?

Spiritual
In the Judeo-Christian belief, there is doctrine that explicitly states "thou shalt not mark thyself". As the United States is primarily a Christian oriented nation, what does the profusion of tattoo say about people in regards to their beliefs and practices?

Cause/Effect
As popular culture is in a constant state of ebb and flow, and traditionally subcultural practices that have filtered into mainstream society leaves impressions for generations that follow, how will the future perceive this moment in time when tattoo was an ever-present cultural custom?

The topoi layers on another framework of categorical or systematic ways in which you can model your argument. From one hypothesis, I now have three theses to work off of and expand into entire essays.

Tour of Pageflake

Want to hear about something fantastical? Something that might possibly make your life, oh, just a little bit better? Well, before I go overboard, I want to mention that it's not a magic lamp, or money growing tree, but, it has the same skipping the hard stuff elements... Pageflakes.

Pageflakes is a free application for the internet, and allows you to make that very same internet, more about you. It takes care of your wants and your needs, before you even ask. Pageflakes is working 24/7 just to make sure you have everything you could possibly want, out of the internet that is.

Let me explain, Pageflakes is a page, full of flakes.

Ok, so, I can't explain. But I can tell you about mine...

Since beginning this whole blogging endeavor of mine, I have been deligently trying to navigate my way through this messy sphere called the world wide web. Hoping to improve my strategy to finding anything interesting, or remotely related to my blog topic, I have stumbled across things like socialbookmarking cites, rss readers, and the like. Granted, two months ago, I had never heard the term rss, or socialbookmarking for that matter, but now I am starting to understand there is a thing called metadata, a way of organizing this messy sphere. Again, two months ago, I thought I knew how to "google". That's what I would say if someone asked how internet savvy I was, "Well, I can google". Lo and behold, I was not even googling correctly! I stuck to keywords only, I never tried to think in terms of what others would say about my search topic. Well, now that I have a pageflake, I don't even need to do that anymore. I mean, for my blog topic I don't, I have my pageflake monitoring the internet for me.

My pageflake has different widgets on the same page working full time to do what they are programmed to do. I have divided my pageflake into sections. There are two columns. The left column is my RSS flakes. There are ten in total, and they alternate between tattoo related blogs and/or websites and anthropology related blogs and/or websites. The right column has four different sections. The first (on top) is my BIBLIO flakes, which is actually one flake, a webpage flake, that is connected to citeline a bibliographical webpage. The cite it's specifically connected to is my own annotated bibliography, six sources of which I have already mentioned in my Selected Readings post. The next section is my SEARCH flakes, there are two, universal news search and universal blog search. Both widgets are programmed to be searching for " tattoos and visual anthropology." Below the searching flakes is my section BOOKMARK flakes. This has only one flake, a bookmarking widget, that is hooked up to my del.icio.us account, and displays all the bookmarks that I have made on that socialbookmarking website. Lastly, the bottom section of the left column is my FUN RESOURCE flakes. So far, this too only has one flake. It is a specially designed by the University of Southern California (or Southern Carolina) Topoi widget, that is a resource to help when writing.

I hope that better helps to understanding what I mean by making the internet more about you. Right this second, my rss flakes are updating any new postings to be displayed on my page, and at the same time, any news or new blogs related to tattoos and visual anthropology are also being refreshed. So, when I look at my pageflake, I see a multitude of resources unfolding before my very eyes, all specifically working to get me the information I need to write a well informed blog on a specific topic of interest.

An Interesting Find

Having been made aware of the bountiful research on tattoos from an anthropological perspective by my kindred socialbookmarking spirit, I now am at ease about my capability to find interesting topics to discuss. My first "interesting find" I have already mentioned in my selected readings post. However, a mere glossing of the article's content I feel does not suffice. I would like to dedicate this entire post to Mary Kosut's well written and fascinating, "An Ironic Fad: The Commodification and Consumption of Tattoos".

The article focuses on the popularization and consumption of tattoo through the lens of the contemporary media, and in turn, the affect on mass culture. She begins with a few societal statistics, stating "The 2001 MSNBC television special, Skin Deep, which examined tattooing
and other contemporary body modifications, reported that twenty percent of the American population is tattooed. Although the validity of this statistic is speculative, a 2002 survey conducted by the University of Connecticut produced similar findings." Though the population of tattoo bearers is a minority, the consumption of the product of tattoo has yielded a booming industry, attracting consumers cross-ethnically and cross-socioeconimically.

Kosut suggests the popularization of tattoo is attributed to its sheer visibility in the public eye, especially, the entertainment industry. She provides examples from box office movies whose main character's are ostentatiously tattooed (anti)heroes. The movie industry is not the only form of popular culture to take on the tattoo craze, high end retailers like Versace and Chanel are using tattoos to promote their companies in advertising campaigns. These ads are "being used to target the present-day leisure classes" and in doing so "indicates an elevation in their (tattoos) cultural status."

Though, as Kosut points out, the product of tattoo is an interesting commodity, simply because of the corporeal character of the product itself. "Tattoos simultaneously decorate the body and permanently modify it. For this reason, tattooing can be conceptualized as an ironic fad-a popular cultural trend that, due to its permanent nature, cannot be as easily discarded as a pair of jeans." Kosut also suggests the danger of the popularization of tattoos, in that like other subcultural turned popular-cultural trends, they run the risk of becoming trite.

The article ends by recognizing the growing interest in tattoo by cultural institutions such as art museums. Through the help of the mass media who contemporaneously portray tattoo as art with aesthetic value, these cultural institutions have accepted tattoo, "blurring the distinctions between high and popular culture".

I will most definitely be using Mary Kosut's concept of the "ironic-fad" in future tattoo research endeavors.

Socialbookmarking Soulmate

It took a long time to commit, as so many of us in postmodern romances do, but I think I've finally found my socialbookmarking soulmate. I heart bobaker, of citeulike.org. He/She is dreamy... what? I cannot assume bobaker's a male, what if Bob is short for Roberta?

In all seriousness, this whole social bookmarking thing has been a double edged sword for me, the perpetual bungler of all things web 2.0. On the one hand, there are so many and they are so complicated, and you have to understand all this new techno-vocabulary just to navigate your way around them. On the other hand, once you do, they are so helpful.... but back to the first hand, so expansive and wide-ranging.

An academic acquaintance of mine informed me of citeulike, a social bookmarking network for peer reviewed articles only. Which is so perfect, for me, someone who likes libraries, and the concepts of validity, legitimacy, and authenticity.

Next, it was a matter of searching for tattoo tags, or people who had articles, essays or books in their libraries that they had categorized as having to do with tattoo. There were many, though most were having to do with skin and dermatology (a perfectly fascinating science on its own, just not for me). So, I included culture to the keyword search, and voila! Introducing, bobaker, and his 14 articles relating to tattoo and culture. Bobaker is not meticulous in his library upkeep, he doesn't add comments or organize in a overtly coherent way (soulmate). Bobaker has 40 articles in all, with a good majority to do, not only with tattoo and subculture, but psychology and philosophy as well (sigh). Bobaker even has cinematography and horror as tags (louder sigh), the former having to do with my visual anthropologically inclined side, and the ladder to do with my guilty pleasure customarily clandestine side.

What were the chances? Well if you believe in fate, then I suppose there were none, and it was meant to be. I was destined to stumble upon babaker, and glean scholarly articles on my specific subject matter off of him/her. Although, that leads me into reverie... what have I ever done for bobaker?