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.