Category: AR474 (Page 10 of 10)

I felt the first four chapters of our book thoroughly explored the origins of tattoo practice and the variety of functions tattooing has played in different cultures. Overall, I found that this text places a lot of emphasis on specific word choice and the origins of the word / the latin meaning. To me, this hasn’t been something I’ve thought a lot about (how analyzing word choice may reveal how ancient societies were communicating). 

A pattern I noticed throughout readings was that regardless of culture / location, tattoos have generally had a negative connotation attached to them / associated with uncivilized barbarians. To a certain extent, this belief that tattoos are problematic and are associated with barbarians is still prevalent today – people still believe now that tattoos are associated with troublemakers / gangs / crimes. I found it interesting that Greeks had an aversion to decorative tattoos, as they associated them with barbarians. I thought it was interesting that in our western culture, which historically has associated the classic societies with prestige and knowledge, also contains an element of aversion. 

This text made me think about how arguably humans have an innate desire to retaliate / seek revenge on others that have wronged them, specifically when the crime violates their moral compass. This is something I saw throughout the readings, where the name of the crime committed was tattooed on the criminal’s forehead. This reminds me how some people slash the tires of their significant others when they are betrayed or graffiti their car with “CHEATER” in order to humiliate. I always find it interesting when I notice how human emotions and how we deal with human emotions really haven’t changed over time. 

Overall, I felt that these collection of readings provided a solid foundation on the beginning of tattooing and a general overview of the functions tattoos have played over time.

I thought this selection of readings was very interesting, and I was particularly drawn to the word “stigma” and how it has been used to define tattooing throughout history. The word “stigma” as used today tends to refer more to a social, collective agreement to look down upon something. Whereas, “stigma” has also been used to refer to tattooing or body marking. In chapter one, it was defined as a “mark of infamy” or “moral blot” (Caplan 1). It is really interesting to think of how that definition has transformed to be less about a physical mark and understood more as a social mark of infamy. In the cases of some of the examples from the readings, though, it was both.

While tattooing was sometimes used as an honor or to mark high social status, the reading mostly focused on how it was used negatively. I would have liked to learn more about high-status tattooing, but I did find the negative associations to be very interesting. For example, the Maenads, or mad women, were portrayed with tattoos on Greek vases. Also, tattoos were used on enslaved people who ran away to mark them and have them returned.

Chapter two goes more into depth about tattooing as a punitive practice. I was intrigued by the concept of religious punishment and how it was unlikely for Christians to tattoo the cross onto people. From my understanding, doing that would give the person too much power because they would bear the marks of Christ. But, talking about it as if it were a cross gives the Christian more power over the person they tattooed. Tattooing itself is a somewhat painful practice, which contributes to the punishment, but I think the biggest punishment is social. As stated in the chapter, “the body can function as a permanently running advertisement of one’s guilt and subjugation,” which perfectly embodies the physical and social dimensions of stigma.

Chapter three also discusses the power of religious tattoos, as it references someone who claimed nobody could hurt him because he had a tattoo of the cross. While some tattoos themselves had stigma, some people saw them as protective and empowering. Similarly, as discussed in chapter four, people found power in tattooing their horoscopes and celestial symbols to try and gain a sense of power from the universe.

Tattooing has a very layered history, and it is still something that seems to hold a lot of stigma today. While I feel that the culture is starting to change, many people still look down upon people with tattoos and view them as unprofessional or societal outcasts (kind of like the Maenads), demonstrating how this stigma today is rooted in the history of these “mark[s] of infamy.”

The introduction of Written on the Body. The Tattoo in European and American History immediately caught my attention from the way it very openly stated that the history of tattooing in Europe and America is greatly unknown. It is why Caplan describes the book as having a “less solid foundation on which to build” (xi). I realized after reading this sentence that I had never stopped to consider the history of tattoos my interest in them and their prevalence in the current times. The lack of concrete information also came as a surprise considering this prevalence. For me, tattoos and tattooing is just something that had always existed so to read that their origin is so obscure was, although I hate to be redundant, surprising.

While Chapter One and Two also surprised me, there was much of it that also felt understandable, or obvious, once I thought about it. I also lump these two chapters together because despite their differences and Chapter One being focused on the Greeks and Chapter Two being focused on the Romans, the chapters felt very similar in a way. It even felt redundant at times. This was another thing that at first made me curious, but then I thought about it and then I realized that so much of Roman culture is derived from and inspired by Greece so why would that exclude tattooing. Of course they are not exactly the same, but I felt that the general purpose for tattoos in the two cultures were the same: tattooing as a form of punishment. It made me wonder if such a history is why people today still correlate tattoos with crimes. Whether or not there is such influence, it’s curious to see how much tattoos are intertwined with public perception considering that in the past, the tattoos were there to mark who committed a crime and what it was that they did and this was so prevalent because it didn’t allow them to hide. It made their crime the first thing that people saw about them. People don’t typically tattoo a crime that they committed onto themselves however, an abundance of tattoos or tattoos in a highly visible place, like the forehead, are still viewed as signs of a person who committed a crime. In other words, even though the tattoo has changed, their perception has not.

To be completely honest, I found Chapter Three to be much more interesting than Chapter One and Two. This is partially due to the fact that I find the end result of these studies ultimately being a who knows situation funny, but it is also because of the prominence of Celtic symbols in tattooing. More specifically the Celtic knot is such a prominent symbol in tattooing and it’s an image that many people have on their bodies and its popularity had made me believe that there was a connection between the Celts and tattooing so reading this chapter and seeing that it is pretty much unknown as to whether or not tattooing held prominence in their culture made me reconsider popular modern tattoos. What I am trying to say is that this chapter made me consider the meaning behind some modern day tattoos as well as question how certain images became popular in the first place.

The final chapter we had to read was Chapter Four. Call me biased (since I’m presenting Chapter Four), but I thought Chapter Four was the most interesting out of everything we had to read so far. The connection between tattoos and the occult and magic is nothing new to me, but I hadn’t realized how far back that connection had extended. It’s always curious to see how ideas from this time translate to the present considering people as described in this chapter would mark themselves as a way of imbuing themselves with better traits, a form of empowerment if you will, and empowerment is one of the reasons why people get tattoos today. There is, of course, a difference in how deep that belief goes, one being religious and the other being a way to appease oneself. In addition to this, although tattoos were not as explicitly discussed in this chapter, it was intriguing to see how such marks, despite their impermanence, can all be seen as precedents for tattoos and tattooing in England.

(this is definitely too long but no one else has posted so I have no point of reference — so sorry)

In preparation for this class session, we read the Introduction through Chapter 4 of Jane Caplan’s Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History. In the introduction, Caplan provides a brief overview of the history of and societal views on tattooing in the West. The book was published in 2000, and marks the beginning of what Caplan cites as a “tattoo renaissance.” As someone who was born after the publishing date, it is interesting to note that I have lived my entire life in this tattoo renaissance. I feel like we might be in another tattoo renaissance right now – so many people are getting tattoos, as we discussed in our first class meeting, and I often find myself surprised to learn when someone does not have a tattoo. Previous to our first meeting, I also did not know that tattoos had a period of association with circus members; this makes sense, because today it seems like a lot of tattooed people work in the arts, performing or otherwise. On a different note, we looked at some images of tattoos people got after completing the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, which was especially interesting in light of Caplan and Gustafson’s mentions of people from the Roman Empire getting tattoos after pilgrimages to Jerusalem. 

Introduced in depth by C.P. Jones’ chapter on Stigma and Tattoo, the idea of stigma and related terms being translated as meaning “tattoo” was surprising to me. As someone who went to Catholic school, we talked about stigmata exclusively as the mirroring of Jesus’ crucifixion wounds on extremely pious people. No one ever explained the origins of the word to me, so I found all the etymological discussions throughout the chapters to be fascinating. Jones also talked at length about the practice of tattooing enslaved people; I thought it was interesting how the connection between enslavement and tattooing drew some ultra-religious people to tattooing as a sign that they were “slaves for God.” 

Mark Gustafson expands on tattooing for the purpose of punishment in his chapter. Forcing criminals to work in the mines was apparently one of the most common punishments, and also popularized tattooing criminals’ foreheads to represent their crime, punisher, or punishment. These tattoos meant it was nearly impossible for the criminals to return to normal life after their exile in the mines or elsewhere was over; the practice reminds me of the extreme difficulty ex-offenders have finding jobs because of their permanent classification as felons. I had no idea that tattooing for the purpose of punishment is still being used in some places, and did not die out in Europe and the United States until the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Charles W. MacQuarrie moves out of mainland Europe in his chapter, focusing on the British Isles, and specifically Celtic tattooing. Out of the evidence MacQuarrie presented, I was most struck by the line he pulled from the 8th-century poem The Caldron of Poesy, which refers to a man of high status as having a “blue tattooed shank. ” The image of a man with a blue, heavily tattooed leg is vivid, and also makes an interesting connection between high social status and tattooing. As we discussed in class, tattooing’s negative connotation in the U.S. is finally fading, so it is cool to see tattooing viewed in a positive light in literature from so long ago. 

Finally, I thought Jennipher Allen Rosecrans’ chapter on symbolic tattoos was the most interesting. Rosecrans discussed the tattooing of astrological or other magical signs on the body as a means of controlling one’s fate or achieving some other impossible end. Apparently, both tattooing and temporarily writing symbols on the body were typical in and around the 1600s in England for a variety of reasons; when used for magical purposes, the practice was often condemned by the church. I am sure that many churches today would condemn tattooing for magical purposes, too, because most mainstream religions do not condone the practice of magic, and many religious communities look down upon tattoos. Rosecrans’ chapter also taught me about the many categories of magic practiced during this time period, including natural magic, celestial magic, and intellectual/angel magic.

Jane Caplan’s “Introduction” to Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History brings about conversation regarding the multifaceted purpose of tattooing, both in the past and the present.

While preparing for the class I found myself curious about which direction the content would go in; I had never thought very much about tattoos, let alone what their “visual culture” might entail. However, it became immediately apparent that there is a host of social, political, and cultural tensions that are directly manifested in the art of tattooing. I was specifically interested in the Kang and Jones article, which investigates why people get tattoos and whether their initial aims are satisfied by this decision. Identity seemed central to the article’s investigation, as tattoos are a way of reaffirming specific beliefs, memories, or interests in outward ways that mark the individual as a member of a certain group. However, there seems to be a fundamental paradox of individuality and community that I found incredibly interesting. The binary of conformity and resistance seems like a hard thing to reconcile when discussing tattoos, especially in regards to neo-primitive subcultures that challenge the social norms of mainstream society. Navigating the irony of tattoos as a commodity within a consumer market despite being a personal artistic statement is an issue that I’ve discussed in the context of material art but never in terms of body art.

This article, along with the other assigned ones, all seemed to present a central and fundamental question about how personal meaning functions in tandem with a wider, and often divergent, social understanding of that meaning. This also seems to be complicated by the politics of the body and how people choose to represent themselves; clearly, there is a heavy stigma around tattoos and the ethics behind body modification. The articles spend a lot of time discussing how gender plays into this and why women are more likely to get tattoos that challenge traditional gender roles and/or patriarchal values. This, juxtaposed against the more masculine tendencies to solidify gender stereotypes, is another interesting phenomenon about tattooing that I had never considered or consciously noticed. There was a lot of material in the first few readings that I feel excited to unpack and discuss with the class.

The class began with a discussion about the paradox of permanence and the perceived severity of tattoos because they “last forever.” This made me think about why the physical permanence of a decision or marker of identity is so daunting and discouraged. Tattoos often have very little to no consequence to anyone other than the individual who has one, yet receive a significant social importance and weight. We discussed how tattoos are often associated with the “delinquent” or lower class but have recently been elevated to a more fashionable higher status. We then moved onto a general history of tattooing and examined how far back the art went (Siberian mummies, ancient Egyptians, and Picts in the British Islands were among the examples). The binary between civilized and uncivilized society, sometimes marked by tattooing, dates back to the 17th century (well, probably before then too, but was recorded in Bulwar’s book). I had no idea that these stereotypes had been embedded in so many cultures for as long as they had. I’m looking forward to seeing how these ideas we read about and discussed in class will develop.