In this class, we explored tattoos by a lot of national traditions including Polynesian, Balkan, Egyptian, and Maori\u2026 My presentation was on Balkan tattoos and the more I researched it more I thought that it was a very intriguing topic. I thought the ritualistic aspects of the traditional Balkan tattoos, such as how tattooing is traditionally performed on certain days of the year like the spring solstice, and the unique ingredients of the tattoo ink such as the mother’s milk of a woman with a male baby with blue eyes, was very interesting. I paid attention to the fact that in many national traditions, there are ritualistic aspects to the act of tattooing, like chanting during the application of the Aboriginal Australian tattoos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the new tattoo traditions that I learned about that stood out to me was the Inuit tattoos. I was very intrigued by how the Inuits interpreted some traditional tattoos as protection from the spirits. They believed it was possible to be possessed by the spirits of the animals they hunted, so they got tattoos that would protect them from those spirits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The contrast between the prevalent contemporary perception against tattoos, and how the people whose tradition is to wear tattoos perceive tattoos was also brought to my attention. Contrary to today’s belief that getting tattoos is a reckless decision made by the young and immature, tattoos were seen as a sign of maturity and power in many of the national traditions we talked about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this class, we explored tattoos by a lot of national traditions including Polynesian, Balkan, Egyptian, and Maori\u2026 My presentation was on Balkan tattoos and the more I researched it more I thought that it was a very intriguing topic. I thought the ritualistic aspects of the traditional Balkan tattoos, such as how tattooing is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11819,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11819"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}