Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

Epilogue 2008:
Body Modification
Then and Now
CLINTON R. SANDERS with D. ANGUS VAIL
The only thing about social relationships, social structures,
and other elements of social life that doesn’t
change is that they are constantly changing. The perpetual
emergence of social worlds is the rule rather than the exception
and the worlds that Customizing the Body addressed in the
late 1980s—the academic world of ethnographers, the intellectual
world of those concerned with a sociology of the body and its
modification, and the tattoo world—have been especially active
sites of social change, development, and evolution.
Good ethnography tends to transcend many of the changes in
the worlds it describes because it explains the processes through
which people produce those worlds, not the outcome of those
processes. From this perspective, Customizing the Body is not
specifically a book about tattooing. It is a book about how people
experience, respond to, and enact definitions of the kinds of activities
that are socially acceptable or unacceptable. It is a book
about how people produce and define art. It is a book about how
peoples’ relationships are characterized by both conflict and cooperation
and how their identities, both purposively chosen and
involuntarily assigned, are shaped by their physical appearance.
These processes do not change, even if their manifestations
might.
Tattoos may look different today than they did in the late
1980s, but people still have to decide whether they think tattoos
are tacky, sleazy, dangerous, or fun, and, more importantly, they
still have to decide whether being tacky, sleazy, dangerous, or fun
are characteristics they want to embody and display. Although
sociologists and other social scientists disagree about many mat-