Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

182 Epilogue 2008
body modification practices by contemporary social groups.
Pritchard (1999, 2000, 2001), for example, focuses on the appropriation
of Maori tattoo practices (ta moko) by “modern primitives.”
The author focuses particularly on the issue of whether
cultural meanings and identities can be appropriated by one
culture without severely distorting their significance within
the cultural group in which they originated.
Along similar lines, the selections in the volumes edited by
Caplan (2000) and Thomas, Cole, and Douglas (2005) combine
historical and anthropological approaches to examine the complex
movement of tattooing from Polynesia to Europe and America.
While Captain Cook’s role in this process is well documented
and widely known, the works in these two collections show that
the typical accounts of his influence are overly simplistic and fail
to acknowledge the influences of a variety of other indigenous cultures.
The final path of anthropological analysis follows most directly
in the tradition of Customizing the Body in that it employs information
collected through direct interaction with people involved
with body modification and tends to avoid pathologizing the phenomenon.
DeMello’s (2000) Bodies of Inscription, for example,
moves from a historical discussion of tattooing to focus on the
central role played by tattoo conventions and publications in
forming styles and orientations within the tattoo world. DeMello’s
discussion is grounded in extensive interview data and emphasizes
the importance of body alteration in shaping the identities
and social connections of the largely middle class members of the
tattoo world on which she focused. Like sociologist Katherine
Irwin (2001, 2003), DeMello emphasizes inequalities that she sees
in the tattoo subculture, especially those based on gender and
class.
In the 1990s serious discussions of body modification often reflected
the postmodern analytic and presentational conventions
that had become popular in certain social scientific circles. These
works tended to be obscurely worded, based on rather speculative
“readings” of limited data, and employ an analytic frame
premised on the central role played by social inequality. For example,
Rosenblatt’s (1997) secondary analysis of Modern Primitives
(Vale and Juno, 2005 [1989]) presents modern primitivism
as a form of resistance to social and cultural structures that have