Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

183 Epilogue 2008
supposedly made identity construction problematic in contemporary
society. For example, in typically convoluted postmodernist
prose, Rosenblatt contends that
[a] comparison of modern primitivism with “invented
traditions” and “revivals of traditional culture” could be
more than an ironic or decentering device. . . . A study of
the discourse surrounding primitivism taking place in the
shadows of anthropological discussions of culture movements
can illuminate the ways in which, in each case, creative
political practice and structures of meaning render each other
intelligible (p. 288; see also DeMello, 1993).
Two edited collections also reflect this postmodernist orientation.
Mascia-Lees and Sharpe in the flamboyantly titled Tattoo,
Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment (1992) and Featherstone (2000)
in Body Modification offer a variety of pieces that treat the body as
a “cultural text.” As is, or was, typical of postmodern discussions,
the selections in both of these volumes are not based on direct empirical
data (save for occasional use of the author’s personal experience)
and tend toward abstracted analyses of films and written
materials. The authors do not appear to be overly concerned with
the failure to ground their discussions on empirical data. In their
introduction, for example, Mascia-Lees and Sharpe offer a postmodernist
explanation for the fact that the authors of the chapters
in their collection have avoided dealing with the complications involved
with the direct investigation of body modification and the
culture that surrounds it. As they state:
Contemporary theorizing, whether feminist, postmodernist, or
anthropological, has contributed recently to exposing “the
natural” as a Western cultural construct, calling into question
the often taken for granted dichotomy between nature and
culture and the ways in which this distinction has acted to
reinforce relations of power and domination. Indeed, the body
has become an important site for rethinking such binary
oppositions as masculinity and femininity, gender and sex,
the public and the private, and the cultural and the natural.
Contemporary attempts to expose these categories as ideological
constructions buttressing Western and/or male supremacy