Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

184 Epilogue 2008
and to disrupt them have focused on the body. Understanding
the body not as simple materiality, but rather as constituted
within language as in much contemporary thought, is
intended to question traditional notions of the body as prior
to, or outside of, culture. This move is, of course, just one of
the latest attempts in the West to grapple with the relationship
between the natural and the cultural and to put the body, and
representations of it, in service to this struggle (p. 3).
While some of the basic ideas offered by authors influenced by
the postmodern “turn” are of potential value, in placing the body
and representations of it on equal analytic footing, postmodern
analysis does away with the need to investigate people’s actual
embodied experiences. From a postmodern perspective empirical
research such as that upon which Customizing the Body is based
holds limited value because, in focusing on collective experiences
and empirically verified phenomena, it fails to account sufficiently
for “narratives,” “discourses,” and other personalistic constructs
and stories. We take issue with such claims. However, some discussions
directly influenced by postmodernism are of considerable
value.
Victoria Pitts’s (2003) In the Flesh is an example of what can
happen when a skilled analyst combines postmodern theory with
systematic data derived through the use of more or less conventional
methods. Pitts examines the politics of body modification in
discussions of the piercing, tattooing, scarification, and subdermal
implantation practices of a number of segments of the
body-modification world—primarily modern primitive culture,
queer culture, and cyberpunk culture. She demonstrates how
people use body modification as an ongoing activity through which
they construct their social selves. According to Pitts, people use
body-modification practices as methods of reclaiming their bodies
from a contemporary culture they find alienating, hostile, and repressive.
Michael Atkinson’s (2003) Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body
Art is a discussion of tattooing practices in Canada based on systematic
ethnographic research. Atkinson grounds his understanding
of tattooing largely on ideas developed by Norbert Elias
(1991, 1994) that emphasize how social experience shapes individual
and collective personality structures and how people’s use