Kymberly Helbig

Publication Date

4-1996

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Michael Ann Williams, Erika Brady, Larry Danielson

Comments

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Original department Modern Languages & Intercultural Studies

Degree Program

Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

Tattoos can be viewed as visual manifestations of the self who wears them, and tattooing as a process for helping to create that self. In that process, tattoo artists and subject explore a new kind of aesthetic, meaningful body as they use tattooing to negotiate their art, their bodies and their selves. In this thesis, I look at how tattooing is used as a form of personal expression, how it challenges social and personal boundaries by challenging the boundary of the physical body and how tattoos help us to re-establish the link between physical experience and personal identity.

As a technique for personal expression emanating out from the body, contemporary, American tattooing has become its own tradition, distinct from those such as tribal, gangland or prison tattooing which use the process to mark group members and designate their membership status. Tattooing, as practiced by many artists and subjects today, intends to distinguish its adherents from all others, re-creating their bodies as they interpret them. Interestingly, this re-creation of one self most involves two persons, the tattoo artist and the tattoo subject, necessitating an intricate and intimate negotiation between them in order to create a piece of art that is “yours, mine and ours.” How this negotiation takes place and its resulting experiences, memories and meanings is the first portion of this thesis.

Tattooing also highlights considerations of the social implications that such self-display and performance bring to the fore, as well as questions about how a personality is allowed or expected to be physically expressed. By placing their art in skin, artists and subjects create something that lies on a precarious boundary between one self and another, between acceptable art and unacceptable display, and between the physical person and the intangible (intellectual, emotional) person. They confront, intentionally and unintentionally, social assumptions about the proper methods for self expression, proper limits for bodily adornment and proper ways for us literally to touch and be touched.

Finally, the process of tattooing is a process of altering the structure of the physical body, actually transforming it rom one body into a new body. This transformation is ultimately one of birth, one of defining and then creating a new self by re-defining and re-creating the old one on both the physical and metaphysical level. Tattooing makes a change to the body that reflects and affects changes to the internal self. Thus, I consider tattooing as a method for reuniting the rational self with the physical one, overcoming the traditional separation between thought and experience.

Disciplines

Anthropology | Folklore | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social and Cultural Anthropology

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