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Article Excerpt
NORTH AMERICA IS EXPERIENCING what some call a second "tattoo renaissance" (DeMello, 2000). As part of this revolution in the popular cultural significance of tattooed flesh, tattooing is ascending to unprecedented levels of popularity among a vast array of social groups. Once a long-standing symbol of the North American underclass, this "body project" (Shilling, 1993) is now a floating signifier of a full panorama of social statuses, roles and identities. The tattoo is blossoming as a polysemic symbol of Canadian culture, and is actively inserted into the identity politics of a melange of actors. More so than in any previous era, tattoos are, as Hebdige (1979) might describe, "pregnant" with cultural significance.
Sociologists and other academics, however, almost invariably describe tattooing as cultural deviance (Atkinson, 2003a; DeMello, 2000; Copes and Forsyth, 1993; Irwin, 2000). Studies of tattooing among the mentally challenged (Ceniceros, 1998; Measey, 1972), prisoners (Kent, 1997; Seaton, 1987), gang members (Rubin, 1988), and deviant youth subcultures (Atkinson, 2002), represent the tattoo as a badge of dislocated, ostracized, and disenfranchised communities. Apart from anthropological analyses of tattooing in Japanese, Melanesian, African, and Polynesian cultures (Gell, 1993; Kaplan and Dubro, 1986; Kitamura and Kitamura, 2001; Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, 1992), few social scientific studies portray tattooing as either rational or pro-social. Even comprehensive historical (Caplan, 2000; Gilbert, 2000) or ethnographic (DeMello, 2000; Irwin, 2000; Vail, 1999) analyses of the practice selectively link tattooed bodies to stigmatized populations. Tattooing is decoded as esoterically normative within the boundaries of historically marginal groups, as its profanity well represents group members' feelings of difference and exclusion. It is deciphered, in Cohen's (1955) terminology, as a deviant "collective solution" to sentiments of social inferiority.
While tattooing is by no means widely respected in Western cultures, its one-dimensional depiction as uncontested deviance is sociologically myopic (see DeMello, 1995; Fisher, 2002; Friedman, 1996; Gallick, 1996). A majority of empirical analyses of tattooing fail to consider how the body project symbolizes conformity to prevailing cultural body idiom, or expectations of affective control upheld throughout Western nations. Even fewer juxtapose the booming popularity of tattooing against cultural prescriptions to engage in a style of body work underpinned by the impetus to display one's "individualism" to others. Theorists regularly ignore whether tattooing may be a part of what White and Young (1997) refer to as the established "middle-class body ascetic," or what Monaghan (2001) describes as "vibrant physicality."
In this paper, the tattooing projects of selected Canadians are inspected as acts of compliance to "established" (Elias and Scotson, 1965) codes of bodily control and display. While tattooing is not the pinnacle of normative behaviour in Canada, the self-expressed meanings of Canadians' tattooing projects smack with compliance to a diffuse cultural imperative to engage in disciplined body work. Through a theoretical framework provided by figurational sociology (Elias, 1983; 1994; 1996), contemporary sensibilities about tattooed skin are interpreted as an extension of long-term civilizing processes.
Theoretical Underpinnings
Mainstay social-psychological interpretations of tattooing revolve around a construction of tattoo enthusiasm as inherently pathological (Gittleson and Wallfn, 1973; Grumet, 1983; Houghton et al., 1996; Howell et al., 1971; Newman, 1982). Social psychologists typically contend that a tattooed body is the manifestation of a mind fraught with disorder. Furthermore, they suggest wearers cannot conform to dominant social norms, values and beliefs as a result of developmental or cognitive defect (see Williams, 1998). If we accept classic social psychological interpretations of tattooing offered by Gittleson et al. (1969), Goldstein (1979), Lombroso-Ferrero (1972), Measey (1972) and Pollak and McKenna (1945), tattooing predicts more serious deviance; as individuals who brutally mutilate their bodies in such a barbaric way cannot contain other "primitive" or contra-normative impulses.
In related medical and epidemiological research, tattooing is attributed to youth impetuousness and irrationality (Armstrong, 1994; 1995; Armstrong and McConnell, 1994; Armstrong and Pace-Murphy, 1997; Armstrong et al., 2000; Grief and Hewitt, 1998; Gurke and Armstrong, 1997; Houghton et al., 1996; Martin, 1997). Tattooing indicates immaturity among "at-risk youth" and is correlated with other forms of self-harm such as physical aggressiveness, promiscuity, substance abuse and suicide (Braithwaite et al., 2001; Kern, 1996; Roberts and Ryan, 2002). Accordingly, enthusiasts exhibit a paucity of foresight in their behaviours, prefer physical expression over cognitive or verbal, and demonstrate feelings of social inferiority through unhygienic and physically dangerous patterns of action (see Frederick and Bradley, 2000). To voluntarily inflict pain on one's body and mar the skin with everlasting symbols of impurity is described as overtly antisocial (see Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990; Loimer and Werner, 1992). Such interpretations ring with Judeo-Christian understandings of the body as a sacred "home," and legitimate Western-scientific theories about tattoo enthusiasm prevalent since the turn of the 19th century (see Atkinson, 2003a).
Sociological analyses of tattooing produce a slightly broader spectrum of interpretation than psychological-medical. Yet despite Sanders' (1989) and DeMello's (2000) path-breaking analyses of tattooing as a contextual and negotiated signifier of identity, sociological statements on the cultural use of tattoos in North America ultimately (re)produce a conceptualization of the practice as contra-normative. The symbiotic relationship between tattooing and illegal behaviour (or otherwise unconventional lifestyles) still dominates in sociological research. Sociologists prefer to study the subversive subcultural uses of tattooing among groups such as prisoners (Kent, 1997; Seaton, 1987) and youth gangs (Govenar, 1988). Examinations of everyday life in tattoo studios equally "verify" the disreputable nature of North American tattooing cultures (Burchett and Leighton, 1958; McCabe, 1997; St. Clair and Govenar, 1981; Steward, 1990; Webb, 1979). Tattooing is deconstructed as a signifying practice that purposefully embraces and promulgates images of Otherness. It is postulated to be part of what Willis (1978) calls a "homology" of deviant style, that is, a set of complementary group practices coalescing around a shared set of outsider ideologies, activities and representational preferences.
With apparent irreverence to Klesse's (1999), Myers' (1997), Mifflin's (1997), Rosenblatt's (1997), and Atkinson's (2002; 2003a) claims that non-mainstream forms of body modification foster cultural bonds, few examine tattoos as pro-social markers. The nature of tattooing as a normative practice is rarely considered, because both the pathology of the act and actor is assumed. Reflective of this ongoing tradition of interpretation, there presently exists a giant schism between social scientific interpretations of tattooing and contemporary sensibilities about the act circulated by Canadian practitioners. The dominant manner of analysing tattoos in academic research may, however, be challenged by exploring several of the sensitizing principles of figurational sociology (Elias, 1994; 1996).
Method
Data utilized in this paper stem from a three-year, participant observation-based study of tattoo enthusiasm in Canada. (1) During the research, I spent three years "hanging out" (Willis, 1980) with tattoo artists and their clients in Calgary and Toronto. Through the research process, I interacted with hundreds of tattoo enthusiasts and eventually interviewed 92 of them. I met participants in a variety of social contexts, but first encountered a majority of them at tattoo studios in Calgary. Some of the enthusiasts were return patrons to the Calgary studios, while others were tattooing neophytes. I also met selected interviewees through friendship networks cultivated during the participant-observation phases of the research (i.e., during the first two years of field work). A smaller number of interviewees were students or friends of mine at a university in Canada (see Atkinson, 2003a).
The nature of my participation in tattooing considerably influenced the sampling process. As a person who immersed himself in a tattoo-enthusiast role and as a researcher who spent copious amounts of time hanging around with tattoo enthusiasts, I interacted with a substantial diversity of individuals during the field work process. At first, I interacted with a core group of enthusiasts in Calgary, but progressively "branched out" by hanging around with their tattooed friends in various social locales. By tactically "doing nothing" (Atkinson and Shaffir, 2003) with them in everyday life (i.e., going to restaurants, running routine errands, watching television, sitting in tattoo studios, or simply "shooting the breeze" over drinks), I casually inquired about their tattooing experiences, perspectives, and stories. In spending leisure time with tattoo enthusiasts, initial insights into the complex motivations for and meaning structures attributed to tattoo projects developed. The sampling process utilized in the research is therefore best described as a pastiche of convenience, snowball, and theoretical sampling.
The number of field interviews conducted in this research totalled 92, including 27 tattoo artists and 65 clients. The average age of the artists interviewed is 25, with an overall range in age from 20 to 55. While men and women are more or less equally represented among tattoo enthusiasts in Canada (Atkinson, 2003a; Atkinson and Young, 2001), only four (15%) of the artists I interviewed in this study are women. Eighteen (67%) of the artists have working-class family backgrounds and nine (33%) have middle-class family backgrounds, as measured by Blishen's (1967) socio-economic...
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