Jane Caplan - Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History

WRITTEN ON THE BODY

Written on the Body

The Tattoo in European and American History

Edited by

JANE CAPLAN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Published in the United States, its dependencies, and Canada by

Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey, 08540

In the United Kingdom,

published by Reaktion Books Ltd

79 Farringdon Road

London ecim 3JU, uk

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2000

Copyright Reaktion Books Ltd 2000

All rights reserved.

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-0-691-23825-8

R0

Notes on the Editor and Contributors

CLARE ANDERSON is a lecturer in the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Leicester. Her research interests include crime and punishment in colonial Mauritius and the transportation of Indian convicts overseas, on which she has published a number of articles. She has recently published Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815-52.

SUSAN BENSON is ca Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge University and an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University. She has worked on issues of race and ethnicity in Britain and is the author of Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London (1981). She has also worked on gender, Islam and colonial history in northern Nigeria. Increasingly, these and other interests have led her to focus upon issues of power, corporeality and personhood, of which her current interest in bodily inscription is one aspect.

JAMES BRADLEY is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Glasgow. His main areas of historical research are spa treatment, alternative medicine, the body, criminal identities and sport. He co-edited Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Immigration (1997) with Dr Ian Duffield. He has been a co-editor of the journal Australian Studies since 1996.

JANE CAPLAN is Marjorie Walter Goodhart Professor of European History at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Her publications include Government Without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1988), and she has edited Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason (1995) and Reevaluating the Third Reich (1993). She is currently writing a book on the history of individual identity documentation in nineteenth-century Europe, and has co-edited a volume of essays Documenting Individual Identity. The Development of State Practices since the French Revolution (forthcoming).

IAN DUFFIELD is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Edinburgh, and has published extensively on convict transportation and on African Diaspora History. His major publication to date in the former field is co-edited with James Bradley, Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Immigration (1997).

JULIET FLEMING is a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Her essay in this volume is taken from her current book project, which investigates writing in early modern England.

ALAN GOVENAR is a writer, folklorist, photographer and film-maker. He is President of Documentary Arts, a non-profit organization to broaden public knowledge and appreciation of the arts of different cultures in all media. Dr Govenar is the author of twelve books including Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist; American Tattoo; Flash from the Past: Classic American Tattoo Designs 1890-1965; The Early Years of Rhythm and Blues; and Portraits of Community: African-American Photography in Texas. He has produced and directed numerous television documentaries, including two films on tattooing: Stoney Knows How and The Human Volcano.

HARRIET GUEST is co-director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She has published several essays on Cooks voyages and edited, with Nicholas Thomas and Michael Dettelbach, Johann Reinhold Forsters Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (1996). Her most recent publication is Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1760-1810 (2000).

MARK GUSTAFSON is an Associate Professor of Classics at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches Greek, Latin and Ancient History. His main area of interest is the later Roman Empire. Current projects include a monograph on the conflict between Lucifer of Cagliari and Constantius II, various articles on Roman tattooing (which may be collected into a longer work) and a literary history of Robert Blys Sixties Press.

C. P. JONES is George Martin Lane Professor of Classics and History at Harvard University. His books include Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana (1971); Plutarch and Rome (1971); The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom (1978); Culture and Society in Lucian (1986); and Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (1999).

CHARLES w. MACQUARRIE is an Associate Professor of English at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California. He was the 1996-7 Washington Fellow at Pembroke College Cambridge and visiting scholar in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. He was recently elected to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

HAMISH MAXWELL-STEWART has a Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh. Since completing his doctorate he has worked in the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Glasgow, and is currently the Port Arthur Fellow, School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania. He is the author of a number of articles on the nature of convict culture and resistance.

STEPHAN OETTERMANN (D.PhiL, University of Marburg) is a freelance journalist and curator whose main research interest is the history of popular entertainments. He has curated exhibitions on Georg Bchner, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Friedrich Nietzsche. His books include Zeichen auf der Haut. Geschichte der Ttowierung in Europa (1979, 1985 and 1994), Das Panorama. Geschichte eines Massenmediums (1980), Die Schaulust an Elefanten (1982) and Lufer und Vorlufer. Zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Laufsports (1984). He is currently preparing a historical encyclopedia of popular entertainment.

JENNIPHER A. ROSECRANS is an advanced doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Michigan and is presently in the final stages of writing her dissertation, More Mutable than Proteus: A History of Body Alteration in Early Modern England, funded by a Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

ABBY M. SCHRADER is an Assistant Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is at work on a book-length manuscript titled The Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and the Construction of Identity in Imperial Russia.

J. Storer, An Inhabitant of the Island ofNukahiva, 1813, engraving. British Library, London.

Introduction

JANE CAPLAN

Tattooing is one of many forms of irreversible body alteration, including scarification, cicatrization, piercing and branding, and it is the probably the oldest and most widespread of these. Physical evidence for the practice survives from the late fourth millennium BC in Europe and from about 2000 BC in Egypt, and tattooing can be found in virtually all parts of the world at some time.