Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and Europe - Softcover

This historically rigorous and theoretically nuanced collection of essays [is] indispensable to students of world systems of art and culture.
--Ruth Phillips, Carleton University"

"This historically rigorous and theoretically nuanced collection of essays [is] indispensable to students of world systems of art and culture."

--Ruth Phillips, Carleton University

Although Robbie Williams's Maori-inspired tattoo, acquired recently when he toured New Zealand, may seem unusual and ground-breaking, it is in fact a revival of a practice begun in the late eighteenth century, when Westerners first made contact with the native peoples of the Pacific. The term 'tattoo' entered Europe with the publication of Captain Cook's voyages in the 1770s, and Pacific tattoos became fashionable in the West as sailors, whalers and explorers brought home tattoos from Tahiti, the Marquesas, New Zealand and Polynesia. In recent years these early contacts have been revived, as native tattooists from Oceania have begun tattooing non-Polynesians in Europe, the USA and elsewhere, Robbie Williams being only the most visible example of this new trend. Tattoo is both a fascinating book about these early Oceanic-European exchanges, that also documents developments up to the present day, and the first to look at the history of tattooing in Oceania itself.

Documenting these complex cultural interactions in the first part of the book, the authors move from issues of encounter, representation and exchange to the interventions of missionaries and the colonial state in local tattoo practices. Highly illustrated with many previously unseen images, for example the original voyage sketches of the first Russian circumnavigation of 1803-6, this is a fascinating account of early tattooing and cultural exchange in Oceania, and will appeal to the wide audience made newly aware of, and interested in, Pacific tattooing.