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The Power Of Tattoos

Decent Essays

Tattoos are known and seen all over the world on a diverse set of individuals. The meanings and reasons behind the tattoos differ from person to person. Tattoos are self-expressive forms of fulfilment and expression among many individuals in an ever-changing competitive society. Tattoos hold internal and external power for tattooed people in a variety of ways. This will be discussed in the ethnography. Tattoos are important symbols of identity expression through use of the body. The body becomes the document of expression. This study is aimed to examine this form of expression and the reasons and meanings for certain art placed on the body. The study took place in Pretoria South Africa for a period of 5 months. The information was gathered …show more content…

Observation and surveillance by powerful people from large institutions conceal these devices of display by use of higher institutional power. Tattoos can thus function as a method of bio power. Bio-power is where an individual will use their tattoos to hinder surveillance and strategies by power institutions, by means of tattoos used as tools of rebellion. The display of tattoos on the body, visible to the public, is a method used by tattooed individuals to contest prevailing public conventions of body appearances. They practice this challenges to public conventions through the use of their own personal tattooed bodies as crucial to confrontation. The theory of bio-power by Michel Foucault’s (1994) is the authority of an individual based on their biological condition of life (Foucault 1994). The individual holds a form of power which is deeply rooted within that individual’s public community. I use the concept of bio-power by Foucault to demonstrate how the practice of tattoos can exemplify a symptom of power and techniques of …show more content…

2006; Romans et al. 1998; Stirn et al. 2011). It then comes as no surprise that earlier methods of research have not only ignored the use of tattoos as practical expressions of identity construction, and focused on the negative traits connected with tattoos (Atkinson 2003; Kosut 2005; Sanders and Vail 2008), it was also wrongly assumed that reasons why people got tattoos were the same throughout history. Tattoos have involuntarily brought along with them methods of control for tattooed people through their very existence which has in turn formed methods and industries of dealing with and challenging such forms of control. We need to understand the changes in patterns of social meaning and perception of tattoos over time, before we can understand the roots of power and subversion. What cannot be ignored, is history of tattooing in the United States, it has altered and it has been changed over time to fit or resist our expectations of the times and places where it has been practiced. Since the first known tattoos, more than five thousand years ago, to the tattoos of today, there have been numerous different views

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