About Body Art & Tattoo: Controversial signs on the body.

[gorgik9]

There are two main sources of inspiration for this thread of mine:

On the one hand, I've been fascinated by various kinds of body art ever since childhood, and since I'm 57 years of age now, this means I've been some kind of body art fan for a bit more than half a century. But it doesn't mean I'm full of tattoos or that I'm planning to get a tattoo.

On the other hand, in the context of modern Western society and culture, body art and tattoo in particular has been quite controversial at least since the mid-19th century and this also shows in our beloved GH forum: I've done some research in two of the forum areas - "General Discussion" and "Porn & Sex Discussion" - and looked at threads specifically framing tattoo/ing as one or another kind of problem. If I got it right, the first thread of this sort was posted in "General Discussion" by Silas in 14 February 2010, titled "Tattoo's Unsexy???! C'mon guys!", while the latest to my knowledge was posted in "Porn & Sex Discussions" by package15 on 14 September 2017 and titled "Issue 1: Fed Up With Tattoos But Double Standards".

If I'm correct we've had at least eight "tattoo-as-problem"-threads until today.

My general plan for this thread is to start with some conceptual preliminaries, discussing the generic concept of body art and make a simple taxonomy of the main technical and functional genres. I'll then make posts on the different genres and in particular write a short history of tattoo, looking into the socio-historical reasons for its controversiality.

I'll make a couple of more posts in this thread later tonight, but after that, Saturday and Sunday afternoons will be my ordinary posting days in this thread!

 

[gorgik9]

Conceptual preliminaries: Body Art and its genres.

I'll start with some conceptual preliminaries so we'll all know what we're going to talk about, and the number one thing to get clear about is which concept of art I'll be using! :

I'll start with a negative argument, that is: explaining which concept I'm NOT going to use: First of all, I'm not going to talk about (visual) art as a collection of objects, a collection of works of art - in many ways this is still the most usual figure of speach when talking about (visual) art: to talk about art as a collection of framed pictures and sculptures.

My second negative argument is to bracket the dominant post-romantic notion of art as an expression of personal originality and imagination, and the very opposite of utility.

OK, this was just to pave the way for my positive argument, that is: Which notion of art I will be using. I'll take advantage of the simple fact that the English word "art" comes from latin ars, which in its turn was the translation of Greek techne - so WTF was that?

Techne was any kind of human activity dependant on some specific knowledge and skill, and there's no disputing that all kinds of body art are arts in this sense.

So body art in this sense is an art in basically the same ancient Greek sense that writing is an art, or like medicine is an art and pastry cooking is an art; writing is grammatike techne - its something that has to be learned, which talking doesn't: any kiddo will start blabbering at about the age of 1-2 years old, without having spent a single day in school.

Any art involves the knowledge of specific materials, tools and techniques, and the ability to make useful applications of this knowledge.

A taxonomy of Body Art.

Using body art as the generic concept and mainly following the taxonomy of German anthropologist and historian Stephan Oetterman, I'll subdivide body art into the following technical and functional genres:

- body paint

- cosmetics

- mask

- tattoo

- scarification

- branding

Any taxonomy will be problematic: You can always question if some things included in your taxonomy shouldn't rather be excluded, while other things excluded should have been included.

In my opinion a reasonable candidate for exclusion could be branding: You could say that branding isn't an art, it's an arcane penal method for punishing criminals and / or a method to mark cattle, furniture and other pieces of property. I guess my main reason for keeping branding in my taxonomy is, that this in modern European eyes most unpleasant body art can explain a lot of the negative attitudes towards another body art: tattooing.

A good candidate for inclusion could be: piercing. The only thing I have to say to people missing piercing in this thread would be: Please make your own GH thread on piercing! I'd definitely come and visit!

 

[gorgik9]

Body Art and the "Four Period Theory".

I will of course get deeper into each genre later, but I think it's necessary to look at a few general problems first, largely of an ideological nature and with roots in the 18th century theories of society and history in the French and Scottish Enlightenment.

In some recent academic writings one can find the idea that modern Western cosmetics (using stuff like powder, face make-up, lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara, nail varnish etc) isn't to be considered a body art, but rather a logical opposite of body art: so it's argued that while Western cosmetics is a method for articulating the individual "inner self", traditional body art is rather a matter of using the individual body and skin to make the person part of social collectives: family, lineage, tribe etc.

But in my opinion this opposition of modern individuality and primitive sociality must be seen as a historical opposition having its deepest roots in Enlightenment theorizing, inspired - among other things - by the many published detailed anthropological descriptions of primitive societies like Joseph Francois Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages americaines (1724) and the published travel logs of Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook in the last third of the 18th century.

What we get in the second half of the 18th century is in my opinion the first ambitious systematic theory of historical development and change, the "Four Period Theory" articulated by A.R.J. Turgot (in France) and - more importantly - by Adam Ferguson, John Millar and Adam Smith (in Scotland). So here we go: All humans start off as savages in the state of nature, living primarily as hunters and gatherers (period 1), but then this primitive society develops into a society of stock breeding (period 2) and farming (period 3), and in the end we get the full blown civil society (period 4).

This encompassing theory of history and historical change had a basic philosophical underpinning of the kind we can find in the magnum opus of David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature; Hume's view on human nature was anti-rationalist, which in this context means, that you or any other human being can't change neither your own life nor society just through thinking. Changing something depends by definition on desicion, and desicion depends on - passion and desire. Take this very famous line from Hume: "- Reason is - and ought to be! - a slave of the passions!". Pure thought is never enough to get anything done; there must be passion and desire behind desicions to get change.

So the central question for Hume and the Scottish Four Period theorists will be the following: What makes passions and desires change? What's the strong engine to effect changing passions, softening them, making them grow milder, linking them on to a more agreeable and considerate course? The basic Enlightenment answer would become: Changing habits and customs.

Passions change with habits and customs, habits and customs changes with society. We could state this in the jargon of sociology: Informal institutions are more important to explain socio-historical change than formal institutions, or in other words: Social change will happen when habits and customs change, not when parliament promulgates new legislation. Legislation changes because society has already changed - not the other way around.

So in my opinion, from the late 18th century on colourful body arts became powerful symbols of the fundamental opposition to European / Western civilisation. With paint, ink and patterns on your body, you're not a civilised middle class man. Either you're a savage, or - if European - a criminal or/and a sailor.

Identity - ritual - identification.

We can look at traditional body arts using the concepts of identity, communication and identification as our point-of-departure:

Body art can be percieved as a method for expressing or hiding - individual and/or group - identity, but on the other hand kinds of body art can also be involuntarily applied to identify a person as a member of a - usually stigmatized - subgroup; for example using branding irons to brand slaves or certain categories of criminals.

Identity expression or external identification - in the end both are a matter of communication - of something to someone for some reason and using some medium. One important type of communication is the staged performance of identity in rituals where often masks have been used.

* * * * *

I promiss that there will be more pics and less theorizing in most of my posts to follow in this thread...

 

[gorgik9]

Body Paint.

Body Art / Body Paint among the Nuba people in Sudan, Africa.

I'll start in Sudan, Africa, and to be more precise: in the tribal villages in the Nuba Mountains in the middle parts of Sudan called the Kordofan. I've collected materials from three different sources: George Rodger, James C. Faris and Leni Riefenstahl.

It sould be noted that the rich body art traditions of the Nuba tribes doesn't exist anymore - it has been destroyed and is for all practical purposes extinct nowadays. I think its necessary to list what I take to be the main causes:

1) The flood of Western tourists unleashed in the late 1970s by Riefenstahl's two popular books became a serious disturbance of the life in the Nuba villages;

2) But the ultimate destruction came in the bloody civil war 1983-2005 between the Muslim fundamentalist government in Khartoum and their Christian opponents - the Nuba were caught in the middle, and Muslims and Christians were pretty equal in disliking nude male bodies.

Nuba Body Art 1 : George Rodger (1908-1995).

The true pioneer to present the life and culture and in particular the body art in the Nuba tribes to a Western audience was British photojournalist George Rodger (1908-1995) who in 1955 published (in French) his journeys in Nuba country in his photo book Le village des Noubas. As you'll see in the following set of pics, body paint isn't the only kind of body art in these pictures - there's scarification and more.

Nuba body art 2 : James C. Faris.

Another early pioneer was American cultural anthropologist James C. Faris who did his fieldwork in the 1960s and published an influential book in 1972, Nuba Personal Art. He gave a detailed semiotic analysis of the patterns and colour schemes in Nuba body paint.

Here's a YouTube clip - "The Nuba Bird Dance" - of a dance performance concieved and designed by Christopher Agostino based on the information in James Faris's book:



And here's also a link to a very informative blogpost by Agostino:
Anon URL

 

[gorgik9]

Nuba Body Art 3, : Leni Riefenstahl.

We'll get on deeply controversial turf in the third example - which without a doubt also is the publicly most well known example - of Nuba body paint: The set of pictures published originally in two large books 1974-76 by Hitler's court photographer / cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003). George Rodger deeply resented that he in a sense had paved the way for Riefenstahl's photo books, and James Faris has meeted out scathing critique of her work on the Nuba people.

Body Art in the Omo River Valley : Photos by Hans Silvester.

We'll stay in Africa, but moving on in a south-east direction from the Nuba Mountains in Sudan to the Omo River Valley in south-western Ethiopia!

Using all kinds of material at hand in their immediate environment - from clay, lime, soot and earth colours, via leaves, twigs and branches, to nuts, berries, fruits and feathers - to adorn their bodies has been a favourite traditional pastime for men and women, for children, youngsters and adults among the peoples living in the Omo River Valley.

But the traditional masters of Omo Valley body art - and this regrettably gives me some problems in this thread - have always been the children, since they have much more time to spend on body decoration than their elder siblings and parents.

Out of respect for the rules of our forum I will only post pictures of body art among adults and the elder youngsters. Anyone interested can find loads of spectacular photos by French-German photographer Hans Silvester on the internet - just Google his name and you'll find shiploads!

 

[Shelter]

Why they have been so hateful against the NUBA-WORK of Leni Riefenstahl - only because she has made the both movies of the Olympic Games 1936? Or because she has known AH personally and was his "darling"? Lenie Riefenstahl was a very great artist during a very dangerous time and afterwards.

 

[gorgik9]

Why they have been so hateful against the NUBA-WORK of Leni Riefenstahl - only because she has made the both movies of the Olympic Games 1936? Or because she has known AH personally and was his "darling"? Lenie Riefenstahl was a very great artist during a very dangerous time and afterwards.

Hrrmm...how should I put this?

Maybe thus: If you willingly keep company with the Devil, you don't have the right to whine if you get scarred, bled and burned...

1) Riefenstahl's ideological movies in the 1930s: In my own and many others opinion the movie where Riefenstahl's connection to the NSDAP and the Hitlerite ideology shines forth the strongest is "Triumph des Willens", the movie about the Nazi party ralley (die Parteitagungen) in Nürnberg 1934, which had its premier in 1935. It's been called the number 1 propaganda movie of all times, and Hitler leapt with joy. In his - Hitler's - opinion it was the best and most perfect glorification of the strength and beauty of the Nazi movement.

After WWII the French Nazi Maurice Bardèche argued that no other doent has such potential for resurrecting the myth of Hitler as Germanys and Europe's saviour.

In Riefenstahl's own opinion she was just a totally innocent little female artist telling the simple innocent story of the Parteitagungen in 1934.

Well excuse me Fraulein Rifenstahl, this is a heap of crap and bad lies!: The title of the movie was Hitler's own invention, and parts of the movie was shot in film studios. You had to get this OK with Joseph Goebbels and probably with der Führer himself. Simple little innocent movie? Cut the crap, just cut it...

2) Riefenstahl, the Nuba, George Rodger and James Faris:
If Riefenstahl hadn't got hold of a copy of Rodger's 1955 book on the Nuba tribes, she probably wouldn't have known of their existence and where to find them.

She also got a copy of Faris 1972 book and referred to it in the essays included in her 1974 & 1976 books and her many magazine articles and interviews, so she used Faris as the scientific authority to guarantee that the Fraulein got it right.

In Faris own opinion she got very much totally wrong; Riefenstahl projected a racist perspective on the Nuba people, their culture and body art.

In the 25 Years Anniversary edition of Riefenstahl's "Africa" published by Taschen Books we find what must be one of her last long interviews as a preface to this book. The interviewer asks her among other things if she ever experienced any problems with the Nuba people she met to photograph them, and she said of her own will that yes, she experienced a lot of trouble with the Nuba of Kau. They strongly recented her work with the camera and didn't like to stand in front of it. It seems she didn't have an inkling that she engaged in something morally rather questionable.

Leni Riefenstahl lived in a big elegant luxurious house outside München, and rumour has it that there was a saying among her neighbours that she lived "in the house the Nuba built" - her two big books and the number of international magazine interviews and articles was a spectacular commercial success.

As far as I know Fraulein Riefenstahl never sent as much as a Pfennig to the people in the Nuba mountains.

 

[Shelter]

Hrrmm...how should I put this?

Maybe thus: If you willingly keep company with the Devil, you don't have the right to whine if you get scarred, bled and burned...

1) Riefenstahl's ideological movies in the 1930s: In my own and many others opinion the movie where Riefenstahl's connection to the NSDAP and the Hitlerite ideology shines forth the strongest is "Triumph des Willens", the movie about the Nazi party ralley (die Parteitagungen) in Nürnberg 1934, which had its premier in 1935. It's been called the number 1 propaganda movie of all times, and Hitler leapt with joy. In his - Hitler's - opinion it was the best and most perfect glorification of the strength and beauty of the Nazi movement.

After WWII the French Nazi Maurice Bardèche argued that no other doent has such potential for resurrecting the myth of Hitler as Germanys and Europe's saviour.

In Riefenstahl's own opinion she was just a totally innocent little female artist telling the simple innocent story of the Parteitagungen in 1934.

Well excuse me Fraulein Rifenstahl, this is a heap of crap and bad lies!: The title of the movie was Hitler's own invention, and parts of the movie was shot in film studios. You had to get this OK with Joseph Goebbels and probably with der Führer himself. Simple little innocent movie? Cut the crap, just cut it...

2) Riefenstahl, the Nuba, George Rodger and James Faris:
If Riefenstahl hadn't got hold of a copy of Rodger's 1955 book on the Nuba tribes, she probably wouldn't have known of their existence and where to find them.

She also got a copy of Faris 1972 book and referred to it in the essays included in her 1974 & 1976 books and her many magazine articles and interviews, so she used Faris as the scientific authority to guarantee that the Fraulein got it right.

In Faris own opinion she got very much totally wrong; Riefenstahl projected a racist perspective on the Nuba people, their culture and body art.

In the 25 Years Anniversary edition of Riefenstahl's "Africa" published by Taschen Books we find what must be one of her last long interviews as a preface to this book. The interviewer asks her among other things if she ever experienced any problems with the Nuba people she met to photograph them, and she said of her own will that yes, she experienced a lot of trouble with the Nuba of Kau. They strongly recented her work with the camera and didn't like to stand in front of it. It seems she didn't have an inkling that she engaged in something morally rather questionable.

Leni Riefenstahl lived in a big elegant luxurious house outside München, and rumour has it that there was a saying among her neighbours that she lived "in the house the Nuba built" - her two big books and the number of international magazine interviews and articles was a spectacular commercial success.

As far as I know Fraulein Riefenstahl never sent as much as a Pfennig to the people in the Nuba mountains.

Hmmmmmmm ..........
In this connection I have to doom every great actor, author, artist, sculptor in Germany of this time?!? Have all of them been devils? All of them have been children of their time! Let us be happy to live today in free countries, where we are able to develop us as we want and where no "Führer", "Caudillo", "Duce" or "President" will have the right to restrict us.

 

[gorgik9]

Hmmmmmmm ..........
In this connection I have to doom every great actor, author, artist, sculptor in Germany of this time?!? Have all of them been devils? All of them have been children of their time! Let us be happy to live today in free countries, where we are able to develop us as we want and where no "Führer", "Caudillo", "Duce" or "President" will have the right to restrict us.

No, no, no - you absolutely shouldn't discard every "actor, author, artist, sculptor in Germany of this time", definitely not!

While Riefenstahl did keep company with the Devil - as did composer Carl Orff, philosopher Martin Heidegger, architect Albert Speer, and sculptors Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, just to name a handfull of famous examples - others didn't.

Some were outspoken opponents for ideological reasons, some just disliked the idea to have to adapt their work to some ideological blueprint, some were Jewish and in the end either murdered or went into exile, and some went into an inner, spiritual exile.

Anyone who thinks Heidegger, loyal NSDAP Parteimitglied for eleven years, was the only German philosopher should be ashamed: there was Edmund Husserl, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

 

[gorgik9]

Body Paint in indigenous people of North America: The paintings of George Catlin.

In my childhood I had the erroneous notion that body paint couldn't be anything else but the famous "war paint" of North American indians; well I got it wrong on every point - body paint isn't something exclusive to the indigenous peoples of North America and while "war paint" was used by war parties in many tribes, it wasn't at all the only kind of body paint.

Among the most famous doents of body paint among North American indians are the paintings of George Catlin (1796-1872)

 

[gorgik9]

Body Art in New Guinea: Everything at the same time!

Next to Greenland, New Guinea is the largest island in the world; the western part of the island is called Irian Yaya and is a province in the state of Indonesia, while the eastern part is the state of Papua New Guinea.

We find very rich cultural traditions of bodily adornments in many of the tribal cultures on New Guinea, and quite often we find a number of body arts used at the same time - body paint AND tattoo AND masks etc - so I could have posted my New Guinea pics anywhere in this thread:

 

[gorgik9]

Masks.

The use of masks is a cultural practice almost as ancient and universal as the use of body paint. I will, however, restrict myself to post on masks from two distinctly different cultures from parts of the world very distant from eachother: Ancient Greece and the Northwest Coast of North America (we're talking about the coastal areas from what is nowadays Oregon and Washington State in the south, continuing through British Columbia, Canada, and into south-eastern Alaska in the north.)

Ancient Greece.

Ancient Greece had two categorically different kinds of masks: 1) theatrical masks ; 2) religious masks.

Now the mening of this distinction could be questioned: Wasn't it the case that Greek tragedy emerged out of the cultural framework of the religious festival of the Greater City Dionysia and wasn't the annual theatrical competition staged in the Dionysos Theater at Athens, and wasn't there a stone altar dedicated to Dionysos standing in the center of the orchestra ?

Well, yes that was the case, but the conclusion that the distinction between theatrical and religious masks is bogus doesn't follow:

Theatrical masks were accessories whose function, like that of other items of costume, was to resolve certain problems of tragic expressivity.

A religious mask was either a mask designed to cover the face of one of the devotees for the duration of the ritual, or a mask designed to represent a deity. Dionysos was the god most closely connected to masks and was often called the god of the mask.

 

[gorgik9]

Nortwest coast, North America.

Typical of the Northwest coast tribal cultures were the spectacular skills in woodcarving and painting: the most well known expression of this artistic tradition of course were the large totem poles...

...and the carved and painted masks was another expression. The titles above the masks are the names of the tribes:

Bella Bella

Bella Coola

Chinook

Coast Salish

Haida

Haisla

Kwakiutl

Nootka

Tlingit

Tsimshian

 

[gorgik9]

Scarification.

Scarification occurs in transforming a temporary callus caused by a wound in the skin through rubbing ashes and vegetable dye into durable scar adornments.

Below is a YouTube video by social anthropologist Lars Krutak on scarification in Benin, West Africa.

 

[gorgik9]

Cosmetics.

I'll take a study by Swedish historian of economics Johan Söderberg titled "Rödar läppar och shinglat hår" (my translation: "Red lips and shingled hair") as my point-of-departure for some discussions in this post. It's a book on the consumption of cosmetics and personal hygiene products in Sweden 1900-1960. Söderberg's book ends in 1960 - the year yours truly was born.

Some basic changes in female and male fashion, hairdo and beard.

So we're entering a heavily gendered cultural field and with attitudes and norms historically changing much more than you'd think. I take it as a basic rule-of-thumb to never take for granted, that what's written about and published in novels and non-fiction books, magazine articles, newspapers and other kinds of journalism, actually mirrors what happened in society. The basic reason for portraying various phenomena will mostly be that they were considered problematic in one way or another by someone influential enough to get his or her opinion published - NOT the mere existence of the phenomena.

The foremost expression of the genderization of this field is that the media debate about fashion etc was mostly a debate about problematic changes in female fasion and hairdo, in particular in the decade after WWI; the fact that male fashion changed equally much and equally fast didn't result in a comparable flood of publications - the male changes weren't considered problematic to any comparable degree.

So which were the big problems? First of all the length of skirts and dresses - Victorian ladies had mostly floor length or almost floor length, but Coco Chanel and other fashion revolutionaries made calf-length the new standard with the earliest versions of Chanel's "little black dress". Women showing their legs - unheard of! Scandal! The world is about to end, not with a bang - but with a calf-length dress!

The second big female length problem was the length of her hair: Both my grannies were born in the first decade of the 20th century and had very long hair as young girls - and very long means VERY, VERY long. But becoming young adults in the 1920s they took a radical haircut and never went back to the hair length of theis girlhood.

Women without hair down to the waist - unheard of! Scandal! The world is about to end, not with a bang - but with shingled hair!

A third apocalyptic problem didn't have anything to do with any kind of length, but with red lips.

The world is about to end - because of red lipstick, powder and mascara.

 

[gorgik9]

Big but not problematized changes in male fashion in the 1920s.

What was is to truly be a man, a manly man, in the 19th century and up until WWI? First and last: To have an enourmous amount of facial hair usually called a beard. If you didn't have a big full beard, at least you had to have a big moustasch and/or gigantic side-whisker.

It didn't really matter if you were Tzar of Russia, Habsburg Emperor, king of Sweden or of Italy, or maybe a communist revolutionary, an anarchist, a liberal or a Swedish social democrate, but you could also be a novelist like Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy or Fjodor Dostojevsky, or American president Abraham Lincoln, Prince Otto von Bismarck or Swedish prime minister Hjalmar Branting - all had to have some kind of beard.

The same hairy basic rules also applied to scientists, philosophers and the begetter of psychoanalysis:

No matter what, all these men belonged to the Big Beard Club of the 19th century, but Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) didn't...

He wasn't just arguably the most important philosopher in the 20th century and a gay man - he was also a brilliant representative of the new clean shaved un-bearded man of the 20th century. And the young post-WWI man wasn't just clean shaved, he also often demanded a much shorter cut of his hair than many of the old 19th century beards had.

The safety razor with exchangable blades invented an patented by Gilette in 1895 made it possible, the gas attacks in the WWI trenches made it a necessity; using a gas mask demanded a tight fit to your face, which was impossible with a big beard. Either you shaved clean, or the mustard gas would make you cough up your own lungs. A pretty simple choice.

Other obvious changes at least in parts due to the war was the change from pocket watch to wrist watch.

My main point so far is very simple: The changes in male fashion about 1920 was as radical as the changes in female fashion, but the male changes weren't accompanied by the apocalyptic rhetoric related to the female changes.

 

[gorgik9]

The necessary difference between the sexes; or: The un-manly men with bracelets.

As I said before the amount of publication concerning the changes in male fashion was just a tiny fraction of the publication concerning female fashion, but there was some debate on what would make a man un-manly.

In a Swedish newspaper 1919 you could read the advertisement below (or rather my English translation of parts of the original ad) signed "Sveor", the plural form of the name Svea, the Swedish counterpart of French Marianne, German Germania or British Britannia - the female name symbolising the nation. So this is what "Sveor" had to say in the year just after WWI:

"Swedish men!
Do not adorn yourselves with trinkets! Do not wear female adornments! While it does become the rider and the sportsman to carry a simple watch in a leather strap on the left wrist - beware of the gold chain.

If your beloved give you a memory, use it at home, but do not carry it repulsively dangling on the wrist for all to see. It does not become a man with manly manners. Swedish men, beware of all habits indicating degeneration and effeminacy. Fine feathers make fine birds.

Be Swedish! "

The remarcable thing in my opinion is, that this ultranationalist and ultramasculinist piece of advertisement doesn't register, that the new middleclass thingy that would be named the wristwatch came along with the younger generation getting rid of that very masculine "adornment", the big beard, and neither did it register the new kind of "masculine adornment" waiting in the historical pipeline: the youthful muscular male chest!

Using a bracelet wasn't the only thing a manly man should refrain from in the 1920s: Other manly no-no's were the use of perfume, using silk stockings and silk shirts, in particular brightly coloured silk shirts.

 

[gorgik9]

Cosmetics, prostitution and washing your hair.

But let's get back to the third apocalyptic change in female fashion mentioned above: The use of cosmetics which was fiercly controversial in Swedish society in the early 20th century.

Powder and face make-up were pretty old fashioned stuff and actually used more in the 18th century than in the 19th; at the turn of the century 1900 the use of face make-up in particular, was percieved to have strong connotations of being a prostitute.

The modern type of lipstick in a metal case was probably first manufactured in the US in 1915, so compared to powder and face make-up, the red lipstick was the news - a very controversial new thing, since red lips had intense connotations to sexual activity.

Now everything wasn't as controversial as bracelets on men or red lips on women, but much discussed in magazines and advice books anyway; the voluminous discussion on how often to wash your hair is an obvious example.

In the earliest decades of the 20th century the usual advice was that you shouldn't wash your hair more often than with three weeks in between, and some thought that a whole month was the correct interval. From the 1920s the recommendation decreased to one or two weeks intervals, and in the 1950s it could be as low as 3-4-days in between.

These changing recommendations mirrors a lot more than changing fashions in personal hygiene and beauty care, such as the basic change from a society where the majority of people didn't have access to running warm and cold water (in particular not in the countryside), to a society where the vast majority had all the basic necessities like running cold/warm water and electricity, but my parents - both born in the 1920s - never made the daily hairwash their routine. That was for my own generation to "achieve".

 

[gorgik9]

Branding.

Branding can be described as a method for identifying something as something by making a durable mark on the surface of the identified thing by some external agent using a red hot branding iron.

Concerning the branding of humans, I really don't think that voluntary self-branding has ever existed anywhere, and this could be considered among the most important distinctions between branding and another category of body art in this thread, tattoo.

I think it's reasonable to say, that branding has been a method for two basically different kinds of identification: 1) Branding for identifying something as someones property ; 2) Branding for identifying someone as a convicted criminal.

Identifying property: Branding slaves.

I remember from my early childhood in the 1960s, that my maternal grandfather had some old things he had inherited from his parents - like some tools with wooden handles and some ancient pieces of furniture - which were branded. I could read my great grandfathers initials - SHG - on the handles of hammer and axe.

Now branding of tools and furniture is obviously not controversial, but other kinds of branding are.

At least in contemporary modern society the branding of cattle is controversial:

But of course the most controversial branding is the branding of human slaves:

Going back to ancient Greek society we find Aristotle discussing slavery in his big treatise on Politics, in particular in Book I, where he discusses what characterises a complete houshold (Greek: oikos) : He says that we will find three different kinds of relations within the complete household - the paternal relation of father and children; the spousal relation of husband and wife; and then as the third type the relation of slave owner and slave.

A slave in Aristotle's thought is a piece of living property, or alternatively a living tool. And if property is to be branded it's hard to avoid the conclusion that slaves are to be branded.

Of course there were instruments and methods other than branding for identifying slaves and restricting their freedom. One well known ancient method was to put on an iron collar around the slaves neck.

Ancient Roman slave collar below:

Slave collars from American slave owners:

There's a linguistic detail I can't resist mentioning: The Swedish word frälsning is the equivalent of English salvation, but the original meaning of the verb frälsa was fri-halsa, to free the neck (= Swedish "halsen") by breaking up the slave collar and throw it away.

Identifying criminals : penal branding.

I'll end this section on branding with a famous literary example of the function of penal branding in early modern Europe. It's the scene in Alexandre Dumas' novel "The Three Musqueteers" where the identity as a convicted criminal of the female evil genious in the story, Milady De Winter, is revealed: Milady has been branded on her shoulder by the hangman with the French Lily, the Fleur-de-Lis.

In the next post its time to start talking about tattoo!

 

[gorgik9]

Tattoo.

Talking about tattooing means to talk about the practice of inserting pigment under the skin to leave a permanent image, and no: the Bible didn't get it right - the Word was NOT in the Beginning.

That is: the word tattoo was not in the beginning of the practice, even though some relatively recent publications pretending to be scholarly (example: A. Lemma, Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Boby Modification, 2010) argues that Europeans had no previous aquaintances of tattooing before James Cook gave his reports on his journeys in the Pacific in the 1770s using the Polynesian word tatau. (Soon to become tattoo in English, tatouage in French, tatuaggi in Italian, tätowierung in German and tatuering in Swedish.)

But there had been indigenous European tattooing since times immemorial: Stone age man Ötzi of great post mortal fame since his mummified body was discovered in an Alpine glacier in 1991 was tattooed!

Other very ancient mummified tattooed bodies have been discovered in South America:

We know of small blue figurines from the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt with marks on the body of the figurines usually interpreted to represent tattoo:

Long before Cook and Bougainville popularized the polynesian word tatau in Europe with its many European derivatives, there had been a number of other designations: In English we find "punctuate", "paint", "engrave" and "pricking"; in Dutch "prikschilderen"; "merken" in German; "compungere" in Latin and "piquage" in French. Outside Europe we find "deq" in Kurdish, "sak yant" in Thai, and "horimono" in Japanese - just to give a small number of examples.

It actually seems that the only part of the world where tattooing traditions haven't existed for thousands of years is Australia: Australian Aboriginees weren't aquainted with tattooing, and it were the Europeans who introduced it into this continent in the late 18th century.