Richard Gilmour and Tattoo History by Jeet Heer National Post (November 18, 2004) The Olympics can unite the world in unexpected ways, not only by getting everyone to cheer outstanding athletic achievements but also by showing how pervasive certain cultural trends are. The most recent games in Athens deserve to be remembered as the tattoo Olympics. Of course tattooing has been on the upswing for more than a decade, but it was startling to see how global this phenomenon has become. It was especially visible on the bodies of sprinters ranging from the U.S. gold medallist Justin Gatlin (who had “Godspeed” on his left shoulder) to the Bulgarian champion Ivet Lalova (whose already lovely navel was decorated with a floral design). “If you want to a get a medal, get a tattoo,” was the lesson drawn by the Daily Times of Pakistan. The tattooing of the Olympics is evidence of a significant change in the role body art plays as an emblem of cultural identity. Hitherto, body modification has been used as a badge of tribal identity, a way for one group to distinguish itself from another. How do we tell if someone is one of us? By reading their bodies. Are they circumcised or not? What tattoos do they have? Do they elongate their necks? Chip their teeth? Pierce their tongues? These were not fashion statements, but rather the essential prerequisites of belonging to a group. Even in more recent times, tattooing was most popular among male social groups that had a very distinct life-experience that separated them from the rest of society: soldiers, sailors, prisoners, pirates, bikers. The tribal origins of tattooing can be seen in the rituals of these groups, which often use painful rites of passage to seal membership in their close-knit fraternities. Yet if almost everyone is free to get a tattoo, the tribal resonance of the act is lost. Shorn of its tribal roots, tattooing has become a form of generational self-branding, a way of asserting membership in the transitory club of youth. If we wanted to put a McLuhanite spin on this, we could argue that the young themselves form a tribe in the modern global village. In fact, McLuhan has some authority on this subject, since he prophetically predicted in the late 1960s that body markings would become increasingly popular as a way of creating new tribal identities. Yet there are major differences between the old tribal tattoos and the new faddish tattoos, so McLuhan’s insight is only half-helpful. To get a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of body art, I turned to the excellent doctorial thesis my friend Richard Gilmour recently completed at York University. Titled “Imagined Bodies and Imagined Selves”, Gilmour’s thesis examines the stories of Europeans who were captured by native tribes from 1520 to 1763. Some of these captives were “redeemed” (a word originally meaning to be freed after the payment of a ransom, with roots in the Biblical story of Exodus); others stayed with their Native captors, often by choice. Surprisingly, tattooing and body modification take up a significant part of this story. Seeking to integrate their captives into the tribe, many Native groups used elaborate rituals to transform European bodies, including tattoos. Thus in 1539 or 1540 the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto came across his countryman Juan Ortiz, who “had his arms tattooed after the manner of the Indians and in no wise did he differ from them.” The importance of adoption in certain native cultures explains why this type of body modification was so central. Groups like the Iroquois defined themselves not in biological terms through bloodlines but culturally as a people that had undergone certain rites of passage. They also felt a strong imperative to keep their numbers stable. Therefore, if an Iroquois died in war or through illness, both increasingly common after European contact, the tribe would capture an outsider and turn them into a newly minted Iroquois. A tough physical regimen and body modification were both part of the program to replenish the tribe. Writing to a friend in 1753, Benjamin Franklin marveled at how successful the native technique of adoption was. Many “redeemed” captives would try to return to those who had captured them. Franklin noted that when “white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to say among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.” Aside from being a marker of assimilation, tattooing had a wider significance in the encounter between Europeans and natives. In the early centuries when they didn’t share a common language, visual signs offered a quicker route to try and understand an exotic culture. One Jesuit priest talked about trying to read the body of the Indians as he would a book. Yet this textual analysis of the body had its limits. Already steeped in medieval lore about monsters at the edge of the world, European settlers saw tattoos as license to denounce the natives as grotesque, alien and possibly demonic. As so often in cultural exchange, encounter with another simply served to reinforce a beleaguered sense of self. Hence the real upshot of Gilmour’s thesis is the creation of a new American identity based precisely on the trauma and fear engendered by captives going native. Like all good scholar, Richard Gilmour brings a personal passion to his studies. His own body is adorned with many beautiful tattoos. If you look at the underside of his arms from the palm of his hands to his turn of his elbows, you’ll see an anatomically accurate etching of his bone structure. This reminder of the skeleton beneath the skin is closely tied with a persistent theme in his writing, the history of the body. Unlike more ethereal historians, Gilmour never lets us forget that the people he writes about had bodies, which felt pain and pleasure. It’s a marker of how things have changed that tattoos don’t scare people as much as they used to. Yet all good history takes us to a foreign land, where things are very different. On that level alone, Richard Gilmour’s thesis is a great success, for reminding us what tattoos once meant.