Tattooed People as Taboo Figures in Modern Society - Tattooed People as Taboo

... Tattooed People as Taboo Figures in Modern Society - Tattooed People as Taboo I will open with words from "The Body Decorated," which I think aptly describe the significance of tattooed women in our society, "The body is the physical link between our souls, the outside world, and ourselves. It is the medium through which we most directly project ourselves in social life; our use, decoration and presentation of it say precise things about the society in which we live, the degree of our integration within that society, and the controls which society exerts over the inner person" (Ebin, 1979:iv). While often dismissed as a somewhat mystical and an incomprehensible aesthetic, tattoo was once a living symbol of common participation in the cyclical and subsistence culture of the hunter-gatherer. Tattoo recorded the "biographies" of personhood, reflecting individual and social experience through an array of significant relationships that oscillated

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