Making multiple skins : tattooing and identity formation in French Polynesia
Abstract
This thesis examines hoe people situate themselves in the world, physically and
ideologically through manipulating the body. Acknowledging that the body is
constructed socially and culturally, it analyses tattooing of contemporary Tahiti in
French Polynesia, on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork. Tahitian tattooing was embedded in a social and cosmological system in the pre/
early contact period, and it had been transformed through interaction with Europeans
and Christianization. Since it was abandoned due to missionaries' suppression in the
1830s, there was an undeniable absence oftattooing in Tahitian history until its revival
in the 1980s. The socio-cultural implications of tattooing in the pre-/early contact period
were displaced by those of youth culture, globalization, modernization, and prison
culture. The thesis examines this discontinuous nature of Tahitian tattooing which is
different from other Polynesian tattooing such as Samoan, and its impact on the
contemporary revival. It also aims to address the issues of corporeality, spatiality, temporality, and
ideology of tattooing. The thesis explores the formation of identities and social relationships, through examining the mobility and confinement of people, object, practice, and knowledge, in the context of taure'are'a (adolescent) culture, exchange between Tahitian and non-Tahitian tattooists, geo-politics within French polynesia and in the Pacific, and the prison culture. It also investigates the concept of sequence of time, by analysing the significance of "the past", "tradition", and "ancient" in the discourse of tattooing on the process of constructing adolescent masculinity, and that of the cultural and ethnic identities: and also the concept of the past, present and future in the discourse of art festivals and in the prisoners' contemplation. The thesis shows that tattooing is an embodiment and representation of identities
and social relationships resulting from objectification of their own body, and others, in a
shared time and space, and it is also a way of making discontinuous history continuous,
and secluded and disconnected places interconnected.