Tattoo ─ Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West

The popularity of tattoos today is a revival of a practice begun in the late eighteenth century, when Westerners first made contact with the native peoples of the Pacific. The term “tattoo” entered Europe with the publication of Captain Cook’s voyages in the 1770s, and Pacific tattoos became fashionable in the West as sailors, whalers, and explorers brought home tattoos from Tahiti, the Marquesas, New Zealand, and Polynesia. In recent years these early contacts have been revived, as native tattooists from Oceania have begun tattooing non-Polynesians in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere.

Tattoo is both a fascinating book about these early Oceanic-European exchanges, which also documents developments up to the present day. Documenting these complex cultural interactions in the first part of the book, the authors move from issues of encounter, representation, and exchange to the interventions of missionaries and the colonial state in local tattoo practices. Highly illustrated with many previously unseen images, for example the original voyage sketches of the first Russian circumnavigation of 1803–6, this is a fascinating account of early tattooing and cultural exchange in Oceania.