Tattooing and the Paradox of Decolonization

Since I have been lacking the drive to update and upload pictures of my work, I thought I might keep my readers entertained by writing some useful and perhaps helpful stuff for those that are interested in not just the tattoo images…I chucked up this title as you can see in the bottom here randomly just to excite you academic readers but to be honest, there is nothing academic about it. I’m doing my own little research on the side on tattoos and I thought it be good to keep me motivated by writing random stuff up here. So this is the first part, and hopefully in the near future, I’ll feel motivated again to pick up where I’ve left you….

‘Tattooing and the Paradox of Decolonization’

Tattooing ‘was’ an integral element of the Tongan cultural weave prior to European influence and it is said today that it is enjoying a renaissance-like popularity. And although I feel this to be true in the line of work I do here as a hobby, I still encounter in many other dimensions of our social life elements of disapproval and condemnation. There are many factors contributing in various ways to this paradox, and to know these would require hours and hours in the library. Without being too-lacking-in-respect for those that do spent hours in the library doing series research, yet sound a little smart, I want to assume some kind of authoritative voice by designating my argument from a tattooist and hands-on type of perspective.

I started this blog at first to display and share some of my tattoo work and often when the climate was right, put in some smart-thinking type of stuff here and there – without sounding too academic and pretentious. Like most people that call themselves ‘artist’, I enjoy an array of things and some of which you will never imagine to be together in a person’s playlist. But back to the above paradox now. I realize this because almost every Tongan male between the age of 18 and 35 flaunts some type of ink and in most if not all these works include Polynesian patterns. And seeing this, most of what comes into your mind automatically is, there are a lot of people, young people, getting tattooed. There used to be a stigma attached to it and the mental or psychological structure of our society back then saw tattooing and people with tattoos as unfitting, hence its significance in the development of subcultures advocating counter-ideas to mainstream societies.

Perhaps the re-emerging of tattooing widely claimed today would be designated from a popular culture-dominated psyche. Its renaissance would be enjoyed and heralded mostly from within popular culture. But popular culture is kind of a paradox in itself in that though it is widely perceived as mainstream; popular culture always seeks to explore and exploit the margin and elements of cultures unknown to itself. In this sense, popular culture might as well be a contemporary flipside to colonization and thus cultural imperialism. One understanding of popular culture is that it exists to demarcate society and therefore contribute to the ever-subtleties of systematic segregation of race and class.

Popular culture feeds on commercialization and rhetoric. For this, it is befitting to describe it as a type of simulation to an extent. If you’re reading this and you are an expert on popular culture, you might be offended by my loose usage of the term ‘popular culture’. I understand that it shouldn’t be broadly used and over-generalized but this is blogging. By popular culture, I just mean the things that are exhaustively fed to us through mass media. Even underground hip-hop is considered with the same vehement as commercialized rap because it makes those who support and enjoy it look differently cool. By differently cool I mean that in these days, it’s ‘cool’ to be different – almost as if our aesthetic value is judged not only in accordance but more so against the mainstreams artistic and social taste.

So where does tattooing come into all this? My view is that the widely claimed idea of tattoo’s renaissance coexists with popular culture’s exploiting nature. The idea that popular culture feeds on commercialization and rhetoric comes from the belief that it sanctions its progressive need to stay afloat by exploiting other forms. Here is an example; Jesus is both a popular culture and religious figure but more so the latter. Jesus is the reason for Christianity as a religion and He has almost always been known solely in that light. Now, elements of his teaching and divine-like personality has been isolated from its religious context and fused with other feel-good beliefs and ideologies. Meaning that the mentioning of his personality isn’t always limited to religion nowadays. We all know the association of Jesus and hippies due to his popular image as peaceful, long haired and beard or Kanye West’s well publicized T-Shirts that reads ‘Jesus is my homeboy’ – amidst many other attempts to popularize Jesus or simply appealing to his popularity.

This is a good example because it highlights the ways in which popular culture process other forms not to merely announce the death of their essence or authenticity but also, and perhaps more importantly draw on their significance for its own rhetoric and thus profitability. I don’t mean to sound pretentious and over-academic here but I want to use the term ‘palimpsest’ as a very useful analogy to this argument. Before I do though, I’ll continue later in part 2…