Disembodied: Indigenous Tattooing and the Virtual Archive

Abstract

Indigenous cultural tattooing has reawakened in BC. While only marginally recorded in the anthropological archive, a contemporary virtual archive has emerged on social media that documents and widely circulates images of tattooing practice. This virtual archive contains thousands of images, sorted into categories through the use of hashtags. These categories are broad, permeable, and user-created. This virtual archive contrasts sharply with the structured analogue archive that anthropologists have traditionally kept. The virtual archive may satisfy the social communication potential of tattooing in making the practice visible to an audience, but that visibility may also create vulnerabilities. Indigenous tattooing has re-emerged in the context of an increasingly popular mainstream tattooing practice that relies heavily on images from social media and the internet to produce designs. The tension between visibility and vulnerability of tattoo images in the virtual archive can be attributed to three main factors. First, most Indigenous tattoo artists are pursuing this practice with an understanding of Indigenous property law and ownership which the virtual archive is not aware of. Second, recording and circulating a tattoo as an image may sever the link between a design’s physical mark and the meaning it carries. Third, the virtual audience may not be equipped to read the significance of Indigenous tattoo designs. This research is an entry point into considering how an archive such as social media impacts meaning by disembodying the living practice of tattooing and circulating that practice as flat images.