Description: "This historically rigorous and theoretically nuanced collection of essays takes the reader on a global journey marked by successive phases of incomprehension, clash, desire, appropriation, and indigenous renewal. Through their meticulous chartings of the permutations of local differences, changing constructs of art, and shifting power relations the book produces critical new understandings of the process of cross-cultural translation--and its impossibility--indispensable to students of world systems of art and culture."--Ruth Phillips, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture and Professor of Art History, Carleton University
Review Quotes: "Marking the body is a unique act of social and aesthetic primacy. The authors of Tattoo bring these extraordinary body-marking traditions to life, elucidating in a range of sites and perspectives both the historic and contemporary importance of these forms. Through the lens of this engaging, insightful, and multidisciplinary volume, body practice and theory, history and sociology, art and ritual, East and West not only not only rub up against each other, but also inform and transform each other."--Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University