This paper explores a further instance of tattoo as punishment in colonial Burma in 1889 when a district superintendent of police was charged with the ‘outrage’ of having the face of a local woman tattooed against her will. While there were various instances of tattooing as punishment in the colonial period few became the focus of public inquiries by the British government. In analysing the reasons for this official inquiry and the public debate that surrounded it this chapter considers the varying meanings given to tattooing in the colonies by the metropolitan government. This case provides a comparative example for considering the ways tattooing in the Pacific in a similar period was understood by those at ‘home’ in the West.

This paper is a comparative ethnohistorical investigation of representations of 'tattowing'/'tatouement' in the artwork and writings of members of British and French voyages in Polynesia during the classic era of scientific exploration from the 1760s to the 1830s. The major voyages considered are those of Bougainville (1766-9), Cook (1768-71, 1772-5, 1776-80), La Pérouse (1785-8), Bligh (1787-9, 1791 3), Vancouver (1791 5), Freycinet (1817-20), Duperrey (1822-5), and Dumont d'Urville (1826 9, 1837 40). The places mainly considered are Tahiti, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Marquesas. Such voyages often involved relatively extended encounters with Polynesians and brought together the trained empirical observation of naturalists with the expertise of artists whose job was to produce systematic, naturalistic images of the people, places, and things they saw. The paper maps variations and transformations in the practice of tattooing in different Polynesian settings by following the production and reproduction of knowledge through diverse media and genres of representation, both published and unpublished – including journals, narratives, and scientific treatises; and field sketches, finished drawings, paintings, engravings, and lithographs. It is tempting but inappropriate to regard such representations as nothing but the discursive appropriation of passive native bodies by a dominant imperial gaze or the fashion for tattoo amongst European voyagers as mere artistic colonization. First-hand drawings of tattoo were always products of performative interaction as was indigenous tattooing of European bodies. Both processes hinted at cryptic stories of crosscultural agency and exchange. Accordingly, I relate outsiders' representations of tattoo not only to contemporary metropolitan artistic and discursive conventions but to the actual circumstances of their generation in specific situations of crosscultural interaction in Polynesia. The ethnohistorical potential of such representations derives partly from tensions between different genres, media, and authors and partly from the subtle countersigns of indigenous agency lodged in what visiting Europeans wrote and drew.

This paper brings to light practically all known materials produced by the participants in the first Russian expedition to the Pacific on the Nadezhda and Neva which spent twelve days on the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas. They included the expedition's commanders and ordinary officers of Baltic German and Russian origin, German-born naturalists and Russian-born merchants, the high-ranking Russian official and the priest. Twelve members of the expedition wrote over twenty accounts while Tilesius, Langsdorf, and Levenstern produced dozens of visual images of Nukuhivans. The texts include official and private travel journals, specific accounts of tattooing by Tilesius and Langsdorf published in Russian, and private letters. The well-known engravings of tattooed Nukuhivans published in Kruzenstern's Atlas and Langsdorf's travel account are juxtaposed with original field drawings and watercolours by Tilesius and drawings in Levenstern's detailed private journal. This rich and varied early archive is of great value for an ethnohistory of the spectacular full-body tattoo called te patu tiki in Marquesan and described in Russian as 'speckled bodies'. Moreover, the study of these Russian materials in the context of journals by William Crook, an LMS missionary who stayed at Nukuhiva in 1797-98, and Edward Robarts, a beachcomber who was one of the main sources of information for the Russians, as well as later ethnohistorical research by Dening, Thomas, and Gell, allows the identification of the subjects of most of the Russian drawings with concrete members of the family of 'King' Keatonui. The anecdotal evidence in the Russian accounts, especially in the private journals, enriches the available information about Keatonui's family and personifies the seemingly objectified types portrayed in the published engravings. It also describes the circumstances under which some drawings were made, provides a glimpse of the variety of attitudes which tattooing provoked among different people, and makes it clear that the Russians themselves were tattooed during their stay in Nukuhiva.

This paper examines 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 European contact and Christianization. Since it was abandoned due to missionaries’ suppression in the 1830s, there was an undeniable absence of tattooing 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 paper examines this discontinuous nature of Tahitian tattooing which is different from other Polynesian tattooing such as Samoan, and its implication in the contemporary revival. It also aims to address the issues of corporeality, spatiality, temporality, and ideology of tattooing. The paper explores the formation of identities and social relationships, through examining the mobility and confinement of people, object, practice, and knowledge, particularly in the context of taure’are’a (adolescent) 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. The paper shows that tattooing is an embodiment and representation of identities and 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.

Hawaiian tattoo traditions are some of the most intriguing and little know of all the Polynesian tattoo traditions. The earliest European explorers to Hawai'i had already been exposed to the tattooing traditions of Tahiti, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and other parts of Polynesia and were not surprised or really interested in the Hawaiian tradition of uhi (tattooing). There are few references by Captain Cook to the art of uhi; other early explorers to Hawai'i had varying accounts of uhi practices and design. These accounts were superficial at best and did not give any cultural or technical insights to the extent and expertise of the Hawaiian Kahuna Ka Uhi (tattoo expert). During the overthrow of the Hawaiian religious system in 1819, many cultural practices that directly connected or were heavily influenced by Ho’omana Hawai'i (Hawaiian religion) were discouraged. This however did not stop the practices of Ho’omana Hawai'i such as hula (dance), kalai wa’a (canoe building) and uhi to name a few but led to many of these practices to be done far from public scrutiny and acknowledgement. A few families and individuals into the early 20th century carried on the uhi traditions. The passing on of these traditions aurally by these individuals and families and how they intersected with western perspectives are the foundation of this paper.

Since the publication of Modern Primitives in 1989 by the alternative art press, Re/Search, the renewal of western tattooing through the use of tribal styles has burgeoned. Over the same period, a number of leading American and European tattoo artists developed personal and professional links with Polynesian practitioners such as Sulu’ape, Chime and Nunes. Over this period, ‘modern primitivism’ like neo-paganism and a variety of new age movements, has been criticized for a facile idealization of the exotic other, in effect for its perpetuation of classic primitivist assumptions. This chapter shows that current engagements with Polynesian and other tribal tattoo traditions and practices cannot be reduced to this model; in some cases they entail a more meaningful and unpredictable cultural exchange. These cross-cultural exchanges contribute to the creation of particular socio-cultural identities and relationships embedded in the shared experience of the practice of tattooing.