Esther Liberman Cuenca

Beyond dispelling misconceptions in popular histories—such as the commonly held belief that Europeans first encountered tattoos when mariners brought home the practice from the South Pacific in the eighteenth century—this project examines premodern tattooing from a global perspective. In showing how people conceptualized the relationship between custom and tattooing, this project introduces the concept of “ethnographies of skin,” a genre of writing found in geographic surveys or chronicles describing tattooing customs of “foreign” peoples to inscribe meaning into culture. These epidermal markings, which could signal an individual or group’s religious devotion, criminality, or social status, were not static expressions but encoded dynamic narratives about the lives of the tattooed, tattooers, and their observers.