In a few days (just waiting back for a final set of questions) I’ll be posting an interview with Kamal Jeet Sharma about his tattoo studio in Ludhiana, Punjab and his efforts to professionalize tattooing in India. Mark from Everything and Nothing snapped this photo of some of Kamal’s typical “competition”, a street tattoo machine he saw in Northern India in the Himalayan foothills.
This winter Tyler and some friends went to Tanzania. He’s a social anthropologist as well as a ModBlog reader, so while he was there he snapped some pictures of the widespread body modifications they saw. The guy on the left in the photo below is Kerry, their guide, who they met in Dar Es Salaam — almost all young men in Dar have similar Western-style tattoos.
On the way to Ngorongoro Crater they stopped near a small Maasai village where they were approached by the women in the pictures here who were hoping to sell them various trinkets. The piercing holes they have were made with iron knives, and with no sterilization, they’ve been increasingly vulnerable to bloodborne problems such as HIV/AIDS.
Tyler adds that you do see hi-tech though even in the deepest areas of the country, where they met the “cyber Maasai” above left in a quiet Zanzibari village using his earlobes to hold up his headphones. His bottom front teeth are also knocked out, a traditional body modification liked to breastfeeding and udder sucking. Thanks to Tyler for the pictures and background!
I got this wonderful letter from Isabel (click the photos to enlarge) –
Hello ModBlog,
Thanks for all the great images and stories and for updating them so often. It’s always a fun place to visit.
In June 2000, my husband and I quit our jobs, put our stuff in storage, and traveled around for almost nine months. We started in Indonesia and came home (grudgingly) after South Africa. In the process we visited Syria and fell in love with the people and culture. So much in fact that our daughter’s middle name is Damascus. While there, we saw several older women with the traditional face and hand tattoos. This beautiful lady was selling vegetables in a market and was kind enough to let us take her photo. Unfortunately, the new generation seems to have left the practice behind and they’re either covered up or very Western looking.
The other two shots are from our visit to a Batonga village in Tanzania. They welcomed us, showed us how they milk their cows and we got a few pictures. After this visit we went to a small bushman settlement and the only body mod we saw was a young kid with scars from a leopard attack. But that doesn’t seem to really qualify — wasn’t voluntary.
Hope you enjoy the pics as much as we love reliving the memories of all the beautiful people we met.
Best,
Isabel
Ritual, not play, as photographed by Arco at last October’s vegetarian rituals in Phuket, Thailand. Lots more photos from him and others in the cultural rituals gallery on BME.
Shawn sent me this footage (from some point in 1988) of his old friend Jack Yount and included the following..
“My first contribution to BME back in 1995 was a memorial article for my friend and mentor Jack Yount. The images that accompanied the article, as well as hundreds to be posted in following years to my own spcOnline site (currently offline), gave you a glimpse of Jack’s extraordinary modifications. This video, taken some years before we met, shows the start of his iconic transformation. It’s my hope however that you look past what Jack has done to his body and listen to the kindness and warmth in his voice.”
Video footage © 2008 Shawn Porter - Scarwars.net
Procedural photos continue after the break.
Abacrombie sent in these shots of a truly old-school tattoo experience at the home of Petelo Sula’Ape, a tattoo artist from Faleasiu, Samoa. The tattoo was done over about eight painful hours of tattooing in a single day. Several assistants helped by stretching the skin as Petelo hammered the tattoo in place using traditional tools in his open-air home — which was a good on account of all the smoking! Read more…
About six months ago Ian took a trip through Africa and snapped these pictures. Above, with the smaller gauge piercings in metal and wood, are Turkana tribesmen in Kenya, and below are Mursi tribeswomen that he photographed in Southern Ethiopia with ultra-large gauge stretched earlobes and lip discs. Continue reading for a closeup of the same picture.
This wonderful entry comes from my friend Julia (IAM).
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This is the story of my trip to the Mentawai islands off the coast of Sumatra in 2001.
Yeah, that’s right — I’m finally updating under my own username! Much thanks to Roo for helping me get posts here until now, but, as much as that help was appreciated, I’m definitely relieved that era is over.
Just to keep everyone in the loop as to the update schedule that was hinted at elsewhere, I agree that main site updates can be expected very soon and am also very happy to see that happening. BMEvideo is nearly ready to be udpated and should have new content within a day or two, and the main BME site should be flooded with experiences and images early in the week, if not sooner, depending on when a small number of technical issues that are barring that update can be resolved. I’ve had a chance to skim through some of the content that’ll be going up over the next weeks and I’m very excited and pleased about it — giddy, really — and I think you will be as well.
Roo and I will need to focus primarily on getting the main sites caught up, so we may be a little slow here on ModBlog over the first week, but I do have a few things I want to post later today. Let me prelude to them by posting a couple pictures from one of my favorite anthropological photo books, Africa Adorned. On the left is a Murle woman from Sudan with decorative facial scarification, and in the middle and on the right a Dinka man and woman, also from Sudan, with forehead scarification.
Anyway, stay tuned later today for a few brief posts.
Digger (”punk rock prehistorian” — check out his page to see his superb petroglyph tattoos and more pictures like this) sends in these photos of a Thai bronze age burial excavation (click through for a second photo), showing shell and marble bracelets as well as large shell ear tunnels.
