Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

“Going On View”: The Topology of Female Facial Tattooing Among the Drung

Stéphane Gros

Résumé

In this paper I show that female facial tattooing among the Drung of China is a processual and quasi-initiatory transition to womanhood. It is inseparable from the productive relationships established between women, involving generative powers that are transmitted, revealed, and represented by tattooing. As a result, a woman’s facial tattoo is an inside that presents the highest relativity—a fold of the outside, the exteriorization of the interior and simultaneously the interiorization of the exterior, as A. Gell put it. Tattooing relies on a form of transversal relatedness that in turn instantiates a differentiation in each woman by unveiling her generative value, which is also made up of affect, temporality, and memory. In this bio-economy of relatedness and subjecthood, a woman’s facial tattoo is therefore a unique actualization that individualizes her just as much as it binds her to the collective, as she from then on becomes an active agent of social reproduction. The paper analyzes the various ways in which facial tattooing is a key element in a process of socialization and individuation by which the “social skin” proves to be an interface more than a surface. Tattooing—by puncturing the skin, causing bleeding and pain—sustains and marks the social and physiological time of the transition to nubility, preparing women for their fertile becoming. In this process, the woman’s body constitutes the site of an intersubjective actualization and participation, a cosmological assemblage in which diverse forces condense in interplay between the exterior and the interior.

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Dates et versions

hal-03955212 , version 1 (24-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03955212 , version 1

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Stéphane Gros. “Going On View”: The Topology of Female Facial Tattooing Among the Drung. American Ethnological Society Conference, Stanford University, Mar 2017, Stanford (CA), United States. ⟨hal-03955212⟩
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