| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Makiko Kuwahara. Tattoo: An Anthropology. New York: Berg. 2005. Pp. xix, 268. $29.95.
Makiko Kuwahara's ethnographic account of tattooists and tattooing in contemporary Tahiti has two stated goals: to address the "discontinuous nature of Tahitian tattoo history" as well as the "defining importance of the spatiality of tattooing" (p. 2). Only the first chapter looks at the history of Tahitian tattooing, while the remainder of the book ambles through descriptions of tattoos, tattooists, and tattooees. These descriptions attend to the antecedents of tattooing as well as the consequences. The reader is given insight into why tattooists become tattooists and why tattooees become tattooees. The formation of personal identity is, perhaps not surprisingly, articulated as an important feature of the decision to tattoo and to be tattooed.	1
At the end of the introductory chapter, in which the author lays out the purpose and plan of the book, I penciled a note to myself: "Is there enough for a book here?" The answer is "perhaps not." The history of Tahitian tattooing is represented as both discontinuous—proscribed by Christian missionaries beginning late in the eighteenth century—as well as continuous—adopted by Yankee and European mariners and surviving as a cultural transplant away from Polynesia. This creates the interesting (although certainly not unique) irony that contemporary Tahitians must look to Europeans in order to reinstate a native form. The book implicitly promises to address the ways in which (at least some) Tahitians wrestle with this history, but in many respects, the (dis)continuous history of tattooing is cast aside after the initial chapter.	. . .

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