Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century

2. Wearing the Dead

49 2 Wearing the Dead Wearing Our Mourning The development of tattooing is one way to carry the dead around with us, while also making the status of the bereaved clearly evident to those around them. Tattooing is a visual marker that concretely indicates one’s status as bereaved to the community, by memorializing the dead through the inscribing of names, images, or even replicas of body parts (such as handprints or footprints of the deceased) on living bodies. Tattoo remembrances are literally carried with us, age with us, and allow a virtual afterlife for the dead, simultaneously establishing the identity of the bereaved in a fixed and permanent way in a society that denies the corpse and no longer gives space for grieving. Here we move from the missing dead body to the practice of using living bodies to recover the dead. A Brief Global History of Tattooing Tattooing has a long history, cycling through social acceptance, revulsion , and indifference. Though many histories put the popularity of the modern practices of tattooing as originating in Polynesia,1 it has been around since the beginnings of humankind; the first evidence of tattooing was found on the frozen remains of a Neolithic man discovered in 1991 in the Italian Alps.2 Greek and Roman histories , however, provide the first extant records of tattoos as a means of control, employed by the state to coerce, control, and stigmatize people . Most recently, the Nazi regime employed this device in World War II with Jews and other prisoners held captive in concentration camps. Through the association of tattoos with slaves or criminals, the state’s use of tattooing to exert control over the body is one of the 50 Virtual afterliVes ways that tattoos historically became associated with marginal society . It is also among the Greeks and Romans that the practice of tattoo removal first seems to have emerged—the attempt to erase the state-enforced marginal status of those tattooed.3 In the modern West, tattooing has traditionally been associated with marginal society—the lower and working classes, soldiers, convicts , motorcycle gangs, and circus performers—but this is a skewed understanding if one looks at the history of tattooing in its entirety. In Victorian times tattooing gained popularity in upper-crust society, among women in particular, as they tattooed their lips as a marker of status.4 This identification of tattooing with status is once again emerging among today’s American middle class. An association between celebrities and tattoos first became apparent in the 1990s. Tattooing in American culture today is so commonplace that children receive temporary tattoos in their goodie bags at birthday parties, Sesame Street featured tattoos in a show, and there is even a Tattoo Barbie.5 In short, tattoos are one of the markers of belonging to a middle-class suburban culture with a discretionary income. Today one in four Americans has a tattoo,6 and among American youth ages eighteen to twenty-nine, nearly 40 percent have at least one tattoo.7 American youth subculture has rescued tattooing from its most recent marginal status, though part of its appeal to youths might in fact be its marginality, so it remains to be seen whether tattooing will continue to enjoy its recent comeback in mainstream society. In China tattooing was also traditionally practiced among marginal peoples and, as occurred in the Greco-Roman period in the West, was sometimes used as a way to enforce status and class differences . Criminals, prostitutes, and those among the lower classes in China often underwent punitive tattooing as a way to easily identify their lower status at city gates. Tattooing enjoyed a brief surge of popularity , however, with the portrayal of tattooed bandits in a famous Chinese classic novel, The Water Margins, or Shui Hu Zhuan.8 The novel is based on a true story of bandits active during the Song Dynasty ; the thieves were colorful characters whose tattoos were as illustrious as their characters. When The Water Margins emerged in popular Chinese culture in fourteenth-century China, tattooing briefly became popular among the literary elite, but it eventually re- 51 Wearing the Dead turned to its marginal status, where it remained until very recently.9 Today in China tattooing is still associated mostly with criminals10 and those on the margins of Chinese society, such as the ethnic minorities of the Lis in Hainan and the Dulong in Yunnan.11 In...