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S/kinship: The relational ontology of tattoos in contemporary Australian discourse and practice

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posted on 2023-11-22, 05:16 authored by Susannah OstojicSusannah Ostojic, John TaylorJohn Taylor
In examining affective motivations and meanings associated with kin-based tattooing, this article proposes a practice of ‘s/kinship’: the tangible inscription of relational personhood on the body. While research on the practice of Western tattooing has long been drawn into discourses of deviance and individual identity, little attention has been paid to the tattooing of social relations. Drawing on surveys and interview data, this article highlights the significance of kinship and other forms of relationality in tattooing, bringing attention to how these are manifested through the skin as expressions of social proximity, permanence, and porosity. In doing so an analytic approach to s/kinship is developed to foreground the practice of tattooing as an expression of relational personhood, one that highlights the permeability of personhood as a salient ontological feature in the social life of tattoos and the tattooed.

History

Publication Date

2023-08-01

Journal

The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Volume

34

Issue

2

Pagination

(p. 94-109)

Publisher

Wiley

ISSN

1035-8811

Rights Statement

© 2023 The Authors. The Australian Journal of Anthropology published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Australian Anthropological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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