In the article titled Body Art published by New Your Times,
author Michael D. Lemonick talks about how body art has been around for
thousands of years and describes some types of body art and their meanings.
“There is no known
culture in which people do not paint, pierce, tattoo, reshape, or simply adorn
their bodies” says anthropologist Enid Schildkrout of the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City. We use
our bodies for art because it is the nearest, most intimate canvas. In two separate showcases, this phenomenon
was celebrated. One of them was an
exhibit called Body Art: Marks of Identity, and the other was a book called
African Ceremonies. In the exhibit, they
devoted over 4,000 years of body modification.
Based off of tradition, body art has been used to attract the opposite
sex, boost self esteem, identify with age or gender group, and mark rights of
passages, like puberty or marriage. With
Indigenous people, those personal adornments stay the same. Teenagers use body art and piercings as a
form of independence and freedom, or to fit in.
People in their 20s and 30s have latched unto to “neotribal” look that
has borrowed from cultures of the South Pacific to the Amazon. It’s there way of
saying that they don’t belong to the supermarket society.
I think that body art
is amazing. I love how people express
themselves in so many different ways through body art. I myself have tattoos and piercings because
they are a way of expressing who I am as a person and what I love. I don’t do it to fit in at all. I do it because it means something to me that
some people wouldn’t understand. I plan
on getting more tattoos when the time comes.
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