A quarterly specialized journal
The Message Of Folklore from Bahrain To The World

Reading the body in its tattooed transformations

Issue 7
Reading the body in its tattooed transformations

Ibrahim Mahmoud - Syria

P erceiving its cultural, social and psychological aspects, it is packed corpora of meanings, i.e., ‘corps’, what moves of meanings and symbols inside, but what emerges out at the level of direct view, and has been manifested in the form of lines and signs. It is the neglected of the name as it is known by its human characteristic, skin-term virtual common among humans in general. It has been busy otherwise where it was made sure it that has the character of the local environmental: the collective, tribal, as a geographically describer, and socially public and has individually been differentiated. If the impact of an active role in the body, which is surrounded by leather chairs, and how was seen every time as a fertile field that accepts tillage or farming, and plant what we want to plant on the surface, to be a surface teacher>s of the outside speech to the inside, not even some of the perceived and taken internally, and it seemed in the extended relief on the skin in different places of it. The tattoos, as a new trace resisting forgetting, controls the rider as an individual belonging to a group, or belonging to a cultural system meaning it, it calls for reading its multi-faceted. It is the surface wave tempestuous despite apparent calm, and closely attached to savant culture and popular one, which represents an active memory promising many things. The phenomenological methods enable us to identify the outline of the tattoo in its different stages, and this makes it easier to move in this regard, at the level of the material and what can be said about it once analyzed, we can not claim that what is contained therein is different to what it was said, or for previously, but to pursuit the different to discover it more! Because the tattoo is perceived in its physical formation, for this we dismiss this aspect (technical), going forward to its wide history, but different in its aspects, since any reference to it without limitation, may rule it out from its practical or functional frame. A valuable book is (Anthropology of the body and modernity) written by David Bruton, outlines the most important merits of the body, its hidden aspects, how history is altered around him on many levels: medical, philosophical, semegraphical, and semiological.... etc. «3», but what is not mentioned as possible is its link in its living nature, divine nature, giving local dimensions, regional, concerning certain people in certain situations without others, in the position of the law or authority, or in connection with international dimensions in terms of tattoo manifestations cross-border, known by Stars and sportsmen (wrestling, for example) and others ... In the context of a remarkable title, namely (community of non-state), Pierre Glaster takes us with him into the world of tattoo, in a tribal society, which is expected to threaten constantly its sons from the imminent danger, and tattooing teaches them to do so. A sub-title of the book (torture memory), with a screaming content, what is tortured more is mentioned more because it is seen in the danger of the outside! No person, who learned the ritual and through the impact that it is impossible to get rid of it, can ignore what is prepared for him, of course is not who will have to live in the shadow of a memory taken from the skin physical and secure headquarters as if carved and the eye can read without mistakes the engraved, as far as the other stresses: Maybe the enemy standing by more than others, the need to revitalize this memory, because this outside refers to the imminent danger.

All Issue