Reinscribing Subculture: Commodification and Boundary Work in Traditional Tattooing

• In Event: 380 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Consumption and Embodiment: Intersections and Identities (co-sponsored with Section on Consumers and Consumption)

Abstract

Using ethnographic data and interviews with over 50 tattooers and collectors, this work identifies a new figure emerging from the process of subcultural commodification (Goulding and Saren 2007), Through appeals to tradition as claims of authenticity “traditional” tattooers and their patrons engage in boundary work in order to reinscribe subcultural distinctions in the face of popularization. Unlike tribal entrepreneurs, who promote commercial interest in subcultural forms and fashions in the pursuit of economic capital, traditionalists privilege the pursuit of subcultural capital by invoking tradition as one mechanism of distinction. Traditionalists maintain the symbolic boundary between the sacred and the profane, and thereby reinscribe social boundaries between real subculturalists and outsiders.

Author

• David Paul Strohecker, University of Maryland-College Park