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What are the most significant things you’ve learned from studying their tattoos and body modification rituals?

I can never pass up a good story especially when it comes from a tattooed elder! I love interacting, listening, and interviewing elders and this has always been a big draw for me – sharing personal moments and experiences. Throughout the course of my career as a tattoo anthropologist, I never steer away from the words of my informants. I try my best to let them tell the stories in their own words and not make any grand generalizations along the way.

I look at my publications as collaborative cultural heritage projects that will ultimately be returned back to the communities that inspired them for their own use. I say "collaborative" because I work closely with elders and other indigenous knowledge experts before, during, and after any project because this is the key to establish and promote trust which has a potential impact on the quality, depth, and continuity of any research project itself. I do this work because I think it is critically important especially since these traditions are largely disappearing around the world and so few people are out their working to preserve them.

I also feel that as a writer and anthropologist, you really can’t understand the transformative and bodily experience of tattooing or scarification unless you go through with the process itself. And I wouldn’t be true to the words I publish unless I actively participated in these rituals including the receipt of tattoos or scars via the traditional methods of application.

It’s a very experiential thing and there are sounds, smells, feelings, and thoughts that circulate around you while being tattooed or scarified. While at the same time your mind wanders and reaches out into the past to envision what life must have been like in these places one or two hundred years ago.

Perhaps you can imagine what a hand-tapped tattoo feels like by reading someone else’s written account in an anthropology book, but unless you experience it for yourself on a personal level I don’t think you can get at the essence of it as a cultural practice and rite of passage that has physically and psychologically transformed its bearers since the dawn of time.

Moreover, tattooing is a mark of identity, and until you carry these permanent reminders on your body I don’t think you can truly understand what “makes” the people who wear them. It’s a shared process of pain, recuperation, and personal memory of the event.