Tattooing in the Marquesas

Willowdean Chatterson Handy

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780486466125
• eBook ISBN:
  9780486113593
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

This definitive source on the intricate tattoos of Polynesia's Marquesas Islands offers a rare glimpse of a dying art. Because of the colonial authorities' 1884 ban on tattooing, there remained only a single surviving tattoo artist at the time of this 1921 survey—and a dwindling number of living examples. These 38 plates of black-and-white drawings and photographs provide an unusually complete and intimate record of a sophisticated art form.
The Marquesas consist of a dozen rugged volcanic islands that lie 1,000 miles northeast of Tahiti. Rich in oral traditions, folklore, and decorative arts, their complex culture was devastated by the intrusions of outsiders during the nineteenth century. In the early 1920s, Hawaii's Bishop Museum sponsored an expedition to preserve what was left of the islanders' vanishing world. Willowdean Chatterson Handy, an expedition associate, created this priceless record of the ancient body art rituals. In addition to detailed information about tattoo methods and customs, Handy's account features fascinating insights into the designs' symbolic significance and their representation of social status. Her painstaking drawings of tattoo patterns are accompanied by captions that explain the traditional motifs.

Tattooing in the Marquesas

By WILLOWDEAN CHATTERSON HANDY

INTRODUCTION

Drawings and photographs of tattooing patterns on the bodies of natives were made by the author during a residence in the Marquesas Islands in 1921. As tattooing is now forbidden by the laws of the country and the art is consequently dying out, this collection of the last specimens of tattooing patterns which exist today in the Marquesas has seemed to demand a complementary collection of information regarding the practice of the art, to the end that the beautiful motives might at least be partly accounted for and might some day take their merited place in the history of art. The data have been drawn from natives who have been decorated, from one old tuhuna, or artist, who has practised tattooing, and from literary sources, thus piecing together a fairly accurate picture of the practice. Discussion of the design itself, of which the natives know nothing today beyond the nomenclature, is undertaken in a spirit of appreciation and with the hope that the suggestions offered regarding the evolution and significance of this form of decoration may uncover other possibilities and lead to a more conclusive interpretation of the art.

THE PRACTICE OF THE ART

It would appear that this form of body decoration was not confined to certain ranks or classes in the Marquesas, though what might be called a property qualification limited somewhat the complete covering and finer work to the wealthy who could afford to employ the best artists and stand the attendant expense of feeding them and their assistants as well as the large band of ka’ioi who erected the special house for the occasion. A father prepared long in advance for the payment for tattooing of his first-born, raising pigs, and planting ute, paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera ), for the making of tapa as gifts for both the ka’ioi and the tuhuna. Payment also took the form of ornaments, war clubs, and more recently, guns. Langsdorff, says that they paid for their decorations according to the greater or less quantity of them, and to the trouble the figures required; that during the thirty or forty years when the body was gone over again and again with the tattooing bones until the skin was completely covered, the cost became considerable; and that such all-over decoration necessarily indicated a person of great wealth (10 p. 120)¹, It follows naturally that it also appeared only upon people of advanced years (6, p. 130; 13, p. 102-103), a circumstance which undoubtedly led to Captain Chanal’s conclusion that the marks had no relation to anything but age (II, p. III).

While the tuhuna was paid generously for work on an opou, the eldest son of a wealthy man, no payment was asked of the ka’ioi, a more or less unorganized group of younger sons and daughters, who took such part in the preparations as raiding for food and building the special house, and who slipped in to have designs punctured upon them gratis when the ôpou was resting or recuperating from the effects of the operation. It is perhaps these ka’ioi to whom Melville (12, p. 49) refers in speaking of the common fellows who were practiced on. Langsdorff, was apparently unaware of this custom, for he says that those who could not afford tattooing went without:

The poorer islanders who have not a superabundance of hogs to dispose of in luxuries, but live chiefly themselves upon breadfruit, are operated upon by novices in the art, who take them at a very low price as subjects for practice. The lowest class of all, the fishermen principally, are often not able to afford even the pay required by a novice, and are therefore not tattooed at all. (10, p. 120.)

With the lower classes noticeably less tattooed than the higher, the conclusion was often drawn by early visitors that this form of decoration pointed out noble or distinguished persons (8, p. 155 and 13, p. 84). Berchon, writing in 1859, avows that all classes were tattooed at that time, but that formerly it was a sign of nobility and distinction. From what is to be gathered today from living informants, this is a misconception, in the main, based on the fact that wealth was in the hands of chiefs and distinguished men.

Melville (13, p. 102) at one time assigns tattooing to the warrior class, but present information states that the untattooed as well as the tattooed went to war. That warriors, as well as other groups, wore special designs as badges is stated by modern informants as true in a few instances, and is frequently suggested by the early voyagers to the Marquesas. Spirals over the eyes (Pl. v, 7) are today described as belonging to all warriors in ancient times, while spirals called kokoata on cheeks and hips indicated chiefs, as do the tiny pinlike marks (Pl. XXXVIII, G. d) to be seen today on the inside of the left ankle. After a battle these marks—according to the informants—were sought for by the priest of a victorious army on the ankles of the slain to determine whether a chief had been killed and a great battle fought. Beyond these distinguishing marks, living informants make no mention of the badges described by early visitors, such as the mata-komoe distinguishing a hero (10, Pl. VIII, fig. 9; p. xv), the marks of high birth put upon the arms of women in families of chiefs (18, p. 222-223), the tattooed right hand and left foot of women as a sign of wedlock (13, p. 221-222). Mr. Linton was told that only chiefs had their feet tattooed; but this is not borne out in the late practice of the art nor corroborated by other informants. The confusion probably arises either from the distinguishing chiefly marks being upon the ankle, or from the custom of tattooing the body of the opou from the feet up, contrary-wise to that of the ka’ioi.

The only distinguishing feature of the tattooing of a ka’ioi, as reported today, is the order in which the designs were put on, the face being decorated first. The reason assigned by a Pua Ma’u informant for the custom of beginning with the feet of the opou was that the face if tattooed first was liable to become infected and cause a stoppage of the operation. It is possible that the reverse order in the case of the ka’ioi was the result of indifference as to their fortunes, but it is also possible that there was here a fundamental class distinction. There is no proof today that the work was not of the same pattern as that of the opou, though Melville thought he distinguished a difference in the quality of the work put upon “inferior natives,” their designs appearing to him like daubs of a house-painter’s brush (13, p. 250).

Berchon says that tattooing was an obligation rather than a mark of distinction for women, that the right hand must be tattooed by the age of twelve so that it might be used in making popoi, in making pakoko (the circular movement of two fingers in taking up popoi to eat it) and in rubbing dead bodies with coconut oil (1, p. 114-115). Natives today say that an untattooed hand could not make popoi nor eat it from the same bowl as a tattooed hand, that a tattooed man could not eat with a woman, and that a man with all his designs finished could not eat with a man whose designs were unfinished; but any reason for these requisites beyond their being “pretty” is unknown. Women would not marry untattooed men, probably because the decoration represented either wealth, endurance of pain, style, or all three.

A special effort was made to find some trace of banqueting societies distinguished by marks tattooed on the chest, which Krusenstern, Langsdorff, and Melville² describe (8, p. 159-160; 10, p. 121-122; 12, p. 50-51); but no memory of anything in the nature of such fraternal orders supported by the chief and tattooed gratis is discoverable today. With Berchon’s conclusion that the fact reported must have been “quite exceptional” we must agree. It was customary, however, ...

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