Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. 327 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$80.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7849-8.
This book is a homage to tatau, honouring its deep socio-political significance and central mediating role in Sāmoan culture, past and present. As much as this is a social anthropological account, however, it is also a paean to tatau as a high art form, to the tufuga ta tatau who create these remarkably beautiful marks on the skin as well as the contemporary artists who wear and celebrate them. Indeed, many of the images reproduced in the book have adorned the walls of art galleries in and beyond Oceania.
Authors Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot organize the five chapters chronologically, each examining a different time frame in the 3000 years of Samoan tatau: the ancient traces of tatau, European encounters and observations (1722–1900), persistence and change (1900–2000), tatau as a ritual institution (2000–2010) and tatau and its globalization (2000–2017). It is not a linear approach, however, as the authors foreground an Indigenous narrative in which people, encounters, and events continually interact with ancestors, oral traditions, and dynamic kinship formations. The text is ethnographically rich, highlighting an empathetic engagement with interlockers, both authors having conducted extensive field research in Sāmoa, the home of Sean’s grandfather. It is also an inclusive text, incorporating the writings and reflections of Indigenous scholars and artists such as Maualaivao Albert Wendt, who notes that the male tautau, the pe’a, is named after the flying fox, and that tatau and malu (female tatau) are expressive of the Samoan concept of vā: the space that relates, holding separate entities and things holistically together, giving context and meaning (154). Selina Tusitala Marsh writes of her diasporic relationship with malu, and the understanding that “tatua is believed by many to be a gateway through which to learn more about one’s culture—after the fact, not before” (285).
The book is dense in tatau detail—drawing from material culture, historical, and ethnographic evidence—interwoven with a number of critical themes: Indigenous cultural continuity; the tension between local and global; ceremony and ritual; genealogy and extended kinship systems and the art of tatau. As a marker of Indigenous continuity, tatau has outlasted missionization and a colonial encounter heavily implicated in cultural erasure, suggesting the embeddedness of tatau in Sāmoan ways of life and its ability to transcend diasporic fractures. That tatau’s cultural value, for instance, intensified after independence in 1962, is suggestive of a cultural fluorescence rather than a revival. The tension between globalization, cultural appropriation, and loss, on one side, and cultural integrity, authenticity, and tradition, on the other, is put into play throughout the book. It is apparent, for example, in Sāmoan discomfort over the perceived commercialization of tatau, where money rather than the exchange of customary goods is used to compensate services, and the tattooing of non-Sāmoans, particularly pālagai (Europeans). The response of Su’a Sulu’ape Paulo II, whose family is one of the two tufuga ta tatau titleholders, is one which legitimizes these changes within Samoan tradition, reasserts his authority over the suafa tā pe’a (tattooing) title, and recognizes the pragmatic requirement for cash in his migrant home in South Auckland (147). It is also apparent in the use of traditional hand-tapping tools, or masini (machines) and lama made from candlenut soot or Indian ink (157). The authors’ analysis suggests that the opposition of global and local, tradition and innovation, authenticity and inauthenticity provide false dichotomies. Tatau now circulates on global cultural flows, and it has “transformed to continue to meet the changing needs of Sāmoan people” (299); indeed, from the 1990s, “the most active instigators of change were Sāmoans seeking to be tattooed” (146).
At the same time as tatau has been globalized, Sāmoans have actively sought to protect certain sociocultural and artistic features, and in this they have been relatively successful. For instance, while taulima, the tattooed armband, is ubiquitous, appearing on flash art in tattoo studios worldwide, homogenized as a Polynesian or neotribal style, the pe’a and malu are shielded from this market, their markings retaining distinctive ceremonial rites of passage and extended family significance. And while there has been a proliferation of tattooists adorning Sāmoan and non-Sāmoan skin with tatau, value is attached to fa’aasāmoa modes of transferring knowledge and those with the genealogical links to educate and practice (193). Indeed, the negotiation of these spheres is linked to the traditional art of ‘aiga (extended family) politicking. That the global tattooing community is to some extent cognizant of and compliant with these hierarchies is, arguably, suggestive of “Sāmoanization.”
This book is an in-depth anthropological and technical account of tatau through the ages. It is also, crucially, an Indigenous upending. Sean Mallon’s observation at the 2001 international tattoo convention in ‘Upolu in 2001, destabilizes the colonial gaze: “Samoans in attendance were standing at the periphery of the event and staring at the tattooed Europeans … in a complete turnaround, tatau—a familiar sight for Sāmoans—had become on European skin an almost foreign and exotic ‘curiosity’” (247). A similarly effective mobilization of tatau is illustrated in photographer Greg Semu’s “The Last Cannibal Supper”; the artist, adorned with tatau and surrounded by twelve disciples, openly mocks the tradition of positioning tribal people as ethnographic spectacle.
Fiona McCormack
University of Waikato, Hamilton