Reading beneath the Skin: Indigenous Tattooing in the Early Spanish Philippines, ca. 1520–1720.

This article explores the early modern encounter between Spanish colonizers and the Visayans, tattooed Indigenous people of the Philippines. Skin has commonly featured as a marker of human difference in studies of colonial interactions. By tracing how Spanish responses to tattooing were negotiated l...

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Publicado en:American Historical Review Vol. 127; no. 3; pp. 1252 - 1288
Autor principal: Kroupa, Sebestian
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Sep2022
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Reading beneath the Skin: Indigenous Tattooing in the Early Spanish Philippines, ca. 1520–1720.
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        au: Kroupa, Sebestian
        affil: University of Cambridge , UK
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        Tattooing
        Spanish conquest of the Philippines, 1565
        Bisaya (Philippine people)
        Indigenous peoples
        Spanish colonies
        Christianity
        Tattooed people
        Philippines
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          Philippines
          Tattooing
          Spanish conquest of the Philippines, 1565
          Bisaya (Philippine people)
          Indigenous peoples
          Spanish colonies
          Christianity
          Tattooed people
      keyword:
        early modern colonialism
        Indigenous tattoo
        skin marking
        Spanish Empire
      ab: This article explores the early modern encounter between Spanish colonizers and the Visayans, tattooed Indigenous people of the Philippines. Skin has commonly featured as a marker of human difference in studies of colonial interactions. By tracing how Spanish responses to tattooing were negotiated locally using preexisting and newly emerging terminologies, I suggest that there was no fixed framework for interpreting the meanings of skin and skin markings in early modern Europe. I demonstrate how Spanish writers sought to use Visayan tattoos to insert their bearers into the Spanish colonial universe, but how, at once, the tattooed body challenged imperial visions and the colonial categories of naked and dressed, literate and illiterate, savage and civilized. Just as the tattoo was caught in the space between the interior and the exterior of the body, so, too, the Visayans occupied a liminal position in colonial hierarchies as people who were destitute but capable of civilization. By examining the different forms of literacy entangled in reading tattoos, I point to the performative dimensions of the encounter and conceptualize the tattoo as a form of "embodied history." I argue that paying close attention to such cross-cultural interactions is crucial for our understanding of how contemporary categories associated with skin and difference emerged out of early modern global engagements.
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