Bøker av Lars Krutak

A beautifully illustrated history of Indigenous tattooing practices around the worldTattooing within Indigenous communities is a time-honored practice that binds the tattoo recipient to a deeply felt collective history. More than mere decoration, tattoos are a visual language of the skin, embodying cultural values, ancestral ties, and spiritual beliefs. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions captures ancient tribal tattooing practices and their contemporary resurgence, highlighting a beautiful aspect of humanity’s shared cultural heritage, one mark at a time.Transporting readers through history, Lars Krutak explores the art and customs of tattooing across numerous ancestral lands, including Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Greenland, the Arctic, Polynesia, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. He illustrates how tattoos function as a form of writing that defines and structures community life, performing as rites of passage, symbols of rank, and signs of marital or religious devotion, among other facets of culture. We are introduced to the heavily tattooed Birdmen of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Li women of China’s Hainan Island with their elaborate facial and body tattoos, and innovative cultural tattoo practitioners who are rebuilding a skin marking legacy for future generations to come.With numerous images published for the first time and an illuminating foreword by cultural historian Sean Mallon, Indigenous Tattoo Traditions opens a window onto one of the world’s most vibrant yet misunderstood mediums of human expression.

"For millennia, tattoos have documented the history of humanity one painful mark at a time. They form a visual language on the skin, expressing an individual's desires and fears as well as cultural values, family ties, and spiritual beliefs on the surfaces of the body. The Indigenous peoples of Asia have created some of the world's oldest and most distinctive tattoos, but their many contributions to body art and practice have been largely overlooked. Tattoo Traditions of Asia is the first single volume dedicated to the anthropological study of an ancient cultural practice and artform that spans many countries and societies, ancestral lands, and contemporary communities across the continent and its islands. This richly illustrated survey combines the author's twenty years of fieldwork, interviewing hundreds of Indigenous tattoo bearers and contemporary tattoo practitioners, with painstaking research conducted in obscure archives throughout the region and elsewhere to break new ground on one of the least-understood mediums of Indigenous Asian expressive culture-a vital tradition to be celebrated, an inspirational story told in skin and ink"--