What does it mean to hurt? Is hurting the tearing of your skin, the literal tearing of your skin in your brain, an alarm bell in your brain telling you to fight, flee, or freeze, or a stimulus-response to what you think would happen?

Pain is an emotional and sensory experience with deep evolutionary roots. The three basic functions of animals are to find food, reproduce, and avoid harm. Thus, pain is an interaction of an animal and their environment. From a sensory perspective, pain involves various nociceptive sensory systems, such as for pressure, temperature, and noxious substances. But pain also involves dampening of nociceptive sensors, such as opioids.

“Pain” is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage.” Nociception describes the physiological activation of pain receptors and modulation of pain signals in the central and peripheral nervous systems, absent an emotional dimension. Because it’s not clear what is experienced in nonmammals, the term nociception is used to distinguish the physiological analogs of pain, since an emotional component is more difficult to detect in nonmammals, if it is in fact present.

The amount tattooing hurts depends on a person’s sensitization to tattooing pain, through both a dampening of nociception and of the emotional component—fear of pain. I have spent my career studying both dissociation and tattooing, though not necessarily in the same context.

Dissociation is the partitioning of awareness involved in everything from daydreaming to dissociative identity disorder to Pentecostal speaking in tongues, which I’ve studied. For tattooing, people often describe going into the zone, putting on headphones, talking to someone, or some other practice to distract themselves from and thus not feel pain. The pain of tattooing works through a combination of anticipation (sort of like the “white coat syndrome” of becoming nervous when a doctor tests one’s stress levels) and the physical injury to the body.

​When I receive machine tattooing nowadays, after receiving many tattoos over the past nearly 40 years, I barely notice the sensation. However, in 2019 I received a hand-tap tattoo on my lower leg and just about jumped out of my skin from the pain. I was so startled by the sensation of how a hand-tapped tattoo is literally pounded into one’s skin that I tensed up. At one point, watching a gecko on the light overhead to try to get into a zone, the gecko started twitching its tail, and my leg started to jerk sympathetically but involuntarily as well. Su’a Paul Sulu’ape paused in his tapping to ask if I was OK, and all I could do was point at the geckos. I was in so much pain, I considered tapping out in the first minute as the sensation of fire shot up my leg.

We have a new article out in Pacific Journal of Health that explores a case study of tatau. We collected cortisol throughout multiple days for a man getting a Samoan pe'a tattoo. This is the first documentation of the physiological response to traditional tattooing that we know of. Read the full open access text here.

We also have a brand new chapter on the medical anthropology of tattooing in the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification. This was co-authored with former graduate student Michael Smetana. Mike wrote the first draft for a course, and I slogged away on the rest of it over the course of a year or two. Marco Samadelli wrote a short summary and didn't have time to write a full chapter, so they asked me to combine his chapter with ours. I'm quite pleased with it, though I've already found a few things that will need to be fixed if they retain it for future editions. Check it out here.

Another nice piece recently came about tattooing and immune function that I was interviewed for. This one is in Parade Magazine:
https://parade.com/health/tattoos-immune-system

I spent the week of UA's spring break in Samoa to get the project I was awarded NSF funding for in 2020 started finally. I spent 5 weeks this past summer in Honolulu talking with the Samoan diaspora community and had intended to collect similar data in Samoa via coordinated training of research assistants at the Centre for Samoan Studies at the National University of Samoa. However, having only arranged these relationships via email, I could not wrap my brain around how I was going to accomplish those things, and, after chatting with Jessica Hardin, another anthropologist who works with CSS for research in Samoa, I realized the best strategy would be to pay for an extra plane ticket and make the trip to have some meetings in person about the project.

I stayed at the Samoan Outrigger Hotel because it cost about as little as a cheap AirBnB and is located close enough to the Samoan Cultural Village, where Suluape Tatau do hand-tap tattooing, and the National University of Samoa, where I would be giving a talk and have meetings. I went down to the Cultural Village right after I arrived, but no one was tattooing so I popped into a bar overlooking the Village and Apia Bay to see who was around. It was happy hour and full of Kiwi expats talking about their schemes to make money. Felt like a James Michener novel, but I guess everyone needs to make a living.

The flight there is super long, and Samoa is 18 hours ahead of US Central Time, so I left on Sunday at 2PM, but I didn't arrive in Samoa until Tuesday afternoon. But I didn't have any appointments until Thursday, so I tried to find everyone on Wednesday. I walked around looking for NUS and CSS for several hours, and I finally found everyone I was looking for after getting thoroughly sunburned and foot-blistered. My stupidity for forgetting a hat, sunscreen, or my already broken in slides. I found Dionne Fonoti in CSS and the main offices and met a few other folks over there. Then I walked down to the Cultural Village and found Ata Sulu'ape tattooing. Junior (Paul) was in Pago Pago, and their father Alaiva'a was at home. Ata told me their father doesn't come down to the Cultural Village anymore, and I didn't have a car so didn't seem him while there. However, right as I was leaving, his daughter Patricia saw on FB that I was in Samoa and sent a message, leading me to realize I could have reached him through the daughters. I didn't think of it though, so next time.

On Thursday, I gave a seminar talk about the research I've done and tried to describe the goals and methods I am planning for the Samoa project. The seminar was very well attended with lots of great questions and several people excited to potentially work with me. More on that in a paragraph or so.

On Friday, I had some meetings to determine, now that my plans were somewhat clear, how CSS and I could help each other. Much of it revolved around who would be available to take on extra work. I'd be training and paying the person or people, but NUS does have have biological anthropology. They have cultural and language studies and archaeology. There was a medical doctor who is president of the Malofie Association, which is an association of people with the pe'a. I've been trying to catch up with him ever since, but he's super busy as a surgeon and director of the teaching medical program.

On Saturday, I had a fruitful breakfast meeting with Dionne, her partner, and Greg Jackmond, the archaeologist at CSS. We talked a lot about the tatau project and generally got to know each other, but I also got the opportunity to hear about some amazing archaeology and bioarchaeology material they have that they're looking for help analyzing. So now, as part of our exchange, I'm trying to find students and colleagues who could help them with this analysis or who may be interested in doing archaeology research there. Contrary to my beliefs that anthropologists have been studying Samoa ad nauseum forever, it's really that anthropologists have popped in now and again and written books but never maintained a constant presence. The archaeology that's been done there has languished since the 1970s, save the occasional study to reify the Lapita story of peopling the Pacific. It's really still unknown why people migrated there or spread out and migrated from there to other Polynesian Islands. However, they have LiDAR data indicating Savai'i was once extensively inhabited, and there is tons of evidence of prehistoric habitation that is completely unexplored.

Sunday is the day of the Lord, so no meetings. Frankly, most Samoans are so booked up with chief, village, and church responsibilities on the weekends that they're more busy than during the workweek. So I spent Sunday watching Alabama play basketball (in March Madness, the Saturday night game in Alabama was Sunday morning in Samoa) then went to a hike up to Robert Louis Stevenson's house and grave again. I'd been there last time but got caught in the rain. This time I walked in intense sun and got another sunburn.

Monday was the day I was supposed to leave, but since the flight was at 8pm, I had time for some more meetings, which was providential. I had breakfast with Bernadette Samau-Sila, who is a Lecturer in Finance and Marketing. She's Samoa-born but raised and schooled in New Zealand. Shes a qualitative researcher whose methodology is perfect for the study I've proposed, which is why she reached out. She's done some research on the malu and just loves research, and I'm really looking forward to combining our ideas to make this project better.

I headed back over to NUS with her after breakfast and went to see Greg's LiDAR maps, which I then played with for several hours until I needed to get to the airport.

Our new paper mentioned in the previous post is out, Open Access, in the Nature subsidiary journal Humanities & Social Science Communications. We're pretty stoked to have open access in a Nature journal. Is that big time? It is in my head!

Furthermore, I'm really proud of the students in my lab who stuck in there for Zoom meetings over the course of a year as we figured out how to do a scoping review, write it up, and get it published.

Here is the DOI for the paper, where everyone can read it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-01511-6

My friend Becci Owens, Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Sunderland specializing in evolutionary psychology, had started working on a scoping review of psychological studies of body modification a few years ago but was stalled. I volunteered my lab to help her finish it. It took us about a year to discover that a "scoping review" is a real thing and not another word for a systematic review. After developing a coding system for the corpus of articles Becci had gathered, I googled scoping reviews and found the articles by Nunn like this one that describe scoping reviews in detail and realized that I'd led us all astray for a year. When we refocused on what a scoping review actually is, it became apparent that we simply needed to describe the basic patterns of how psychology studies of tattooing have been conducted.

When we started, we noticed that so many of the studies looked for correlations between tattooing and negative personality traits and risk behaviors, despite the fact that most of the same articles and other contemporary sources note that no correlations between tattooing and negative personality traits how been found and that the primary correlations are with openness to experience and youth. So, our secondary objective was to try to understand why so many studies reify tattoo stigma by studying it as though it were a negative behavior and trying to understand causes of such poor behavior. In examining the group of studies that included tattooing as a "stigma" variable in this way (the largest category by far), it became clear that there was a temporal factor. Early studies were looking at penal and mental health populations, seeing lots of tattoos among patients relative to the general population, and trying to determine if marking the self is some aberration of fragile identities. Later studies seemed to indicate that tattooing itself is not a negative behavior but let's just throw it in anyway because we wonder if it might be a useful way to identify people at risk for mental fragility in the general population. But, though I paraphrase, what the hell is that anyway?

I have long argued that such studies should just use the Big 5 Personality Inventories because what they're interested in is not risk-taking behavior so much as openness to experience. It appears that by the 2000s, scholars such as Viren Swami had laid to rest with explicit studies saying that all tattooed and non-tattooed people are the same, but even then his titles were ambiguous, leading people to potentially think there are differences if they don't read further (which, shocker, many people don't).

Anyway, it became apparent that studies shifted from the above to social psychology studies that look at tattooing in much more interesting ways, such as how tattooing can have different meanings or impacts depending on the type of job you have or how tattooing may intersect with multiple marginalities to influence how people are treated in healthcare settings. These more granular studies are much more interesting.

When we looked at the history of the discipline of psychology, the studies we note start after the first renaissance, which was much more recent than generally assumed--tattoos were only out of fashion for about 15-20 years. The pattern of psychology studies also follow the general patterns for research foci in the field of psychology. 

As of earlier this month, the article entitled "Deviance as an Historical Artifact: A Scoping Review of Psychological Studies of Body Modification" researched and written by Becci, me, Alex Landgraf, Steve Filoromo, and Mike Smetana, has been accepted for publication by Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

​Click here to read a preprint of the whole paper.

One of our local arts organization, which actually hosts the best folk art festival in the world imho, started a new series for its adult patrons called Kentuck After Dark. I love Kentuck's annual Folk Art Festival, which is coming up in mid-October, as well as its monthly First Thursday events, and so many of the artists and employees there. It's one of the best things about Tuscaloosa. So I was delighted when they invited me to give a tattoo dark for the second installment of Kentuck After Dark on August 18. This was a small ticketed event with wine and cheese. It was easy to chat with everyone, and Molly made some delightful mojitos.
Here are a few photos by my wife Loretta Lynn, including a few of me give a talk about tattooing and immune function from me followed by tattooing with Q&A by local tattoo artist Lucas McDaniel. My kids got their first tattoos from Lucas, so he's had to put up with me ad nauseum, making this an easy event for us to work together.

This new article is based on data collected at the 2017 Northwest Tatau Festival and is the first publication of analysis from those data. Summarizing the article in one sentence:

"The psychological and physical experience of being tattooed may contribute to physiological adaptations that prepare the skin for other injury."
​
Click on this link to the full PDF. Below is a slide show of photos from the tattoo festival for your enjoyment while reading.

I was impressed with the Polynesian Cultural Center. It seems like a cultural Disneyland, but it's owned by the Mormon Church and staffed by Brigham Young University students. So on the one hand, we expected the cheesiness that apparently appeals to tourist; but on the other hand, we expected religious messaging to mar the presentation. I was impressed with the limited amount of cheese and the complete lack of religious messaging anywhere that I could detect. What I know about Mormonism comes from Rob Ruck's book The Tropic of Football:  The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans in the NFL and Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. Of course the first is recent non-fiction, while the latter is an old fiction book. But the upshot is that Mormonism doesn't operate the way Christianity does. I've known a lot of Mormons because of their missionary style. My impression is that they go abroad to do service work and set an example but do not actively convert. So a lot of folks like the cultural experience and go into anthropology. A Mormon kid we met had the pule tattoo, which he'd received to settle him down apparently, and he told us that Mormons don't prohibit tattoos. They usually advise against them, but they are OK with cultural tattoos, which is what they consider Samoan tattooing. This is different than what Samoan Mormon kids in American Samoa who accompanied a non-Mormon friend to get tattooed, but I haven't checked this anywhere else.

​The great thing for us about the PCC is that we were looking for Samoans to interview, and the easiest way to identity Samoans in Hawaii without just asking (which can be weird and potentially insulting for a variety of reasons) is to go to the Samoan Island exhibit at PCC because each cultural island is staffed by students from that island. The catch is that PCC is expensive, and we didn't want to pay to go in and look for people to interview, especially since we were skeptical of this tactic at first. So we went back and forth between the main entrance and BYU campus behind PCC looking for folks and kept getting steered by to PCC. Finally, we went in and stopped by the kiosk owned by friends of Tricia Allen (more on her later), who promptly offered to comp us in for both the park and the evening show (this happened again later in the month when I returned with my wife--we arrived with malasadas the second time, but the effect was the same--having connections is the best!).