Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 119

The Oceanian cultural practice that arguably attracted the most intense notice of the Europeans was tattooing, which was evident throughout the whole vast area. Some of the Europeans, not least Joseph Banks himself, submitted to the painful operation of having a tattoo. Both Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges made drawings and paintings of tattooed bodies which subsequently became veritable emblems of the cultural difference – and hence sexually tinged exoticism – of the South Pacific. The eighteenth‐century European accounts tend to ascribe the tattoo patterns to individual caprice and a desire for personal ornamentation. Unsurprisingly, given the linguistic obstacles, they had no conception of the complex religio‐cultural nexus later analysed by the anthropologist Alfred Gell in his Wrapping in Images (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993). Both accounts are taken from The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, edited by J. C. Beaglehole, Cambridge University Press, published for the Hakluyt Society, 1968–1969, vol. 1, pp. 125 and 278–9.