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Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West, edited by Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole, and Bronwen Douglas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. isbn 0-8223- 3550-6 (cloth), 0-8223-3562-x (paper); 252 pages, figures, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth us$99.95; paper us$27.95.
Editor Nicholas Thomas's introductory chapter to this important collection of essays begins with a question about beginnings-the various competing narratives and truth claims for the origins and inspirations for tattooing in the West. Is the primary impetus for Western tattooing to be traced, as so many have suggested, to the voyages of Captain James Cook in the Pacific and the "tatau" he and his crewmen encountered there? Or is this narrative, as so many oftrecounted stories are, more a matter of popular myth making than establishment of historical fact? Thomas skims the various arguments but ultimately chooses to frame the disciplinarily diverse chapters that follow by rejecting this search for a "fetishized origin." It matters less whether Polynesian traditions of tatau were the absolute or sole inspiration for the development and spread of tattooing in the West, and rather more that the rich and heterogeneous histories of tattoo exchange between Pacific Islanders, European explorers, seamen, missionaries, settlers, tourists, and others have much information to offer us about the contingent semiotic indeterminacy of cross-cultural encounters.
For those attentive to either Thomas's or coeditor Bronwen Douglas's previous work, this conclusion has a familiar ring. In this respect, Tattoo is noteworthy not so much for breaking radically new theoretical ground as for bringing the state-ofthe- art theories currently afloat in the social sciences and humanities to bear...