As people from one culture encounter people from another, the diversity of body art can be a source of inspiration, admiration, and imitation. Yet since body art can so clearly signal cultural differences, it can also be a way for people from one culture to exoticize and ostracize others.

From the earliest voyages of discovery to contemporary tourism, travelers of all sorts --explorers and missionaries, soldiers and sailors, traders and tourists -- have brought back images of the people they meet. These images sometimes reveal as much about the people looking at the body art as about the people making and wearing it. Some early depictions of Europeans and Americans by non-Westerners emphasized elaborate clothing and facial hair. Alternatively, Western images of Africans, Polynesians, and Native Americans focused on the absence of clothes and the presence of tattoos, body paint, and patterns of scars.

Attitudes toward body art change over time, reflecting both shifting political relationships between groups and changing attitudes toward the body. Representations of body art in engravings, paintings, photographs, and film are powerful visual metaphors that have been used both to record cultural differences and to proclaim one group's supposed superiority over another.

Highlights of Representations include the earliest engravings printed by Theodor De Bry, based on actual observations of the Indians of the Americas by Jacques Le Moyne de Morques and John White, dating from the 16th century; images of the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, based on impressions of Native Americans commingled with Roman accounts; books and engravings from Captain Cook's voyage to the Pacific; a wall of postcards and photographs of body art from around the world, including carnivals and world's fairs, showing how body art became a common theme of tourism; and excerpts from two films: a documentary featuring Nuba men in southeastern Sudan who painted their bodies, originally to win the favor of their wives and wives' families, and, ultimately to profit from tourists; and "Cannibal Tours," a documentary produced by the BBC, showing the interaction between tourists who collect souvenirs and take photographs of the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the reactions of the New Guinean's to the curiosity of the tourists.

introduction | origins | representations
transformations | identities | distinctions | reinvention