Date: Thursday April 17, 2014
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Loser 106
Mairin Odle (U Penn, NYU)
“Stories Written on the Body: Native American Tattoos in North America, 1800-1830”
Mairin’s research investigates how cross-cultural contact between Native American, European, and African societies in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America could alter individuals’ physical appearances in profound and permanent ways—focusing on three types of marks: scalping, tattooing, and branding. These marks were connected by their painful origins, the physical intimacy their infliction demanded, and their symbolic, storytelling power. Tracing the experiences of the people these marks appeared upon, as well as the stories told about them, she demonstrates how contested ideas about the nature of human and societal difference—which played out in diplomacy as well as violent conflict, captivity, and enslavement—actually reshaped early American bodies. Those reshaped bodies in turn, she argues, were key to establishing (or disrupting) the material reality of such ideas, particularly those emerging in the eighteenth century about permanent and racialized physical identity.