The companion piece to the case study we published earlier this year has seen the light of day in the same Pacific Journal of Health. Feast your eyes!…Continue Reading Physiology of Pe’a and Malu
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….Continue Reading How much does tattooing hurt?
Michelle Myles is a tattoo artist originally from St. Louis but who has been tattooing on New York’s Lower East Side since before it became legal again in NYC in 1997. She was the owner of Fun City (I remember Fun City II as the only visible tattoo shop in the Village when it was illegal,…Continue Reading How is a machine tattoo different than a non-electric styles?
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….Continue Reading Case Study in the Endocrine and Immune Response to Samoan Tatau
Paul “Junior” Sulu’ape pounds on his thighs to work the feeling back into them. He and his brothers Peter and Ata are sixth generation tufuga tå tatau, and Paul spends anywhere from 6-12 hours a day, six days a week sitting cross-legged on the floor of a fale giving traditional Samoan tatau in the outdoor…Continue Reading The Biology and Health of Tattooing
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…Continue Reading Medical Anthropology of Tattooing
Our lab has new publications! The first is an article about podcasting, written by me with Courtney Manthey and Cara Ocobock. We compared listens to episodes of the Sausage of Science podcast that were highlighted on the pod to those that weren’t from the same issues and, save for COVID outliers that were accessed at…Continue Reading The Value of Publicly Engaged Podcasting
The insights into how tattoo pigments stays under the skin and only dissipates and gets blurry over many years is surprisingly recent. In 2018, a team of immunologists from the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy in France led by Anna Baraska tested a new genetically modified mouse model that enables exploration of the human CD64 gene…Continue Reading How does the pigment stay under the skin?
Thursday, July 20, 2023 The scheduled time to go to the ferry for the overnight ferry to American Samoa was something like 6pm. I was originally going to drive there and leave our rental in the parking lot. Leota didn’t feel comfortable leaving us to our own devices nor with us leaving our car in…Continue Reading 48 Hours of Thursday: Ferry to American Samoa & Then Some