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Body Art

50 years ago, seeing someone with tattoos or unusual body piercings was really something to talk about. However, today body art is not unusual, and there are many reasons why people get it.

“This is how I express myself,” says 21-year-old Marina Harding, a graduate student from Seattle, Washington.  Marina has bright green hair, piercings on her tongue, lip, nose and eyebrow, and six in each ear.  “I dress this way to shock you,” reads the motto written on Marina’s T-shirt.  Marina also has eight tattoos, and she wants to get more.  “I love body art!” she says.

Experts say that people pierce and tattoo their bodies to show they are different from others or to remember an important event in their lives.  Body art also shows a person’s sense of fashion and may increase their status in a group.  Body art may make a person appear more ‘cool’ and less traditional.  Jonathan Daulton, 19, has ten piercings on his face.  “Honestly, I do it to be outrageous,” says the computer science student at the University of Nebraska.

People with piercings and tattoos may not know it, but they are part of an ancient tradition.  According to anthropologist Enid Schildkrout of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, “there is no culture in which people do not paint, pierce, tattoos, reshape, and adorn their bodies.”  Schildkrout, who organized a museum show on body art, says, “We want people to realize that everyone, including themselves, performs some type of transformation.  We color our hair, wear makeup, put on clothes, have cosmetic surgery.”  People’s reasons for changing themselves are the same at they have been for thousands of years: to attract a romantic partner, improve self-esteem, show membership in a group, and show independence.

Adapted from Read and Reflect 2: Academic Reading Strategies and Cultural Awareness, by Lorie Howard, with Jayme Adelson-Goldstein, Oxford, 2004

Directions:

Read the passage above and write an essay responding to the ideas it presents.  In your essay, be sure to summarize the passage in your own words, stating the author’s most important ideas.  Develop your essay by identifying one idea in the passage that you feel is especially significant, and explain its significance.  Support your claims with evidence or examples drawn from what you have read, learned in school, and/or personally experienced.