Body as Medium: Exploring Body Images in Urban India (A Study on Hyderabad Tattoo Culture)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14760152Keywords:
body, tattoos, urban, culture, semioticsAbstract
Body, as a medium, has been carrying multiple artefacts on its surface ever since its very existence. Despite the emergence of various forms of media that open new possibilities to decipher meanings associated to a text, body has a significant role in being an open medium to imprint messages and actively participate in conferring meanings to the world. Body is not just a matter and substance, but a medium that generates and carries messages; a vehicle to transport information. Tattooing the body to permanently deploy the messages on its surface as an act of marking identity, social status, cultural symbol is a practice since civilization. The reappearance and penetration of the historically stigmatised tattooed bodies into the mainstream from the last quarter of the 20th century reminds to recognize body as a valuable and a preferred medium to communicate a message. Considering urban spaces as super spreaders of the body modification, the phenomenal growth of the tattoo parlours in the past one and half decade in India is an area hardly explored. My paper focuses on how body in producing messages in the form of tattoos. The methodology includes focus group discussions with the tattoo artists and informal interviews with the tattoo consumers.
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