Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America by Mairin Odle (review)

Abstract

“Bodily modifications,” Mairin Odle contends in Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America, “penetrated colonial skin and colonial imaginations” (6) from the era of earliest English-Indigenous contact through the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Across 122 exceptionally economical and clear pages, Odle presents such modifications—principally tattooing and scalping—as “corporeal evidence” (2) of cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and Natives and investigates how they were variously received within the “settler logics” (4) of colonial societies. Settler colonists, Odle convincingly demonstrates, used Indigenous bodily modification customs as “ideological resources” (3) that could be assimilated either in thought and practice to “allow newcomers to feel at ‘home’ in the lands of others” or, alternatively, renounced as “evidence of Native inferiority or barbarity” (118). This ambiguous settler narrative and its embodied forms were eventually displaced by nineteenth-century racial ideologies that sought “to circumscribe the possibility of cultural transformation” and idealized “unmarked” (122) white bodies and societies rather than those adapted to American environs through appropriated modifications. Under the Skin’s opening chapter—an analysis of tattooing among Carolinian Algonquians and its reception by English settlers—stands out as the best scholarly treatment of that subject yet produced. Here, Odle aims to establish that early English observers such as Thomas Harriot (Hariot), the Roanoke colonist and polymath, regarded Native tattoos “as communication systems needing interpretation, comparable (if not exactly parallel with) writing” (9) or “complex media forms that they saw as analogous but not equivalent to their own writing” (15). The premise of English attention to Indigenous tattooing is persuasively established, as Odle shows that colonists had “great interest in understanding Native media systems” (20), which Harriot and others expressed by “mapping” (17) Indigenous societies through “systematic observations” (16), including recording tattoos.1 Odle furthermore