Pain Industries

Tribal Dreams

written by Philip Marchand (book columnist)

for the Toronto Star, Arts section, Saturday, March 22, 1997.

At many points in history, people have returned to the primitive and its primary ideas. We're there again.

"We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3,000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth."

- Marshall McLuhan, 1969

The bottles of ink stand in rows, red and yellow and blue, plastic squeeze-bottles like containers of mustard and ketchup. Scott Duncan looks fondly at them. He brought them back recently from Rochester, N.Y. "I was blown away by the quality - really, really easy to work with," he says. "And steadfast pigments."

Duncan himself displays on his body the effect of improved colours in today's tattooing. But the most striking designs on his body - on the lower part of his legs - are black and white. It's a kind of tattooing known in the business as "tribal work," because it evokes the primitive, abstract tattooing of certain tribal cultures. "These lines are more harsh and angular," he says, pointing to one of his legs. "That's the more aggressive male side." The corresponding lines on his other leg are more curved and fluid - his female side.

It's a long way from where Duncan sits - in a room at Urban Primitive Design Studio on Church St. - to the traditional tattoo parlour in a bad part of town. No drunk staggers in here to get a rose or a dagger or a heart inscribed to "Mom" tattooed on his biceps or forearm.

This is not tattooing, this is body art, and if a tough -looking character in a biker outfit happens to be a customer, he will likely prove, on closer inspection, to be some guy who works in an office and finds biker outfits a turn-on.

Besides the bottles of ink, and what looks like a simplified version of a barber's or a dentist's chair, the room contains a copy of a recently published book, Patterns that Connect (Canadian Manda Group). Duncan, 21, and his colleague, Daemon Rowanchilde, 34, are very keen on this book, which is sub-titled, "Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art." Almost every page of the book is full of pictures of Pueblo pottery and palaeolithic cave drawings and carvings from New Guinea - and tattoos. The thesis of the book is that the designs produced by ancient and tribal cultures are universal in their significance - the same motifs, the same symbols, crop up in widely separated times and places. Here's plenty of inspiration for today's tattooist, who has long since liberated himself from drawing roses and daggers and hearts inscribed with "mom." Today's tattooist is very interested in the primitive. And in a curious way there's no more fitting person to whet this interest than the author of Patterns that Connect - Edmund Carpenter, an anthropologist living in New York City. Carpenter, 74, who s retired from teaching after a lifetime spent in various universities, including the University of Toronto, wrote the text and put the book's illustrations together using the research of the late American art historian, Carl Schuster (1904-1969).

Carpenter himself is well aware that the primitive is back is style. He knows that today's students are likely to be covered with the same tattoos as an old war chief from the Solomon Islands. "We don't have to use slides any more to illustrate our anthropology lectures," he says. "We just ask the students to step forward and strip down." But Carpenter's connection with the resurgence of interest in the primitive goes back far beyond the publication of his book. In the 1950s, as a young anthropologist at the University of Toronto who had done a lot of field work among the Inuit, he was the sidekick of an English professor named Marshall McLuhan. They were quite a pair - as far as their more conventional colleagues were concerned, they constituted a two-man leper colony. McLuhan was always outraging his fellow faculty members with his alarming vitality, his free-wheeling speculations, his disdain for academic protocol. And Carpenter practically went out of his way to irritate and insult his colleagues.

Both men were consummate lecture room performers. Students either loved or hated them. During one graphic Edmund Carpenter lecture on Polynesian sexual mores- this in the '50s, mind you - a female student left in disgust. Carpenter called out after her, "You don't have to rush, my dear, the boat doesn't leave for two days."

In the midst of these hijinks, McLuhan was developing a comprehensive theory of culture. It had become clear to him that new electronic media, chiefly television, was erasing the effects of many centuries of literacy in the West and returning us to a non-linear, non-rationalistic world similar in some ways to culture of Carpenter's Inuit.

The young, in particular, were re-tribalizing. For example: they had none of civilization's hang-ups about nudity, he explained to a Playboy interviewer in 1967 because "television tattoos its message directly on our skins." Is it any wonder that today's young have a thing for real tattooing? The only wonder is that the fad took so long.

Now why, a reader of Patterns that Connect might ponder, are certain images from ancient and tribal art so universal? Is it because they stem, in the words of Scott Duncan, from some "divine consciousness or global consciousness"? Is that why artists in palaeolithic Europe and ancient Peru and the Polynesian Islands hit upon the same designs? Something like this is suggested by psychologist Carl Jung's theory of archetypal symbols. Jung defined these symbols as forms or images that occur all over the Earth. They seem to be products of the unconscious of the individual who creates them, and yet they also seem to be lodged deep in the psyche of the race, as a kind of collective spiritual inheritance.

The late Joseph Campbell popularized this theory. In his book Hero With a Thousand Faces, for example, he defined his hero as someone whose "visions, ideas and inspiration come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought."

In 1952, Carpenter debated Northrop Frye, who was rather fond of archetypal symbols himself, on the subject. It was a characteristically sharp encounter - many years later Frye, normally not one to descend to the personal, recalled Carpenter as "a real son of a bitch." But Carpenter, then and now, thinks all this Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and stuff is mystical garbage. He has no patience with it. He is contemptuous of students who dip their toes in "the primary springs of human life and thought," even though he and McLuhan were the first to predict this sort of thing 40 years earlier. "I taught for many years at the New School for Social Research (in New York City) and one day a graduate student was in my office," he recalls. "She had this big, black round thing. I asked her what it was, and she said, 'That's my drum.' For Christ's sake, now we're beating drums in the graduate department. This sort of thing has no more to do with anthropology than astrology has to do with astronomy." Carpenter is noncommittal about his own views regarding the universality of the symbols in Patterns that Connect. "I'm not pushing any explanation," he insists. "There are no conclusions to Patterns that Connect."

The human brain, Carpenter suggests, is naturally disposed to images - there may be something in the brain, as well, that naturally connects certain images with certain phenomena. The tree as a image of the branching of the human race, for example us a recurrent theme of Carpenter's book, and it may be, as they say, something hard-wired into our imaginations.

Moreover, the persistence of certain designs in ancient and tribal art may be due simply to the intense conventionality of tribal artists. "We're not supposed to say it, but primitive artists are very conservative," Carpenter says. "They were never sold on this idea of progress. They believed in the past and they honoured it and they stuck with it."

Duncan and Rowanchilde believe there's a little more to it than that. "Shamans would see certain patterns in people's auras," he says. "If the aura was that of a sick person, they would paint on the body something representing the aura of a healthy person."

Bruce Chatwin, the late travel writer and art expert, also believed that the art of certain cultures was influenced by the hallucinations of shamans. He was fascinated, for example, by the art of nomadic tribes, and in particular the nomadic tribes of northern Asia, where shamanism originated. "Nomadic art tends to be portable, asymmetric, discordant, restless, incorporeal and intuitive," he wrote. "Colour is violent; mass and volume are rejected in favour of bold silhouettes and a pierced technique of openwork spirals, lattices and geometric tracery."

All of this sounds very much like the art of contemporary tattooing, as practised by places like The Urban Primitive. Rowanchilde hastens to add that he does not consider himself a modern-day shaman. He can hardly claim to be part of this tradition.

It's just as well. As Chatwin notes, shamans were borderline psychotics. "Mental disorders are common in northern Asia," he wrote. "The harshness of the climate is sometimes blamed. Shamanistic candidates, 'morbid and sensitive,' tell of the relief that shamanizing brings." Rowanchilde is also very aware that a sort of cheap mysticism is common currency in the tattoo business. Culture critic Mark Kingwell, in his chapter on tattooing and body piercing in his book Dreams of Millennium, reports, "People wear ankh and ying-yang tattoos because they 'look cool,' or they flip through The Dictionary of Symbols to find hip designs as though the world's cultures were a kind of fashion source book."

All this aside, however, Rowanchilde's art does have a trance-like meditative quality. "I just doodle," he says, "I haven't drawn anything before-hand. It comes out of the unconscious. I just work on opening myself up, clearing my head as far as possible - so as not to get any thoughts of which way the tattoo is going to go. I just let my mind wander."

And there is a sort of spiritual component at work. "There's almost a drive for people to get reconnected to something through these practices," Rowanchilde says. "There's the drive to reconnect somewhere where we're not. We've severed ourselves in many ways from something and there's that search for things that are missing, that are not obvious to us."

And so the primitive returns, in many different guises. It may be possible now to tap into the "primary springs of human life and thought' just by looking at the bodies of men and women walking the streets of Toronto.


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