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4.9: Virtual Field Trip: The Ainu, Japan

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    Virtual Field Trip: The Ainu, Japan

    The indigenous people of northern Japan call themselves Ainu, meaning “people” or “humans” in their language. Recent DNA evidence suggests that the Ainu are the direct descendants of the ancient Jomon people who inhabited Japan as early as 12,000 years ago. Astonishingly, the Jomon culture existed in Japan for some 10,000 years, and today many artistic traditions of the Ainu seem to have evolved from the ancestral Jomon. As such, this artistic continuum represents one of the oldest ongoing cultural traditions in the world spanning at least ten millennia. – Lars Krutak, Tattooing Among Japan’s Ainu People

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      Ainu man and woman with a bear skin.   An Ainu family - husband wife and child.   A gathering of people in a ceremony.   Ainu woman with a tattoo on her mouth. Ainu man outside his house.   An Ainu woman playing a large wooden instrument.   Modern Ainu man in traditional dress. Ainu couple seated under a cover around a smoking fire pit, surrounded by people in a mix of modern and traditional dress, one man playing guitar.

    The practice of modifying one’s body by marking it has been present from ancient times. And the evidences of tattoo practice are scattered worldwide. Here the question arise what made people think of marking their body? Tattoo in many indigenous community is a part of their culture and it is done on men, women and sometimes on the children too, but they signify a different meaning to the different members of the society. Tattoo is often associated with spirituality, power, and gender. Therefore, to trace back the necessity of marking the body could be possibly for gaining control over something through a symbol that is tattoo and it is done on the body as body is the only thing that we own, therefore the marks that are tattooed in the body is the symbol of owning something. In tribal community tattoos are done after puberty as the symbol of being sexually matured or sometime after achieving some certain ranks in the society in case of men, and often married women are marked by tattoo as a symbol of marriage.”

    -Archita Dey and Kaustav Das, Department of Anthropology University of Calcutta, from Why We Tattoo? Exploring the Motivation and Meaning

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