The Body and Global Indigeneity: Tattoos, Ethnicity and Small Media in Indonesia

Abstract

Images have played a significant role in projecting the temporal stability of the state in Indonesia and other postcolonial nations. In contemporary Indonesia, images move through a complex media ecology, taking on new forms of authority as they travel. Tattoos are one practice through which artists and activists influenced by the politics of global indigeneity refract images through a lens of nostalgia and desire. In this case the body becomes part of a circulatory network of images, ideas and embodied experience. Considering the tension between ethnicity and the state through tattooing - which has been criminalised and subject to stigmatisation - it is possible to extend understandings of ..