Reading beneath the Skin

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the early modern encounter between Spanish colonizers and the Visayans, tattooed Indigenous people of the Philippines. Skin has commonly featured as a marker of human difference in studies of colonial interactions. By tracing how Spanish responses to tattooing were negotiated locally using preexisting and newly emerging terminologies, I suggest that there was no fixed framework for interpreting the meanings of skin and skin markings in early modern Europe. I demonstrate how Spanish writers sought to use Visayan tattoos to insert their bearers into the Spanish colonial universe, but how, at once, the tattooed body challenged imperial visions and the colonial categories of naked and dressed, literate and illiterate, savage and civilized. Just as the tattoo was caught in the space between the interior and the exterior of the body, so, too, the Visayans occupied a liminal position in colonial hierarchies as people who were destitute but capable of civilization. By examining the different forms of literacy entangled in reading tattoos, I point to the performative dimensions of the encounter and conceptualize the tattoo as a form of “embodied history.” I argue that paying close attention to such cross-cultural interactions is crucial for our understanding of how contemporary categories associated with skin and difference emerged out of early modern global engagements.