A spare, elegant rendition of political clashes driven by personal agendas of rage and revenge, The Tattooed Fakir underlines a lesser known section of history with deep emotions. A novel about a lesser known section of eighteenth century Indian history armed Muslim fakirs waging guerilla warfare against British colonial rulers. Explores the interesting dilemma of the mixed-race child who is transformed into the fierce tattooed fakir. A young woman Roshanara is kidnapped by the village zamindar. The British sahib, owner of the indigo plantation, intervenes, but then takes her as his own mistress. She is not, however, any local woman she is a fakirs daughter. It is the end of the eighteenth century in northern Bengal. Roshanaras father, Cherag Ali and her husband, Asif go to Majnu Shahs band of fakirs to plead for help in getting her back. The fakirs are known for their heroic battles with the British, for their arms and horses. Asif feels nothing is left for him in the village and joins the fakirs, training in the use of weapons and ammunition, skirmishing with them up and down the country, but pining, always, for his Roshanara. Years later, in an oddly fated rescue mission he ends up, not with her, but with her son Roshan who evolves into a ferocious fakir soldier, tattooed and insecure about his identity.

At least thirty-seven per cent of male convicts and fifteen per cent of female convicts were tattooed by the time they arrived in the penal colonies, making Australians quite possibly the world's most heavily tattooed English-speaking people of the nineteenth century. Each convict’s details, including their tattoos, were recorded when they disembarked, providing an extensive physical account of Australia's convict men and women. Simon Barnard has meticulously combed through those records to reveal a rich pictorial history. Convict Tattoos explores various aspects of tattooing—from the symbolism of tattoo motifs to inking methods, from their use as means of identification and control to expressions of individualism and defiance—providing a fascinating glimpse of the lives of the people behind the records. Simon Barnard was born and grew up in Launceston. He spent a lot of time in the bush as a boy, which led to an interest in Tasmanian history. He is a writer, illustrator and collector of colonial artifacts. He now lives in Melbourne. He won the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books in the 2015 Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year awards for his first book, A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. Convict Tattoos is his second book. ‘The early years of penal settlement have been recounted many times, yet Convict Tattoos genuinely breaks new ground by examining a common if neglected feature of convict culture found among both male and female prisoners.’ Australian ‘This niche subject has proved fertile ground for Barnard—who is ink-free—by providing a glimpse into the lives of the people behind the historical records, revealing something of their thoughts, feelings and experiences.’ Mercury 'The best thing to happen in Australian tattoo history since Cook landed. A must-have for any tattoo historian.’ Brett Stewart, Australian Tattoo Museum

Where others would look away or change the side of the street, Charles Gatewood pulls out his camera and shoots his subjects, from William S. Burroughs to drunken revelers and modern blood drinkers, like a war photographer. Never putting his camera down, always finding the story. His most famous, but also most provocative pictures are definitely the ones he shot in American cities of the 70s and early 80s. Documenting the modern primitve and tattoo scene, including now legendary figures like Fakir Musafar and Spider Webb, he captured this world long before tattoos were a regular feature in every suburban home. His images document a rich world made by the kind of characters your mother warned you about - and that you secretly wanted to become- when you got your first tattoo.

An enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world Who is a provincial? In this subversive book, Sumana Roy assembles a striking cast of writers, artists, filmmakers, cricketers, tourist guides, English teachers, lovers and letter writers, private tutors and secret-keepers whose lives and work provide varied answers to that question. Combining memoir with the literary, sensory, and emotional history of an ignored people, she challenges the metropolitan’s dominance to reclaim the joyous dignity of provincial life, its tics and taunts, enthusiasms and tragicomedies. In a wide-ranging series of “postcards” from the peripheries of India, Europe, America, and the Middle East, Roy brings us deep into the imaginative world of those who have carried their provinciality like a birthmark. Ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, John Clare to the Bhakti poets, T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul to the Brontës, and Kishore Kumar to Annie Ernaux, she celebrates the provincials’ humor and hilarity, playfulness and irony, belatedness and instinct for carefree accidents and freedom. Her unprecedented account of provincial life offers an alternative portrait of our modern world.

If you've ever seen Fakir Musafar's photographs in Modern Primitives, Body Play magazine or on TV, you must get a copy of this coffee table art book. After 50 years of photographing his own body play and the play of others, here is a huge, 196-page collection of the very best of his work. A must-have for all serious body modifiers, tattoo and piercing enthusiasts.

Although instances of deliberate skin-cutting are recorded as far back as the old and New Testaments of the Bible the behavior has generally been regarded as a symptom of various mental disorders. With the publication of Bodies Under Siege, a book described in the New York Times Magazine (July 17, 1997) as "the first to comprehensively explore self-mutilation," Dr. Armando Favazza has pioneered the study of the behavior as significant and meaningful unto itself. Drawing from the latest case studies from clinical psychiatry he broadens our understanding of self-mutilation and body modification and explores their surprising connections to the elemental experiences of healing, religions, salvation, and social balance. Favazza makes sense out of seemingly senseless self-mutilative behaviors by providing both a useful classification and examination of the ways in which the behaviors provide effective but temporary relief from troublesome symptoms such as overwhelming anxiety, racing thoughts, and depersonalization. He offers important new information on the psychology and biology of self-mutilation, the link between self-mutilation and eating disorders, and advances in treatment. An epilogue by Fakir Musafar, the father of the Modern Primitive movement, describes his role in influencing a new generation to "experiment with the previously forbidden 'body side' of life" through piercing, blood rituals, scarification, and body sculpting in order to attain a state of grace. The second edition of Bodies Under Siege is the major source of information about self-mutilation, a much misunderstood behavior that is now coming into public awareness.

In recent decades, tattoos have gone from being a subculture curiosity in Western culture to mainstream and commonplace. This two-volume set provides broad coverage of tattooing and body art in the United States today as well as around the world and throughout human history. In the 1960s, tattooing was illegal in many parts of the United States. Today, tattooing is fully ingrained in mainstream culture and is estimated to be a multi-billion-dollar industry. This exhaustive work contains approximately 400 entries on tattooing, providing historical information that enables readers to fully understand the methods employed, the meanings of, and the motivations behind tattooing—one of the most ancient ways humans mark themselves. The encyclopedia covers all important aspects of the topic of tattooing: the major types of tattooing, the cultural groups associated with tattooing, the regions of the world where tattooing has been performed, the origins of modern tattooing in prehistory, and the meaning of each society's use of tattoos. Major historical and contemporary figures associated with tattooing—including tattooists, tattooed people, and tattoo promoters—receive due attention for their contributions. The entries and sidebars also address the sociological movements involved with tattooing; the organizations; the media dedicated to tattooing, such as television shows, movies, magazines, websites, and books; and the popular conventions, carnivals, and fairs that have showcased tattooing.

For Mark C. Taylor, the disappearance of depth we sense all around us is a change full of creative possibility. Taylor introduces us to a popular culture in which detectives - the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter - lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. He looks at the current preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. The limitless spread of computer networks, the history of phrenology, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas - all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation.

Globalization is often thought of as an abstract process that happens "out there" in the world. But people are ultimately the driving force of global change, and people have bodies that are absent from current conversations about globalization. The original scholarly research and first-person accounts of embodiment in this volume explore the role of bodies in the flows of people, money, commodities, and ideas across borders. From Zumba fitness classes to martial arts to fashion blogs and the meanings of tattooing, the contributors examine migrating body practices and ideals that stretch across national boundaries.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Western culture is marked by various fantasies that imagine our future selves and their forms of embodiment. These fantasies form part of a rapidly growing discourse about the future of the human form, the disappearing boundary between the human and the technological and the cultural consequences of greater human-technological integration. This book is about those cultural fantasies of fetishism, the different forms they take and the various ways in which the transformative processes they depict can reaffirm accepted definitions of identity or reconfigure them in an entirely new fashion.