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What Do Your Tattoos Say About You?Redemption and contamination stories |
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
19th of December 2007, 19:07 GMT
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Your car, partner, home, hair dye or clothes say a lot about your life and personality. But unlike them, tattoos are forever, much more personalized and harder to change or remove. A new research made at the University of Arkansas has attempted to assess their significance. Tattoos seem to be a pylon of stability (coherent identity) in a rapidly changing and complex society. "They do this through the power of story", said co-author Jeff Murray, marketing professor at Sam M. Walton College of Business.
A tattoo is a snapshot of a part or scene of the owner's life, turned into a personal myth. "We continue to be struck by rapid and unpredictable change. Consumers adapt to these changes by varying their lifestyle. They downshift, upgrade, change their hair, body, clothes, car, house, career, geographic location and even family. The result is a loss of personal anchors needed for identity. We found that tattoos provide this anchor. Their popularity reflects a need for stability, predictability, permanence and identity." said Murray.
The study was carried on 7 volunteers (3 women and 4 men), aged 22 to 58: 2 married, 3 single, one widower and one divorced; some of them had children. Their occupations were college student, college professor, construction worker, medical courier, artist, waitress and manager of an exotic boutique. The team took the volunteers in-depth (about) 2 hour long interviews, asking for the significance of the tattoo design, tattooing experience and body perception, but they also "dug" into the subjects' personality and biographical data. The authors found two common master themes: stories of redemption or of contamination.
Redemption stories varied from emotionally negative scenes to emotionally positive ones. For one subject, her tattoos marked the healing from the grief caused by her parents' death. Contamination stories varied the same way: positive events were spoiled by a bad consequence. One man displayed several tattoos in easy-to-see body parts. They were made at the time to mark his membership to his friends' band, but as he got older, he felt his employers judged him according to those tattoos.
"Our analyses revealed that identity is an ongoing negotiation between the individual who chooses to narrate particular scenes and the culture within which the individual lives. Redemption and contamination sequences as common story lines helped us better understand the long-term consequences of tattoos and their role in the negotiation process. This process demonstrates the importance and power of narrative in the construction of personal identity, which, good or bad, says a lot about the types of products people purchase and their reasons for purchasing them", said Murray.
"Many marketers and retailers understand this and increasingly rely on narrative to sell all kinds of products. Companies understand that identity and personal narrative are extremely effective tools for marketing products. They are valuable explanations for why and what people consume." he added.
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