Michael Atkinson Answers Tattoo Questions in Book Tattooed: The Sociogenesis Of Body Art

Michael Atkinson had many questions about the stigma that comes with the tattooed body, but not very many answers, so in his book Tattooed: The Sociogenesis Of Body Art, he set out to find why such a large number of Canadians are currently turning to tattooing as an outward appearance of self-expression rather than clothing or free speech and tries to explain why individual habituse´s, otherwise known as personality structures or second natures, fluctuate over time (Atkinson, 2003: 13).
Atkinson outlines his response with the work of Norbert Elias , who is best known for the “civilizing process” and a hypothesis figurational social science. He gathered information from 27 tattoo artists and 65 tattoo enthusiasts from Toronto and Calgary in a method he called ethnosociology for participant perceptions on tattoos. A figuration is characterized as an accumulation of social performers bound together by chains or networks of interdependency and is a substitute for the idea of social order (Atkinson, 2003: 4).
Atkinson contends that we can comprehend a given social behaviour assuming that it is logically inserted into the long-term social processes. He gives a detail of this hypothetical position, and characterizes the terms utilized within his content. Following the development of tattooing from the 1770s, Atkinson shows the onlooker how tattooing has developed to turn into a normal routine in Canada.
The term sociogenesis that Atkinson uses refers to the historical social processes that are considered genesis in today’s society. The self is built through the regulation of society or the civilizing process of social relations (Atkinson, 2003: 9), where as the psychogenesis is viewed as the improvement of identity structures insid...

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...to feel as though they are resisting society, so they occasionally do it unconsciously (by altering the body) or consciously (by modifying the body or performing other activities).
However, we are still not given insights into the current social qualities and implications relating to bodies that this novel guaranteed. Even with numerous intriguing into the theme, Atkinson never truly addresses the inquiry concerning why more Canadians are getting tattoos, instead it explores this occurrence from a functionalist perspective in terms of defiance, or more so, the decivilizing process. Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of Body Art pushes the envelope into the sociological growth of tattooing. It is convenient for seeing how modifying the body and aesthetics like tattooing might appear uncommon at first in society, yet in the end it will become a societal norm.