Panel Session 1
Caring for Skin: Relational Becomings, Therapeutic Encounters and Journeys of Healing

From Stigma to Panacea? ‘Healing Wounds’ or Tattooing as (Self-)Therapy in Naples
Severin Penger, PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, Free University of Berlin

What are the socio-cultural conditions fostering and enabling a healing efficacy of permanently intended and liberally marked skin through the wound-causing ritual of tattooing? During one and a half year of fieldwork in Naples, I could not avoid noticing a ‘therapeutic’ aspect of tattooing. In this talk, I want to analyse some cases in which such a therapeutic idea is attached to a tattoo, when related to a loss, the perception of one’s body or as some kind of personal empowerment, for example. But then I also want to look at broader dynamics giving rise to such a necessity, including the need (and possibility) for calling such a practice ‘therapeutic’.
Therefore, I will focus on individuals’ motivations and the role of the materiality of the tattoo and its interdependency for such popular, not (yet) institutionalized acts of ‘therapy’ within its socio-cultural context. In so doing, I acknowledge that the encounter of social and individual, often contradictory dynamics in the form of a material, pigmented part of skin is ambiguous and can have ‘deviant’ effects, too. This can still happen, e.g., when associated to aspects of class or criminality – which are historically linked to tattoos in Naples (Blasio 1905). So, what makes a therapeutic tattoo ‘work’ and which part of its setting might change over time, maybe even unmaking its efficacy?
Additionally, connotations of healing and tattoos are probably as old as their stigmatizing effects. Both healing and stigma were, especially in Southern Italy, related to religion and medicine (Horden 2020, McLaughlin 2021:11), and still are domains intertwined with shifting material-discursive practices (Barad 2015) of psychology and economy nowadays. Moreover, these connotations also evolve, hand in hand, with the everchanging perception of tattooing itself, lately moving from a marginalized to a commonly desired and sought-after practice in Naples and beyond.
All in all, without ascribing Panacea-like characteristics to this kind of body modification, this presentation seeks to take the value that people give to its healing powers as seriously as the material and social lacks that can cause its need: the stigmata that are to cope with.

Skinship: Relationality and Skin Microbiopolitics
Heather Mellquist Lehto, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Arizona State University

The skin is one of the most important thresholds in human life, constituting a boundary of one’s body as well as a medium for relation with others. Yet, there is no universal, trans-historical understanding of the skin. Rather, how people relate to and through their skin is informed by conceptions of race and gender, public health projects, scientific research, religious traditions, and cosmetics industries. This paper draws on ethnographic research within the K-beauty cosmetics industry, with research scientists, and with public health officials in South Korea to analyze the recent research and product development related to the skin microbiome. The increasing use of prebiotic, probiotic, and postbiotic skin treatments cultivates not only the skin’s materiality, but also a distinctive awareness of one’s interdependence with bacterial fermentation processes, as well as the broader, environmental conditions necessary to maintain the skin as a complex ecosystem. Korean beauty industries, in particular, use this interest in the microbiome to create new social and economic ties internationally by capitalizing on the country’s long-held medicinal and food fermentation practices. Drawing on six months of ethnographic research in Seoul, South Korea, this paper traces how skin microbiome research has shifted how dermatologists, cosmetics developers, and skincare users understand the materiality of the skin. Inspired by the Korean/Japanese term “skinship” [스킨싶] and Heather Paxson’s “microbiopolitics,” I give particular attention to the sociopolitical implications of such scientific knowledge and skincare practices, showing how shifting conceptions of the skin work to reconfigure social and ecological relations.

Lost in Experimentation: Skin as the Embodied Contested Site of Biomedical and Alternative Medicines through an Autobiographical Account of Eczema Healing Journey
Wai Lok NG, Independent researcher, MA Eduation from the University College London

Eczema, or atopic dermatitis, is a disease where patients have varying degree of inflammation at different parts of the skin. Some have itchy red rashes and blisters while some have dry skin, skin thickening, and increased skin flaking. The affected areas are usually at face, head, neck, and flexor surfaces, such as elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles. Complications may occur if bacteria infect the scratched wounds. The symptoms are bothersome in many ways. Personally, one may have disturbed sleep cycles and diminished stamina for daily functioning. Socially, visible symptoms may be an obstacle for interpersonal contact. The onset of eczema can be at birth or later ages while some would eventually heal themselves and some continue having it. Currently, Western biomedical medicine has no cure for this disease but only preventive and alleviating therapies to minimise flaring. Many eczema patients also suffer from signs of depression and anxiety.
Coming from Hong Kong, I am one of the ten to twenty percent of the population who have or have had eczema; upon the uncertainty of how to cure the disease and the desire to have healthy and normal skin, I took on the journey to experiment with different alternative medicines. Born in 1993, I have been having eczema, like many other new born babies. Bring introduced into Western medicine by my parents, I did not question its legitimacy and gradually learned to trust it credibility and the evidence-based science behind. As time went by, episodes of eczema would exacerbate and subside like waves. At secondary school age, as a complement to Western medicine, I was introduced to traditional Chinese medicine, which was praised to be backed by ‘5000 years of trial and error’. Flaring of eczema was under control during that period but shortly after undergraduate graduation, I had a serious outbreak. During the time, I learned about a naturopathic practitioner who claimed to have found the cure for eczema. There, I was informed of the toxicity of pharmacology and instructed to stop using any Western-biomedical based medication. Although I was admitted to the hospital for overdosage of herbal medicine, I began to distrust Western medicine and actively look for alternative medicines and therapies. As of today, I am still lost in experimentation and yearning for the answer. In a nutshell, what does not work probes me to switch to another set of medicinal practice, until one day I hopefully would locate the right therapy for my condition.
In this essay, health and healing are seen to be ‘cultural constructs, expressed symbolically through language, informed by particular historical, socioeconomic, and political circumstances’ (Ross, 2012, p. 13). Embracing that ‘the personal is theorerical’ (Okely, 1992, p. 9), I write up an autobiographical account of the embodied journey to search for the cure of eczema to illustrate how in a metropolitan city with biomedical science as the politically dominant health system, alternative medicines and ‚New Age‘ holistic spiritualities could assume the role of explaining pathology and shape one’s daily life.

References:
Okely, J. (1992). Anthropology and autobiography: Participatory experience and embodied knowledge. In Okely, J., & Callaway, H. (Eds.), Anthropology and autobiography (pp. 13-40). Routledge.
Ross, A. (2012). The anthropology of alternative medicine. (English ed.). Berg.

Panel Session 2
Skin at Work: Erotic Performances, Skin (Colour) Politics and Art Practices

I Search ‘how to make my skin white’ – Cosmopolitan Beauty Practices amongst Rwandan Migrant Sex Workers
Suvi Lensu, PhD candidate in Anthropology and African Studies, University of Edinburgh

This paper takes Rwandan female and transwomen sex workers’ beauty practises as a starting point to explore the material and social processes of skin bleaching. Based on 12 months’ ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019 in Rwanda, I study the role of skin whitening cosmetics, skin colour and – beauty ideals as well as aesthetic performances as part of cosmopolitan identity construction. In search of better livelihoods, the cross-border sex workers travelled from Rwanda to its’ neighbouring countries, to Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and sometimes as far as to Kenya and Dubai. As a result of their mobile and urban lifestyle, the women adopted various beauty practises, which they transported back home. Consequently, these beatifications were displayed as a material continuity in a form of makeup, skin bleaching products and rituals of self-care. Some used removable whitening powders and foundations, whereas others applied creams with the permanent effect of skin bleaching. Since Rwanda had banned bleaching cosmetics from its markets at the beginning of 2019, some women began to mix natural remedies in the hope of a fairer complexion. Others suffered painful consequences from the usage of whiting creams, yet due to the products’ inaccessibility in the Rwandan beauty trade, they enhanced their modern and polished appearance. Through these aesthetic performances, my Rwandan cross-border sex worker interlocutors took active agency in claiming a cosmopolitan identity. By navigating between temporal and permanent, cosmopolitan and traditional, self-care and damage their skins became canvases displaying the remnants of these social and material negotiations.

‘Exposing for flirting’: skin and female erotic performance in the construction of intimate relationships in northern Madagascar
Diana Mignano, Junior Fellow at Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS), University of Bayreuth

The production of a certain female body is a central part of the erotic performance that Malagasy women recreate to seduce European men in a context of economic-sexual exchange in Diego Suarez, Madagascar. The erotic performance allows them to recreate closeness, intimacy, mutual arousal, desire and pleasure with their potential partners.
One of the most important aspects of erotic performance is the use of make-up, hairstyles, wigs, clothes, shoes and accessories with which Malagasy women prepare and turn their skin into a place of negotiation of their sexuality, femininity, ethnicity and race.

My intention with this paper is to describe these negotiations and the ideas that underlie the different relationships, uses, and experiences that Malagasy women make with their skin in order to access, participate and benefit from erotic performance. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I will
argue that skin, especially skin color and its possibilities for material and performative manipulation are central to understanding the construction of intimate relations in northern Madagascar.

Mediating Skin
Matthew Raj Webb, PhD candidate in Anthropology, New York University

This paper draws on anthropological media theory to examine practices and ideologies of contemporary professional fashion image “retouchers.” Since the earliest days of photography, retouchers have participated in making decisions about how to visually represent skin (human and otherwise) through a variety of media forms (e.g., cinema, printed magazines, digital video) and aesthetic genres. As a professional community of practice, retouchers have generated a
variety of techniques and technologies for representationally encoding features of skin, such as color, texture, and shape, in line with shifting beauty trends over time. Once valued as expert craftspeople and even as artists, public debate since the 1990s has however been increasingly critical of their work, which is often identified with negatively valued secrecy, complicity with predatory capitalist advertising, and patriarchal values. Drawing on interview data collected from 2020-2021 in New York City while producing a short documentary film (Retouch 2021, 17min), my paper analyzes how professional retouchers view their work and knowledge in line with the criticisms that surround it. Themes emerging from this analysis include: (1) retouchers’ positionality as experts, and their challenge to ideologies which equate authenticity with “natural” (i.e., unmediated) representations of the body; (2) retouchers’ resistance to narratives about their work as “labor,” countered by their appeals to a framing rubric of “art”; and (3) a reported shift from hierarchical processes of aesthetic decision-making within the fashion photography industry toward an increasingly socially distributed model. Informed by an anthropological approach to studying cultural production within dynamic mediated fields (Ginsburg et al. 2002; Bennett et al. 2020), I develop Judith L. Goldstein’s concept of the “female aesthetic community,” first introduced in her so titled 1993 paper. Centrally, I draw attention to the tensions between stratified forms of authority “on stage” and “off stage” within a mass mediated female aesthetic community, and argue, ultimately, for a critical perspective on retouching practices and industries as privileged sites for management of class distinctions within the domain of gender.

References:
Ginsburg, F. D. and L. Abu-Lughod, B. Larkin. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New
Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstein, J. L. 1993. “The Female Aesthetic Community.” Poetics Today, 14(1): 143-163.
Bennett, T. and F. R. Myers, D. Stevenson, T. Winikoff., eds. 2020. The Australian Art Field:
Practices, Policies, Institutions. New York: Routledge.