Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast · Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin

Inked Religion

·57 min·2 clips

Maimonides said tattooing was bad because pagans did it, and the Jewish cemetery ban on tattoos is largely a myth.

1. Keeping It 101's "Inked Religion" episode uses tattooing to examine how religions and cultures regulate bodies, from Neolithic evidence to New York City's tattoo ban, which ran until 1997. 2. Hosts Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American religions, and Elyse Morganstein First, a historian of religion focused on Islam and South Asia, frame it as a "throwback" lesson plan with story time and primary sources segments. 3. Their thesis is that whether a tradition likes or loathes tattoos matters less than the fact that bodies are "a subject of regulation, transformation, and maintenance" for communities. 4. First argues that the global spread of tattoo design is tied to European imperialism, citing Captain Cook's journals and Polynesian practices such as the pe'a and malu, while Christian missionaries suppressed those same practices. 5. On Judaism, she cites the Leviticus verse and Maimonides's view that tattooing marked pagan practice, and notes that Israel has a large tattoo market and that many rabbis call the cemetery-burial ban a myth. 6. On Islam, she explains that the Quran does not mention tattooing, a hadith condemns both tattooer and tattooee, henna is permitted, and Shia scholars rate tattooing as reprehensible but not forbidden, with Iran's scene underground. 7. The hosts read from Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada's "Tattoos as Sacramentals," which describes a man named Joe whose Our Lady of Mount Carmel tattoo, crowned and ringed by 12 stars, functions as devotional media. 8. Goodwin raises the shift in narco communities from Virgin of Guadalupe back tattoos, because "no one would stab the Virgin," toward Santa Muerte, and both hosts criticize popular sources that treat all indigenous tattooing as one practice. 9. In primary sources, First describes her hamsa, nazar, and ketubah tattoos, and Goodwin describes her Octavia Butler "God is change" tattoo, done after Samhain at the Crone Collective in Burlington, Vermont, and her father's disdain for tattoos. 10. Suits listeners curious about religion, the body, colonialism, and personal ink.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast