Matters and experiments - Contemporary modalities for the acquisition of technical competences: The case of Austronesian tattoo techniques: Panel 9: Place(s) for innovation? Enduring and changing materials in the Pacific

International audienceOnce spread throughout the Austronesian linguistic area, the hand-tapping technique of tattooing was progressively abandoned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before being gradually re-discovered during the 1980’s in the wake of the cultural renewal movements. Initiated later than the revival of seafaring and dances, hand tapping tattoo techniques were first sought among renowned members of the Samoan community (tufuga ta pe’a or tattoo specialists) before being transmitted more widely. Pacific tattoo revivals were also promoted from outside the Pacific rim by a body of professional tattooists and occurred precisely when Western tattooing was gaining cultural legitimacy. This gave rise to a professional environment structured by the specificity of matters, gestures and the agent-patient relationship as well as by new configurations and policies at work. This situation represents a singular case of emergence of a material culture, i.e. the constitution of a social group through engagement with matters and materials. Based on a multi-sited ethnography, this communication will address the socio-technical transactions within a transnational network of practitioners engaged in the transmission and preservation of hand tapping tattoo techniques. It will stress the paradox of loosing-while-safeguarding by examining the consequences of experiments in matters that have been undertaken by tattoo practitioners at different level of the learning process