First, Tattoo Your Mouth: Tattooing, Immunoboosting, and Cultural Resilience

Lecture by Dr. Christopher Lynn, biocultural medical anthropologist, of the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology: 

One in three Americans has at least one tattoo nowadays, according to polls, but what are the health consequences of this skin injury? And why have people been doing it for thousands of years, well before sanitary tattooing practices were developed? In the United States and Samoan Islands, which has the oldest continual tattooing practices in the Pacific, tattoos enhance immune response and communicate important cultural information. Christopher Lynn is biocultural medical anthropologist from the University of Alabama who has been researching tattooing and immune response for nearly a decade. He is currently working on a book and documentary about the cultural resilience of tattooing in the Pacific and the role Samoans have played in the global resurgence.