by Kendra Smith |
 don’t believe I’m doing this,” says the middle-aged man sitting on the vintage lime-green examination table in the small room where Damion Haux works as a body piercer. The client, a nurse, wears a leather jacket, but other than that doesn’t seem too wild. He has come to see Haux to get his nipple pierced. In the colorful, narrow room, painted green with murals of high grass growing and adorned with the drawing of a many-limbed Hindu god, he tries hard not to stop breathing as Haux clamps the area around the left nipple and draws the needle through.
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The people who visit Haux and others like him for piercings from navels to nipples are not the kind of characters most would expect to see in a piercing shop. Body piercing has become more widely accepted in America than ever before. And although noses and navels are almost passé, and eyebrows and chins are trendy, the popularity of piercing shouldn’t obscure its value—to some it can be important, even therapeutic. This changing perception of a once-radical act may stem from the growing belief that piercing and other forms of body modification are personal rituals that America has been lacking for a long time. |
The popularization of nontribal people doing tribal things with their bodies, called neotribalism or modern primitivism, is evident in the names of piercing shops that have sprung up all over the nation from Kansas City to Berkeley. The moniker for Haux’s Eugene, Oregon, business, Skin Rituals, comes from his desire to keep a bit of the primitive attitude toward piercing in his business, even though it has become so mainstream. The word “rituals” seemed appropriate. Today, as he pierces a customer’s nose, Haux leaves the needle pointing jauntily through the guy’s face as he grabs the stud that will fill the newly made hole. With the double-pointed needle sticking through his nostril, the customer resembles the tribal warrior who appears on Haux’s business cards.
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