What The Body Carries Away From Home
I worked in a city—Sydney—that receives people from everywhere, and the men who came to me over three decades reflected that. Not a representative sample of anything, and I want to say that plainly before I proceed.
What arrived at my door was what happened to arrive, shaped by who sought out the work, who found me, who decided to come. But within that limitation, the range was genuine: men formed in India and Japan and Brazil and West Africa and the Philippines and Indonesia and many other places, each of them carrying the specific bodily inheritance of the tradition they had grown up in, modified by whatever had happened since.
What I noticed, consistently, was that the inheritance was more various than any account of it I had read would have suggested. The narratives available—about modesty, about the body’s relationship to shame, about what cultures permitted and what they policed—were true in broad outline and imprecise in the particular. The man from Lagos who had grown up in an evangelical household carried something quite different from the man from Lagos who had grown up in a family that had maintained its pre-colonial religious practices alongside the Christian ones. The man from rural Japan carried something different from the man from Seoul who had grown up watching K-pop. The man from São Paulo who had grown up on the beach carried something different from the man from the Brazilian interior who had grown up inside the specific intersection of machismo and evangelical Christianity that had become one of the defining tensions of contemporary Brazilian masculinity.
The range, in other words, was not between traditions but within them. Each tradition was a site of contest rather than a settled position, and the men who came from those traditions arrived already inside the contest, carrying its specific textures in their bodies and their habits of conduct.
I want to try to say something honest about what I observed across that range, because the easy account—the account that says: some cultures are more comfortable with the body than others, and the West is more repressed than most—does not match what I found. The easy account is not without truth. But it misses the specificity.
Among the men who came to me from sub-Saharan Africa, what I noticed most often was not a simple relationship to the body but a layered one. I have written elsewhere about the colonial imposition of modesty norms in Africa—about the Immorality and Indecency Suppression Act in Rhodesia, about the missionaries who arrived with bolts of cloth and codes of conduct, about the semiotic chainmail that linked nakedness, sexuality and sin in the Christian conception and then was exported to bodies that had not previously been wearing it.
What I found in the room was evidence that the chain had attached at different depths in different men. Some carried what felt like an entirely absorbed version of the colonial modesty—indistinguishable, in its texture, from the Augustinian residue I found in men formed in the British tradition. Others carried something more complex: the colonial modesty and underneath it, or alongside it, a different relationship to the body that surfaced occasionally, in the quality of ease that arrived when the management relaxed.
One man—I am being deliberately imprecise—had grown up in a context where body painting was still practised in ceremonial settings within his extended family, and where those ceremonies were conducted alongside a Christianity that his family treated as compatible rather than competitive. What he described, when he described it, was a body that was public in some contexts and private in others, and that understood those contexts clearly rather than applying a single rule to all situations. The body painted with ochre in the ceremonial context was a different body from the body in the city, in work clothes, in the secular spaces of contemporary life. He was entirely comfortable with both bodies and saw no contradiction between them. The colonial modesty had not erased the prior relationship to the body. It had been added to it, and the addition had been absorbed without destroying what was underneath.
I find that layering more interesting than either of the simpler accounts—the account in which the colonial tradition destroyed the indigenous one, or the account in which the indigenous tradition persisted intact beneath the colonial surface. What I observed was neither. It was the coexistence of both, active and simultaneous, the man able to move between them as the situation required.
The men from South Asia who came to me were carrying their own distinct layering. The Hindu tradition contains within it a strand of ritual nudity that is specifically male—the sadhus who renounce clothing as part of renouncing the world, and who are visible on streets and ghats in a state of undress that the surrounding society acknowledges as spiritually significant rather than indecent. The Islamic modesty requirement, which covers the male body from navel to knee, operates in the same geography with a different logic. And then there is Bollywood, which has, over my working life, produced a specific fantasy of the male body—the increasingly muscular hero, the reveal of the torso that has become almost formulaic in commercial Hindi cinema—that generates its own ideals and its own anxieties among the men who grow up measuring themselves against it. The supplement industry in India is now, I have read, a multi-billion-dollar market. The same man who grew up seeing sadhus as an image of male spiritual authority, and who carries the modesty requirement of whatever religious tradition his family maintained, is also calibrating himself against a Bollywood torso that requires pharmaceutical assistance to sustain.
What I found in the men from South Asia who came to me was often exactly this: the coexistence, in the same body, of several different frameworks that had not been resolved into a single one. The spiritual body, the modest body, and the aspirational Bollywood body were all present, in varying proportions, and the man had learned to navigate between them rather than choosing one. The navigation was sometimes visible as a specific quality of self-consciousness—a man attending to his body from several directions at once, none of them quite dominant.
From East Asia, what I found in the men from Japan was often the onsen inheritance I have described elsewhere: a body that had been normalised in communal bathing contexts and that arrived with a quality of physical practicality I did not always find in men from other traditions. The men from South Korea who came to me often carried something different—the K-pop bodily ideal had, in their generation, done something to the relationship between the male body and its presentation that resembled what the Bollywood torso had done in India but with its own specific textures. The K-pop male body is highly styled, carefully groomed, presented in a register that Western fitness culture does not quite have a category for—neither the aggressive muscularity of the bodybuilding tradition nor the studied casualness of the sportswear aesthetic, but something that includes both skin care and emotional expressiveness alongside physical cultivation. The men who had grown up with this as the dominant male body ideal were carrying a different set of anxieties from the men who had grown up with Western fitness culture’s more limited vocabulary. Not fewer anxieties, necessarily. Different ones.
From Brazil, what I found was the specific intersection of beach culture, bodybuilding culture, and the evangelical Christianity that has been growing rapidly in urban Brazilian life. The beach culture normalised the partial display of the male body in a way that had no precise equivalent in Australian or British culture—the Speedo-wearing tradition of the carioca beach, where the male body is visible and assessed and present in a way that the Anglo-Australian beach does not quite permit. The bodybuilding culture produced the specific body ideal that I have written about in the context of the narrowing visual vocabulary—the enlarged chest, the defined abdomen, the body worked on systematically toward an aesthetic. And the evangelical Christianity brought, alongside considerable warmth and community, a specific version of male modesty that sat in direct tension with both the beach and the gym.
The man from São Paulo who had grown up going to the beach, attending the gym, and singing in an evangelical choir was navigating three different accounts of what his body was and what he should do with it. I did not always know which account was winning in any given moment. I am not sure he always knew either.
What I find most useful, pulling these observations together, is not a comparison of traditions on a scale of comfort or repression. It is the observation that every tradition I encountered was internally contested—that the men from each tradition were already inside a negotiation between different accounts of the body rather than settled in a single position. The colonial imposition had not erased the indigenous relationship. The indigenous revival had not replaced the colonial one. The K-pop ideal had not displaced the onsen tradition. The evangelical modesty had not resolved the beach culture. Every body I worked with was carrying the evidence of multiple frameworks, and the question was not which framework was dominant but how the man had arranged himself in relation to their coexistence.
There is one comparison to address, and which I have been thinking about independently: the question of why tattoo revival has succeeded, across the Pacific and across many of the traditions I have been describing, where nudity revival has not. What I observe—and I am cautious about this, because the observation rests on limited evidence—is something about what the body carries away from the encounter. The tattoo persists. It is the body marked permanently by the tradition, able to move through the contemporary world while still carrying the ancestral practice. The Samoan man with his pe’a can sit in a business meeting in Auckland wearing a suit and still have his cultural identity encoded in his skin. He has not chosen between the tradition and the contemporary world. He carries both, simultaneously, without either requiring a specific context to be present.
Nudity is different. The unclothed body cannot be carried into the contemporary world. It requires a context, and the contexts in which it is permitted are specific and often difficult to access—the naturist beach at the bottom of a steep set of steps, the private ceremony that the surrounding culture does not acknowledge. The tattoo is portable in a way that nudity is not, and the portability means it can be reclaimed without the reclaiming requiring a wholesale change in the contexts the person moves through.
I find this observation more useful than the political or artistic explanations, though those also contain truth. The tattoo survives because it can be worn everywhere. The body’s uncovering must find its place.
The men who came to me from outside the Western tradition had often already worked this out, in their own ways, before they arrived. They were not waiting for the resolution of a contest between indigenous and colonial, traditional and modern. They were living in both, simultaneously, as the men they actually were, in the bodies they actually had. That simultaneity was, in my observation, the normal condition rather than the exceptional one. The single tradition, fully settled, was the exception. The layering was the rule.
I am not sure the essays I have written about the Western tradition quite account for this. They have traced a line—from Genesis through Augustine through Victorian regulation through the painted underpants in the naturist magazine—and the line is real and its effects are real. But the men who came from outside that line were already telling me something the line alone could not accommodate. That the inheritance is always multiple. That the body carries more than one tradition at a time. And that the question is not which tradition wins but how the man lives in the coexistence.
That, I think, is the observation I am left with. The coexistence is not a problem to be solved. It is simply what it is to have been formed in a world that contains more than one account of what a body is.
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