Roland Loomis, who took the name Fakir Musafar, spent decades from the late 1960s performing elaborate body modification rituals drawn from diverse indigenous traditions — including the Sun Dance, Kavadi, and Mayan bloodletting — and theorised these practices as a form of 'body play' connecting modern Westerners to primal spiritual experience. His documentation and advocacy of extreme body modification culminated in the seminal 1989 book and exhibition 'Modern Primitives,' edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. The Modern Primitives movement that Musafar helped found reframed body modification as a spiritual and philosophical practice rather than deviance or fashion.

The Modern Primitives movement generated a significant body of literary and theoretical writing about the body as spiritual text, drawing on the work of anthropologists, performance artists, and poets. Its influence can be felt in the poetry of Anne Carson, whose essay-poems on the body's boundaries draw on ritual modification imagery, and in the performance poetry tradition of the 1980s and 1990s that treated embodied pain as a vehicle for revelation. The movement's cross-cultural appropriation of indigenous body practices also stimulated critical responses in postcolonial poetry about the ethics of bodily borrowing.