Since he was 13, Musafar has been experimenting with piercing, tattooing, cutting, corseting, branding and other body alterations, some of which he first picked up from issues of National Geographic. In the 1989 book Modern Primitives, he claims to have practiced every known form of body modification.

For many, curiosity about tribal body modifications like the ones Musafar performs probably starts with pictures in National Geographic. They read about the ritualistic alterations performed in cultures around the globe to distinguish and protect their members. Warriors of New Guinea’s Iwam tribe insert the canine teeth of warthogs into holes in their septums. Young women of Borneo’s Kayan tribe stretch their earlobes with heavy hoops until they reach to their shoulders. Kaleri women from Nigeria have their skin cut in decorative designs to create raised scars that indicate their status within their clans.

He’s not the only one. In the past five years, body modification has been popularized among certain groups that aren’t necessarily mainstream, but whose practices may eventually make scarring, burning and branding as common as pierced ears.

American marketers throughout the years have found the fascination with tribal rituals profitable. The proverbial tattooed lady was a fixture at the circus from the late 1800s on into the 1920s. Today, there is Musafar’s show and another that may be more well known because of its popularization through the 1992 Lollapalooza tour—the Jim Rose circus. Rose manages an eclectic band of performers who do pseudo tribal tricks with their bodies, including the sword-swallowing Enigma, the Torture King—who sticks needles and knives through various body parts—and the appropriately named Mr. Lifto, who raises objects hung from his numerous piercings.

However, the fascination has become more than just voyeurism for some. In 1992, ethnographer James Myers studied body modification in America by attending four body modification seminars in San Francisco. There he saw Musafar instruct workshop participants on branding and then burn a two-inch skull into a woman's leg with a strip of metal cut from a coffee can and heated with an acetylene torch. Musafar also taught the audience to burn themselves with incense sticks, according to Myers’ report in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Myers also attended workshops on piercing and cutting. One volunteer had a design of scales cut into her upper left shoulder with a scalpel, which was then rinsed with alcohol, lit on fire and rubbed with black ink.

Despite their eagerness to alter their bodies in painful ways, however, most of these people weren’t deviants, according to Myers. “The overwhelming number of people in my study appear to be remarkedly conventional sane individuals. Informed, educated, and employed in good jobs, they are functional and successful by societal standards,” he writes. The workshops he attended were connected with a Bay Area sadomasochism group, yet Myers discards the mainstream assessment of these people as oddities bent on doing themselves physical harm because of mental problems. He says historically rejected forms of body alteration, such as ear piercing, have now become the norm. Perhaps, he speculates, body modifications that are relatively new and still threatening to Western culture—like cutting and branding—will catch on eventually.

Myers suggests body modification is more about identity than a desire for pain. “The individual and group dynamics of rites of passage in traditional non-Western cultures are strikingly similar to those I observed at body modification events in this study,” he writes. “These individuals join human beings around the world in using their bodies to express a symbolic language that reveals their sentiments, dispositions, and desired alliances.”