In Senegal, where wrestling has its own tradition that predates European influence, the snapshots of warriors actually highlight the colonial interests of the photographers. In India, Sandow's gospel of personal strength became interwoven with Indian nationalism and independence. Still, the exchange (or replacement) isn't so cut and dry. The "male body factored prominently in the construction of modern national identities," write Chapman and Brown, and as the imperial powers of the day disseminated their own religious and sociopolitical standards, they also strove to shape the actual bodies of the people they encountered. Their journey begins in Europe with Anglo-German "physical culturalist" Eugen Sandow and ends in South America with a snapshot of Hercules Cement-not because the West is the fount of all masculine identity or idealization, but because it was a tremendous exporter of those concepts at the time. Chapman and Douglas Brown trace the origins of the sculpted, nearly nude, or totally bare male silhouette across the globe.
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