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Short Essay 1 This short essay series has been several weeks in coming. It will take being written in parts. It all began when I read the seminal article "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" by the influential anthropologist, Clifford Geertz [read it here: Deep Play Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, Geertz PDF.pdf] . As someone who has lived in Thailand for 9 years, very closely to the fabric of Thailand's Muay Thai, a documenting husband of a wife who has fought more here than any other westerner, from festival fights in fields in the provinces, to National television broadcasts, and as someone who has read pretty much every academic article in English examining the sport, historically, sociologically, I was stunned when reading Geertz's view of Balinese Cockfighting, much of it researched in the 1960s. I felt, instinctively, that in his descriptions he was pointing the reader to something that lay behind and beneath not only Balinese cockfighting, but traditional Muay Thai in Thailand as it has developed and thrived in the social fabric of 1,000s of villages, over hundreds of years, all the way through to high profile National Stadia celebrations and promotions of the sport. In reading the essay I felt someone was describing Muay Thai through a spyglass, capturing its structure and its truth, its reason for being. Why in combat sports does losing feel so, irrationally bad? That is one of the lasting questions that floats behind the article shorts that follow. There is to losing some extra stain that goes beyond normal aspects of social loss. No matter how much consoling, or arguments about fairness to a decision, there is a powerful debilitation that comes with losing in a fight. The arguments behind these article shorts seem to go towards a possible explanation, uncovering parts of "the human" that sometimes have been lost to the modern conversation. I read Geertz essay and I was swept up with associations, and avenues of interpretation for Thailand's Muay Thai, especially the Muay Thai that makes up its root system, the networks of festival fights all throughout the provinces in temporary rings on festivals and in seasons. This vast array of informal fights, which westerners seldom see or participate in, is organized around many of the social principles brought forth by Geertz. It's almost as if he's speaking about the Muay Thai of the villages which has fed the Tree of Thailand's Muay Thai for decades if not centuries, but in code. The masculinities, the representative symbolism of the fighter/cock, the bonds and dynamics of betting (making up the very fabric of provincial Muay Thai), all of it felt like "Muay Thai"...but expressed in a different culture, in a different rite or practice, witnessed and described more than 50 years ago. I of course am no expert in the provincial Muay Thai of Thailand. Sylvie's fought in maybe 30 of these kinds of fights, so we have a lived experience as a participant, and we have the advantage of having taken an ethnographic approach to the legendary Muay Thai of Thailand, documenting the men and the muay of that bygone era, so we are able to create cross-associations and perhaps identify important themes that hold the diversities of Muay Thai together. And, Geertz's descriptions ring resonant with some of my own thinking about the nature of Thailand's provincial and traditional Muay Thai, dovetailing perhaps with the narrative (agrarian) nature of Time (traditional Time discussed here: "The Essence of Muay Thai – 6 Core Aspects That Make it What It Is" and more philosophically, in a cultural criticism sense, here: How Duration Creates Meaning Through Narration with further thoughts found linked here: The god of Muay Thai - Phra Pirap: Where the Real and the Unreal Come Together), all this comes nicely against the kinds of arguments that Geertz is making. I've read the Geertz essay carefully in 4 passes so far, each time uncovering more, but it kept defying me, not giving me a natural way into the unlocking mechanism it presents. Geertz as an anthropologist tried to steer clear of "systems" thinking about cultures, and advocated for what he called "thick description", trying to sink into the rich complexity of what is happening in a scene. He wants it to remain "wild" in some sense, not boiled down to a few academic principles. And this is part of what makes pulling the threads I sense are so illuminating towards Thailand's Muay Thai, difficult. You want to bridge, but not extract. The first thing that comes to mind though is the Thai gambler's perspective on animality. I say the "gambler", because I want to take the position of someone who is invested in a village Muay Thai fight, and a participant. The gambler's perspective really holds the fabric strings, more than even a referee's perspective might. The Animal: Chon The first challenge of seeing how or why Thailand's Muay Thai and Balinese Cockfighting of Geertz's description share an underlying structure is being able to move from the social rites of animal fighting (in Bali - yes, I know Thailand has a long culture of cockfighting, and that some of drawn parallels, but it's the Balinese description we are working from) can map onto fights organized between human fighters. How is an animal like a person? To understand this you need to understand "Chon". In 2015 Sylvie and I had a tremendous night in Chiang Mai being taken to underground beetle fighting. Not only was it a pure revelation that such a thing happens (seasonally), we immediately started drawing parallels with the local festival fights and small stadia Muay Thai we were experiencing. We could see across the animal/human divide, into Muay Thai itself. You can read about our experiences in these two articles Underground Gambling, Beetle Fights, Heart and the Clinch of Muay Thai (2015) and ;more importantly Muay Thai Clinch is Not Boring – Gwang Chon – Battle Beetles of Thailand (2015). Some photographs from those articles are missing due to website problems, but the video below captures just what Beetle Fighting is. If you read the Geerz essay and watch the video just below, you'll immediately see themes and parallels. Beetle Fighting is called "Gwang Chon", which literally translates to something like "Beetle Clash". To "Chon" is to clash together, a collision, a crash. It's used in "car crash" for instance. You search for a beetle with heart, desire, a beetle that will compete. A female beetle is placed under the wrestling log for inspiration and passion. You want a beetle that will chon. This is a very important vector of Muay Thai judgement and celebration, what I'm calling animality. As someone said to us "Animals chon, men have muay". In the article linked above Sylvie touches on the very real ways the animality of chon directly is expressed in a fighter's "heart", one of the most prized aspects of a fighter. Legends of the sport like Samson Isaan, Namphon, Sangtiennoi, Samransak were fighters of tremendous heart. What is important here, for my perspective, is to understand that "heart" is expressed along a vector of animality. This is seen as an expression of a person's animality, something that presents them on a single chain of being which allows beetle fights, chicken fights, child fights, female fights, festival fights between beginners and National stadia fights all to be expressions of the same thing: a fundamental agonistic expression of heart, organized perhaps across animal kingdoms. This vector of animality creates the anchor of the fighting sports. It embodies the life force, the desire, the affective intensity of something fighting. It makes it "real". The further you go along this vector, the more real a fight is. But, importantly: animals chon, men have muay. There is another axis on which a human fighter is judged. The muay, its art. The fighter's technique. The tension between muay and chon is a really important one, and in the next short essay installment I'll take that up, but quickly enough, Muay Thai can be read across these two axes. The "x" axis though is that of animality, the things that bind us together in the great chain of Being. And it is that animality that helps us see how present day Muay Thai fights in Thailand (their rites, their subculture) traditionally can be closely connected to something as far off as Balinese cockfighting in the 1960s. It is the underpinnings of that striving, the chon between beings. It should be noted that even in the Beetle Fights we watched, the appreciation of their battles were not exclusively on the axis of animality. It was not pure chon. Beetles themselves are assessed, anatomically, by many physical factors including the length of their pinchers, which are related to their ability to do certain high scoring lifts. You can see this mentioned in this brief interview: This is only to say that even in the "lower" animal kingdoms, thinking about techniques and their relationship to anatomy (as one does with fighters) enters into the appraisal. Even beetle fights are operating on more than one axis. I'll take on that second axis next.