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Hello everyone, on wednesday I will be giving a talk at the danish art and sports festival Go Extreme https://www.kunsthalaarhus.dk/en/Exhibitions/Go-Extreme where Kevin has kindly agreed to lend me pictures for the powerpoint presentation. The format is very interesting, I think: I will be providing the theory, and two danish muay thai fighters Frederik Fenger and Mikkel Haahr will be displaying the points physically throughout the presentation, concluding with a fight. The argument will be as follows: The classic golden age muay thai dichotomy of muay femeu and muay khao is well established within these circles: the muay femeu is the matador, the muay khao the toro. The muay khao fights with heart, brute force, intensity, relentlessness, violence and strength; the muay femeu fighter is elegant, intelligent, evasive, transcendent, unphased and manipulative. I will argue that the dichotomy of the dionysian and the apollonian as conceived in the work Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy is applicable and reflects the same dynamics, ideas and intuitions as our muay thai distinction. Following this, I will use Sherry Ortners classic Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_049.pdf to further the dichotomy, concluding that these dichotomies as historically created reflect the same relation and opposition: male/muay femeu/apollonian/culture vs. female/muay khao/dionysian/nature. With this concessed, we run into an interesting paradox of masculinity: if hypermasculinity is conceived as the capacity for and willingness to use violence, masculinity cannot also be metaphysically defined as an identity that is opposed to (animalistic) violence. From this standpoint, I will be arguing with Judith Butler that a metaphysical conception of masculinity as a moral or identity of masculinity is untenable, and that through the Heideggerian reading of the greek truth-concept aletheia https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#ReaRelBeiTim, masculinity is an event of dominance, which does not have an intrinsic and transcendent identity or moral at its core, but is created as art from and in the body of the fighter. The reason muay thai is so interesting as a paradigm for the thinking of gender is that it reveals that masculinity, however, is not something radically constructivist or relativistic, seeing that the fight constitutively has a winner and a loser as its ontological foundation. This implies that masculinity is something that shows itself - or lets the truth of masculinity happen - through the art of muay thai. I will try to get it filmed and transcribed so that all of you who cannot attend will get to see it anyways, but I can't promise anything as of yet. Either way I'd love to hear what you guys think about the reasoning and elaborate in case any of you have any questions. Best, Asger

There is an element of That conception of "Greatness" that produces lots of misunderstanding in westerners. We in the west see "great" as a kind of technical thing, like you could extract a fighter out of their circumstances, out of history & download him as a "player". Thais instead do not divorce the fighter from the big purses they make, the powerful promoters or gyms that back them, the influences they have over others. "Famous" & "popular" are the same word in Thai. It means that there is an "aura". I say this because when we asked one of the greatest Golden Age Krus, Arjan Pramod, who his 5 greatest fighters of all Time were, he listed Buakaw as 4th. This is a joke between Muay Thai nerds. The surest sign that you don't know Muay Thai at all is putting Buakaw on a list. But he put him there because of his impact, his ambassadorship to Japan & the West. It wasn't about skill, it's about history. I'm still shaking my head about it, but its because I don't understand - fully - just how Thais see greatness. I think this comes from a deeper concept of "power" (Amnat) & charisma "ittiphon" that ultimately lies within spiritual karma. Those who have favorable circumstances have aura, and are in a way blessed. Samart had a powerful gym & connections & fought down at times forcing more advantageous matchups. For us it might be a critique of his Greatness. But for many Thais these advantages actually add to the substance of a fighter, and are not a detraction. His aura is composed not only of his fighting skills, his character, but everything drawn around it. His situation. Sure, people will quietly detract, make complaints or criticisms. But there is still a strong current of admiration. It is something like being *blessed*. Yodkhunpon once was talking to Sylvie about her drive to one day fight at Lumpinee Stadium. He didn't understand. The reason to fight at Lumpinee was so you could become *famous* (which includes idea of popularity & respect), to have an aura. He told her: You are already famous. It made no sense to him to do the work to have the aura, if you already have it. It's just his perception, but here was a guy who was a devastating fighter during his time, so many battles, but he never got the *aura*, the shine. He didn't have the power behind him to be made into something. I think this was what was behind Arjan Pramod putting Buakaw on his list, and part of why Thais see the substance of greatness quite differently than we do. It's why Dieselnoi will always be the lessor fighter than Samart, despite beating him. Yes, there are counter thoughts & arguments, ideas about who is a *real* fighter, but this stream of authentic admiration remains.

I will also say that often when we talk about "Thai" perspectives of sport, which we read as Asian, or uniquely Thai - things such as Narrative Scoring Structure, emphasizing dominance over aggression in scoring, the importance of how you "wear a strike" - these things are not uniquely Thai. We have lots of corresponding aspects in Western culture as well. When talking about the aura of greatness in Thailand, which does have Buddhistic roots, we can find elements of the same in the West. Mayweather is a great example. Yes, there persist all kinds of criticism of him and his perfect record, how he protected himself, dodged Pacquiao until both were old men, etc. But...along with Mayweather comes an aura that goes beyond his fighting in the ring, he's a man who set his own destiny, was able to build an empire, rolling in cash, dodge who he wanted to dodge. There is this larger sense that HE was the Man. It doesn't play out in the exact same way it does in Thailand, but similar things are operating. You get the same with Jordan, who beyond his stats, his game winning shots, was also a very manufactured persona. People may criticize him via this manufactured nature, how the NBA changed the rules for his sake, giving him advantages that past greats did not have...but ironically enough these kinds of critiques (though true), can actually work to further intensify his greatness, giving everyone the sense that he bent history around himself, almost gravitationally. This is only to say, when we think across cultures it is important to isolate themes that do not correspond to our own, especially our dominant theme, but, often it is a second move of insight-fullness to then recognize that these seemingly unique or differing themes do have correspondence within our own culture, often in a minor but still vital way.