James Gregory

Interesting approach. Two years ago Google Trends rolled out a search by "topic" function in the trend tool, which provides a better picture of overall interest. When you analyze by topic, rather than search query, you see a near doubling in real data and a predicted 2x+ in their forecast for "Muay Thai" as a topic globally over the past ten years.

I'm realizing we're probably biasing ourselves by saying that only conscious action is meaningful. Particularly if the actions center around psychological affects, connecting to spirits of the past...at some level, belief and feeling must come into play. I guess that's a quality of all rites and rituals, that they connect to some timeless archetype. Maybe "timeless" is a better word than "old," and I know that's how these things are spoken about by people like Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade...that ritual connects to the timeless, the eternal. Speaking again just from my own personal experience, I could certainly "feel" the authenticity on a spiritual level from Coban, in his Muay Thai, his Ram Muay, refereeing, and way he conducted himself. I think I could also empiricize, list, quantify those things, but I think that also missed the point. There is some element of "knowing it when you see (feel) it" that should probably be validated.

I think a bit of both. Westerners can be integrated and functioning at high levels in East Asian cultures, and still always remain "other," and that can be a trap in my mind, that you'll never be really accepted no matter how hard you try. But maybe more the latter, in that I don't think authenticity can be as singular or monolithic as we fantasize it to be. Culture and traditions are usually amalgams. For example, the idea that there might be one practitioner, or camp, whose Muay Thai is the "most authentic" I think might be a red herring. People have different ideas of what "Muay Thai" is, reflected in their stylistic differences, and do it equally well but differently. I've learned from a small handful of teachers who have been world and stadium champions who have done things differently, so who is the most authentic, and to what? Authentic to how "Muay Thai" has always been done? Authentic to winning in the ring, or to passing what they know on too others? I think ultimately we can only create our own authenticity to the meaning we both take from others and create for ourselves.

Very interesting thread. As others touched on, tradition can reach a point of almost unconscious momentum where its meaning becomes either diminished or removed from understanding and consciousness. People do things more because they've always done them, without even knowing why, or they are abandoned altogether. I haven't don't much time in Thailand, but I spent almost seven years in Japan, and this is definitely the case. When you decide to spend time there and "become part of the culture," you pursue what that means in terms of language, tradition, and habits. Eventually you reach a point where the "authenticity" you presupposed feels hollow, because even the people and place practicing that authenticity seem to do so either unknowingly or unconsciously. Tradition isn't a conscious action as much as cultural inertia, a rock rolling down a hill that nobody really knows who pushed. That can leave you feeling jaded or contemptuous, particularly if you feel you have made an even better effort as a foreigner to understand the "native" culture than the natives, and also because you'll never be accepted as part of that culture even if you do. There was a release eventually when I just let that go and enjoyed the things I liked about the culture because I liked them, returning to the mindset I started with. I've taken that experience and mindset and applied it to my approach to Muay Thai. I'll do it in a way that I enjoy it, whatever that means, be it fighting, training, doing the Ram Muay, or learning about Thai culture or language to the extent that it interests me, but I have no desire to fall down the "authenticity trap" again, as I think it only leads to frustration. I do think that exotificatiin and Orientalism are actually useful tools in sparking interest, even strangely filtered interest, in elements of culture foreign to the observer and diminishing to the practitioner, and can lead them to being reborn/reinvented, and I also think traditionalism is in some way a fool's errand. I'm generally familiar with why the Ram Muay is done, learned a simple one of Coban's which I performed, felt it allowed me to visualize the fight prior and "see" better during it, and ultimately improved the overall quality of the show and technique of the participants, who all had to perform it. It was this both very "authentic" and positive to me, insofar as my own experience and meaning.