[A couple of essays on Muay Thai]

Earlier this year I wrote a couple of sociology essays that dealt directly with Muay Thai, drawing on Sylvie's journalism and discussions on the podcast to do so. I thought I'd put them up here in case they were of any interest, rather than locking them away with the intention to perfectly rewrite them 'some day'. There's not really many novel insights of my own, rather it's more just pulling together existing literature with some of the von Duuglus-Ittu's work, which I think is criminally underutilised in academic discussions of MT.

The first, 'Some meanings of muay' was written for an ideology/sosciology of knowledge paper, and is an overly long, somewhat grindy attempt to give a combined historical, institutional, and situated study of major cultural meanings of Muay Thai as a form of strength. The second paper, 'the fighter's heart' was written for a qualitative analysis course, and makes extensive use of interviews and podcast discussions to talk about some ways in which the gendered/sexed body is described/deployed within Muay Thai. There's plenty of issues with both, and they're not what I'd write today, and I'm learning to realise that's fine!

some meanings of muay.docx The fighter's heart.docx

[A couple of questions about the promotion of Muay Boran in Thailand]

25 minutes ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

Sylvie's thoughts on masculinity and monkhood in Peter Vail's dissertation chapter are pretty good:

https://8limbsus.com/blog/thai-masculinity-postioning-nak-muay-between-monkhood-and-nak-leng-peter-vail

 

Thanks for this - this is gold and exactly what I'm gesturing in taking Muay Thai to have religous connections tacitly encoded into it as a bodily art in terms of its mind set and also how it is aesthetically understood and evaluated (at least by those who have the familiarity and orientation to perceive and evaluate these meanings themselves).

Quote

Monks are said to offer the laity a “field of merit”: by performing good deeds for monks and the temple, lay devotees are able to accrue bun, religious merit.  Without overly belaboring a tenuous point, I would point out that boxers, during a performance, offer something structurally similar: the opportunity for spectators to bet, which, as I’ve suggested in chapter four, may be related to notions of power and karma.  Wagering on boxing does for bettors what making merit does for lay practitioners: it provides them the opportunity to increase and test their power and merit. (p. 5)

This sort of indirect relationship that gamblers and boxers have where they sort of mutually enable one another's existence is exactly what I find so fascinating and deep about Muay Thai, particularly as it seems to have a measurable impact on how the worthiness of fighters is perceived and judged, particularly in comparison with the Western trend towards quantification in judging (e.g. number of punches thrown, landed etc). Again thinking of social organisation as somewhat game or play like, the gamblers and boxers are 

The list of academic resources linked to from this article is gold and I feel very silly for having not looked or asked for resources here first and instead been slowly finding them myself over the last few months! There's clearly a lot of work been put into this and I think it's quite incredible - really the sort of thing that should be getting Arts/Sports ministry funding.

 

9 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

To me, most of this understanding is to be found in the social form of the kaimuay. This has great variability, but as family space, the pseudo-orphanage, the novice monk parallel, the "camp" in all of its forms captures the meaning of Muay Thai as a social practice and a subject-conditioning context. But there is very little of value written about this.

Maybe the "best" (?) isn't Muay Thai or the same culture at all, Loic Wacquant - Body & Soul_ Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2003)

 

Absolutely, kaimuay are such strong institutions (at least historically) in terms of the intensity of control and inculcation taking place, as well as having that odd overlap with some elements of temples in terms of being a kind of alternative educational path - almost like going into a trade apprenticeship or something.

Wacquant has a lot of great stuff in terms of structural analysis and cultural sociology, but I found his actual engagement with boxing a bit self-centered. It's been a couple of years since I last looked closely but I remember feeling frustrated at what I felt was a lack of engagement with the younger boxers motivations and understandings, and the way he described the 'erotic dancers' at one of the clubs in quite shallow terms rather than exploring how they too are seeking to develop and utilise their bodily capital through the paths available to them, just as the (male) boxers were. The first half of the book and the focus on the gym as a moral institution is great though for sure.

I also found his promise of a truly 'carnal' sociology a bit underdelivered on in terms of really showing or grounding cultural analysis in bodily practice, which I think is a bit of a perpetual struggle for Bourdieuian analysis, and I remember there being a bit of a split between Wacquant's structural analysis and his autoethnography - though to be fair I think part of that is just that theories of mind and body have developed quite rapidly since the 90s. In terms of underresearched areas, Wacquant's notebooks would almost certainly not have been published if he wasn't Bourdieu's protege.

[A couple of questions about the promotion of Muay Boran in Thailand]

21 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

Nah, I don't really think it is that, at least in the way that we think of Boran now, like a lost form of archaic Muay Thai. In general there has been an increasing pressure from gambler interests to reduce risk-taking moves. This has resulted in fewer and fewer techniques being seen in the ring (it has been said). Maybe there was a sense that they wanted to stimulate more risk-taking, more technical skills being shown (but not necessarily because they were older). I don't think the bonus techniques were all Boran (Older), maybe just more varied. But as far as we heard not many fighters really pursued these bonuses in an effective way.

Yep that makes a lot of sense considering the different perspectives and priorities of the promoters, gamblers, and fighters.

5 hours ago, Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu said:

The bonuses are at both Lumpinee and Rajadamnern (although I can't tell you if it's still at Lumpinee now), and, as far as I know, it's the same 5 moves. If you win by KO using one of these moves, you get a 10,000 baht bonus. These are, technically speaking, Mae Mai Muay Thai, which means the artforms of Muay Thai and Muay Boran consists entirely of those, but Thais would refer to these moves as the former. They are intended, as far as I know, as incentives to use traditional artistic movements, but fighters aren't generally bold enough to go for them due to gambling pressures making fighters more conservative.

The Mae Mai Muay Thai basics are taught in PE courses throughout Thailand, but it might be a one or two day course, or even a field trip, and aren't something as comprehensive as extra-curricular sports are. Maybe like how in America we had a day or week of Square Dancing and Line Dancing, but not a full course of instruction for it. Arjan Prayod, who taught Namkabuan and Nampon, is a school teacher (P.E.) as well as a Muay Thai gym manager, but he took kids that he saw with promise from sports in school and invited them to his gym; but he has worked with the government in designing school curricula with Muay Thai, little handbooks; we have one. If I can find it I'll send you photos of the pages.

Ah yep, by Boran I did just mean anything that would be perceived as being more in line with 'traditional artistic movement' than contemporary muay. I perhaps complicated my question by using 'Boran' given the technical specificity that might suggest, as my main interest was just whether the bonuses had any kind of 'cultural promotion' angle (regardless of how superficial that might actually be) and why I was connecting it to Thai P.E lessons that might have a similar element of drawing upon/constructing that sense of historical connection and identity. Thanks very much for following up on this, though please don't bother digging around for that handbook on my account!

21 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:

Can you flesh this out at all?

Everyday meanings? Performed in what sense?

Yep, so I'll try (I unfortunately lost a 3 paragraph draft as gmail/doc's autosave as made me complacent with leaving my pc, so attempt #2. P.S. aaaand I wrote more than I intended, apologies).

By everyday meanings I mainly mean in contrast with the kind of heavily political and quite abstract analysis that I find Vail gives of Muay Thai as political economy/history (I'm thinking particularly of 'Muay Thai: inventing tradition'), where the focus is on how the fairly poorly documented historic martials arts of Muay in the Thai precursor states came to be understood as distinctly Muay Thai due to conscious efforts by various political elites constructing a nationalist mythology around it as a military defensive art (according to Vail and the Thai scholars he draws on).

Rather than this quite historically extended analysis, what I'm interested in are the understandings and meanings at play in Muay Thai as it is instantiated locally, reliably recreated as actual events, e.g. people achieving the doing of Muay Thai. In Bourdieuian terms this something like how the relevant acquired habitus, field, and doxa supervene/coconstitute one another.

By 'everyday' I'm also pointing to the ethnomethodological nature of social institutions as a continually ongoing accomplishment of tacit communication and organisation that, remarkably, generates this sense of stable order, normality, and everydayness - Muay Thai, as a combat sport, is very jarring to people who don't understand this order, just as encountering any institutional field for the first time can be (e.g. airport security, a courtroom, a psychiatric ward).

By meanings plural, I mean the fantastically dense and rich set of meanings that Muay Thai has: religous, economic, gendered, national, rural-urban relations, not to mention personal and aesthetic meanings in terms of the different kinds of agency one can pursue through it. By performing I mean the way that fighters in Muay Thai acknowledge and represent this dense set of relations through things like the wai khru, ram muay, and of course their muay. Bodies have their own culturally dominant meanings and expectations too of course, and playing with or against these expectations strikes me as being central to how fighters enact their agency and actually 'do' muay thai, such as through fighting with or against the dominant meanings and expectations of your background, gender, body 'type', size etc.

I'm drawing on Thi Nguyen's 'Games: agency as art' here and his notion of the aesthetic spaces made by the roles, rules, and values of games as being spaces of possible agency that people can explore (games and play being how we first simulate so many things, like 'defeating' a parent in chess or monopoly, practicing misdirection, deception, observation etc). Nguyen gives his own experience of learning to rock climb as an adult as being the first time he ever felt 'graceful', for instance (Muay, for me is at least, is full of little moments of this where you feel like you just found out a new way you can do something, and so have expanded your possibilities of expression/performance). I imagine gambling likely has these kinds of experience too, though perhaps more cognitive and straightforwardly 'game' like than embodied.

Hopefully that kind of makes sense and isn't too laboured. To situate that within the context of my essay, I'm trying to 'show' the sociological basis for what I take to be the particular aesthetic make up of Muay Thai, in terms of its particular judging system and norms of conduct as being reflective of the rich network of social locations and cultural meanings it has historically connected as an institution.

I want to note that I'm absolutely not an expert in either the practice of Muay Thai nor Thai culture and that this is a bit of a passion project for me, as I find Muay Thai both fascinating and underresearched, particularly in terms of the kind of mid-level analysis I'm hoping to give. I find the existing literature is kind of frustratingly split between either auto-ethnographies by academics who are more aless just discussing how they experienced it and then using it to talk about their main research interest (usually through being in a western gym) or are very macroscopic in terms of historical political-economic organisation, such as what I've read by Vail and Rennesson (though I haven't read Vail's phd thesis which appears more anthropological).

[A couple of questions about the promotion of Muay Boran in Thailand]

Hey thanks for this! That's as good an answer on the bonuses as I could have hoped for, although it'd of been fascinating to know if it was supposed to be someting like promoting/hyping up Boran (particularly in contrast to how entertainment promotions like ONE handle bonuses).

I'm drawing on Vail quite a bit for a bit of historical/political economy overview, although my focus is more on how everyday meanings like Buddhist virtues are performed by fighters (in comparison to something like MMA as having both highly practical/ruthless elements and very performative holywood-esque aspects). Thanks for directing me to your writings - I'll certainly read some of these, particularly as I'm employing Bourdieu which I see you've also done in some of these.

[A couple of questions about the promotion of Muay Boran in Thailand]

Hi all, I'm writing a sociology essay on some of the different ways Muay Thai embodies and symbolises cultural values and perspectives (e.g. masculine/patriarchal, buddhistic/moral, nationalistic/communal, aesthetic/class tastes) and am hoping to draw on library sessions and interviews as part of my data. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, or if these questions have been answered elsewhere (I have searched here and elsewhere, but don't speak or read Thai).

In a (recent?) library session it was mentioned that cash bonuses are sometimes given out for performing Muay Boran techniques during fights - I was wondering if this was in both Lumpini and Rajadamnarn (and anywhere else) and how long this has been going on.

Relatedly, it's my understanding that something like Muay Thai/Boran is has, or is still often, taught in children's physical education classes - does anyone know how common this is?

Thanks for reading