ON THE CORPOREAL EXCHANGE: THAI BOXING’S SACRIFICIAL MOVEMENT Paul William Schissel A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2019 Approved By: Christopher Nelson Jocelyn Chua William Marotti Todd Ochoa Margaret Wiener ©2019 Paul William Schissel ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Paul William Schissel: On the Corporeal Exchange: Thai Boxing’s Sacrificial Movement (Under the direction of Christopher Nelson) This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Thai boxing (muay Thai) understood as sacrificial exchange, exploring the practice of this martial art in the context of contemporary Thai society. Drawing on two years of apprenticeship and participation research in Northeast Thailand and Bangkok, I consider the fighters’ integration in broader patterns of seasonal labor migration as they move between rural, regional tournaments and Bangkok stadiums. Focusing on the training of one particular boxer, I investigate interactions between trainers, managers, family, patrons and ancestral spirits. The boxers’ embodied actions as they unfold in time represent the sovereign relationship between living and dead, nature and culture, performatively establishing the boundaries between growth and decay. As the living move through a world of animate social relations, accruing debt, the boxer’s embodied patterns of repetition and exhaustion in training, and of destructive action in combat, create a possibility for shifting this balance, accruing merit for those otherwise occupied in handling materials which support the powerful, and transforming the established hierarchical order of everyday life. Against the background of the impermanent, closed, linear, cyclical or progressive temporalities of monasteries, factories, the military and the monarchy, the temporality of the ring remains open, giving fighters the elbow-room to performatively engage crucial symbols of life and death, male and female, human and animal, affording otherwise politically disempowered Northeastern Thai families the opportunity to create meaning and possibility in their lives. Acting as both victim and executioner, fighters accrue credit for the assembled audience, reinvesting each tier of the community with a degree of iii responsibility for life. I argue that these practices occur within a ‘deathworld’, in which the heightened attentiveness to the limited possibilities for action reaffirm the local position of the individual within the collective. With embodied motion that cuts across local categories of stillness and mobility, the living and the dead, with ever-greater stamina, Thai boxers become increasingly valuable and credit-able, paying the debts, material and spiritual, that their assembled supporters have incurred as they live their kinetically excessive lives, allowing men throughout the community to remain accountable to Kings, Buddha, ancestors, factories and patrons. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The nature of this research obviates a substantial debt I will carry to all of the Thai boxers, their managers, trainers, families and friends who hosted me in Thailand. The mobility and peace of mind I enjoyed during doctoral fieldwork would also never have been possible without Pom, whose strength, love and steady hand in caring for my daughter exceeded all expectations. I want to thank an anonymous Thai reviewer of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, whose suggestion that I remove the words “Northeast Thailand” from the title of my grant proposal ensured my doctoral fieldwork ultimately received funding. Preliminary fieldwork was also made possible by a Summer Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, a Carolina Asia Center Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, a C.V Starr Scholarship for International Summer Research, and a Carleton University Summer Travel & Research Award. I also want to thank Jakkrit Sangkhamanee in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok for his sponsorship and initial assistance with clearing my Thai research visa documents. I was also fortunate to spend three summers with the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I want to thank my instructors there, Patcharin Peyasantiwong, Sidhorn Sangdhanoo, Janpanit Surasin and also Kannikar Elbow, with whose passing all efforts at translation run out. Among the many other scholars similarly ensnared in the web of language in Madison I appreciate Bonnie Chang, Michael Chladek, Ruth De Llobet, Matthew Griffin, Faith Kares, Noah Kittner, Will Shattuck and Ian Stuart (for padwork too). v My odyssey into anthropology and its parallel exodus from existential angst might never have come to such full fruition without the insight, patience and kindness of Frances Slaney at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where I completed my MA studies in anthropology. Conversations I had there with Peter Gose, Bernhard Leistle, Jen Pylypa, Danny Rosenblatt and Marieka Sax have also long sustained me in the wildernesses of American anthropology. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I thank my committee: Chris Nelson, the anthropologist-boxer’s equivalent of a grizzled veteran advisor-trainer, for support in so many uncountable ways so as to be constant. Jocelyn Chua for her always open door and guidance through ethnographies of violence. Todd Ochoa for his generosity in giving readings, resources and discussions without reservation. Margaret Wiener for her constancy with earnest questions, bringing out the better ethnographer in me. I want to thank Bill Marotti for his crucial historical perspective, as well as participants in his winter 2018 history seminar at UCLA for feedback on writing that became Chapters 5 and 6 of this dissertation. I have a deep sense of gratitude to Terry Evens, whose great humor and patience imparting phenomenology and anthropology as ethics has given me enduring grounds from which to appreciate a radically different life. Thanks to Harry Harootunian for placing Marx in Asia; Jonathan Boyarin for bringing Benjamin to life; Bob Daniels for unteaching anthropology. Happy teaching apprenticeships I have also held with Lorraine Aragon, Brian Billman, Anna Kushkova, Peter Redfield and Colin West, among others. It was never just work. Thanks also to Lindsay Bloch, Paolo Bocci, Hseih Chu-Wen, Aaron Delgaty, Sora Enomoto, Molly Green, Anusha Hariharan, Dan Holbrow, Eddie Huffman, Saydia Kamal, Lawrence McBride and Lindsey West, all of whom shared the halls with me, and then some. Thanks to Joseph Hooper for walking through our respective situation(ist)s. Thanks Marc Howlett for carrying out an intensive psychogeography of attention vi with me. Thanks also to Leedom Lefferts, whose own experiences as an ethnographer always refreshed Thailand for me in Chapel Hill. Finally, thanks to my family for support which proves the plasticity and resilience of kinship. The luxury of this life looking outward I cannot disentangle from the boundless support, generosity and fortitude of the entire McCreath clan, Schissels, Seatons and my Desai in-laws, particularly Ramesh and Shobha. It is an axiom that bringing a spouse and infant to fieldwork opens one up to different perspectives in the community, but I have also come to find through marriage and parenthood an intensive echo underlying all these efforts reaching for a world of otherness. I feel that echo and intensity most acutely for Sangeeta, knowing these graspings for the now we share may open a world of futures for Anokhi and Uma. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..……….1 CHAPTER ONE: EVENT……………………………………………………………………….10 CHAPTER TWO: PRACTICE…………………………………………………………………..81 CHAPTER THREE: TECHNOLOGY……………………………………………..…………..142 CHAPTER FOUR: CONSECRATION………………………………………………………..184 CHAPTER FIVE: WEIGHTEDNESS…………………………………………………………205 CHAPTER SIX: DECAY………………………………………………………………………216 CHAPTER SEVEN: HORIZONS……………………………………………………………...241 CHAPTER EIGHT: RETURN……………………….………………………………………...253 REFERENCES:………………………………………………………………………………...265 viii INTRODUCTION The first time I tried Thai boxing (muay Thai) training in an Ottawa area martial arts club, I quickly realized that my abilities to respond to, represent, analyze or otherwise reflect upon practice fell far short of the obligatory timing I was exposed to in basic training. I needed a memory of what needed to happen—what sequence of strikes or blocks needed to be returned–– which was pre-reflective; a memory composed in the continuous movement of my limbs, which could be converted to correct action well in advance of any opponent. To keep up with other muay Thai practitioners and trainers, I was continually thrown into movements needed to sustain an effective exchange ––a jab, knees, kicks. These exchanges did not always allow for a re- composition of my own personal space in a time of self-reflection. In Thai boxing practice, there was a temporal delay which belied my own abilities to process sequences of action as part of my already established historical record of correct causality and physical limitations. This temporal delay in the exchange with trainers or sparring partners; this duration indicated a place in which cultural change (along with the possibility of an other way of life) could take hold at a wholly significant, even ‘bodily’ level.