On The Corporeal Exchange: Thai Boxing's Sacrificial Movement

Abstract

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 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.Doctor of Philosoph