The sparring instinct: diaries of mixed martial arts
Date
2021-05-05
Authors
Mallette, Thomas G.
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Abstract
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is a combat sport where pugilists combine various martial art forms to compete in sanctioned bouts of hand-to-hand cage fighting. Through immersive ethnographic research at an MMA gym, this thesis presents a carnal sociology that investigates rigorous human sparring as a method of human liberation. Carnal sociology is a method of embodied inquiry where the sociologist uses their own body to investigate social phenomena of interest. Chapter 1 reveals connections between modern sparring encounters and early religious violence as described in Émile Durkheim’s sociology. I argue that human sparring is a form of violent and primitively religious prayer that allows the sparrer to extract originary feelings of human agency that are stored in the social energies of sparring intensity. Chapter 2 explores current debates regarding gender in modern mixed-sex martial arts gyms, arguing for a more patient approach to conceptualizing gender in sparring. Despite scholars depicting the history of sparring as being saturated with violent expressions of masculinity, modern sparring practices appear to present a novel space for men and women to enter into freer associations with gender on their own terms. In Chapter 3, I expand on Dale Spencer’s (2009) concept of body callusing, where instead, I argue that sparrers are primarily drawn to sparring to engage in existential callusing where the sparrer is driven towards a mastery of the non-body to overcome death anxiety. Drawing on participant diary entries, field notes, and immersive ethnography, this thesis argues that human sparring is best understood as a mechanism of human liberation that is undertaken by sparrers through a unique transcendental phenomenology. Sparring violence allows practitioners to overcome certain limitations embedded in everyday human thought by becoming intoxicated by especially altered states of consciousness as a means of accessing primary qualities of the human condition.
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Keywords
Human sparring, Transcendental Phenomenology, Micro Sociology, Gender, Existential Liberation