The sparring instinct: diaries of mixed martial arts
| dc.contributor.author | Mallette, Thomas G. | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Garlick, Steve | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-05-05T19:32:18Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2021 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-05-05 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Sociology | en_US |
| dc.degree.level | Master of Arts M.A. | en_US |
| dc.description.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. | en_US |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1828/12946 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | en_US |
| dc.subject | Human sparring | en_US |
| dc.subject | Transcendental Phenomenology | en_US |
| dc.subject | Micro Sociology | en_US |
| dc.subject | Gender | en_US |
| dc.subject | Existential Liberation | en_US |
| dc.title | The sparring instinct: diaries of mixed martial arts | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |