Round 2014: Back to the Blogtagon

Well, ring my bell.

It has been almost two years since I last posted on Mixed Martial Anthropology. Not for lack of motivation or interest, mind you, but the sheer demands on my time and attention, only a tiny portion of which I spend watching or thinking about MMA. Chalk it up to the paradox of academia as a profession, the perfect and most poignant example of how commodification produces alienated labor (aside from perhaps the way that signing with the UFC has killed more than one fighter's passion for the sport).

I pursued academia as a vocation so I could spend my life reading, writing, thinking, and learning in an open, critical discursive community of knowledge. This remains part of what I do but increasingly an ever smaller part. The vital essence of my work as unalienated, as an expression of my creativity and human subjectivity, is drained away by the requirements to produce, to teach, to serve on committees, to perform. Perhaps the hallmark of success in such a context is that you have successfully turned something you love to do into something you have to do. I did not want this blog to become that. I did not want to feel like I "had" to write it. I did not want to turn my creative interest in MMA into work. As soon as I started feeling like I had to write the blog I quit the blog.  As soon as someone asked me if I would study MMA I stopped wanting to reflect on MMA critically. In so far as such a thing is possible for someone trained to analyze everything, that is.

And yet what inspired me to begin writing MMAnthro in the first place was the puzzlement of my students in my Anthropology of Warfare, Violence and Peace course about my apparently strange fixation on this postmodern bloodsport. Perhaps it's no coincidence that I am teaching that same course again now. I am again exploring with my students that perennial and deeply human co-dependency between violence and peace, aggression and compassion, love and hate, life and death; violence as destructive as well as generative and creative; the relationship between gender and sexuality and militarism; the role of media and propaganda in shaping perceptions of war in the past and present; the way we talk so little about peace and conflict resolution - although these are actually more prevalent in human experience - and focus endlessly on violence and war. And all of that reminds me what it is I find fascinating about MMA in particular and how it evokes a range of other human dynamics in general. 

There's also the occasional email that arrives from someone who stumbled over MMAnthro while out trolling the blogosphere, most recently an anthropology student in the UK (thanks, Evan!) who thinks the blog is cool and is rooting for Alistair Overeem in UFC 169. Lo and behold, there's over 1600 hits on these few  posts (and who knows how many plagiarized term papers!)

So maybe it's time to pull it together again, not for the sake of glory or ambition or anything else other than the fact that there is something inherently interesting going on that might deserve some critical reflection and commentary.

I invite you to send me your own thoughts on the themes of MMAnthro: "social science, social justice, and martial arts as metaphor and reality." It's round 2014 in the Blogtagon!