Paper short abstract:

The enksilment of kickboxing entails more than just training how to fight. This paper discusses how creative ways of wilfully resisting full and active participation and full effort in ladies-only kickboxing training contribute to creating a fun, sociable and leisurely group feeling.

Paper long abstract:

Young Muslim women in Europe are increasingly active in kickboxing, partly because kickboxing is marketed as a tool to equip Muslim women with the physical skills and power to rescue, strengthen and 'empower' themselves. If we zoom in on the learning practices of the young kickboxers, we see that it is not only skills of fighting, self-defence and body modification that are trained. This paper will specifically address a skill that is not part of the repertoire of skills the trainer aims to develop among the students, but is definitely trained anyway: the skill of slacking, pretending and cheating. Fighter's bodies and identities are produced through the imitative, repetitive bodily regimes of training and competition. However, the apparent goal of kickboxing—becoming a competitive kickboxer—is destabilised by the negotiation of pain and slacking off in recreational ladies-only training. So the recreational kickboxing might not result in the same fighting body as in mixed training sessions where the goals of the pupils differ. The fact is that many sporting bodies and communities are more ephemeral and fluid than portrayed by most sport studies that lean on the concept of habitus. I argue that negotiation of intensity and pain in training, and slacking off in exercises, is a form of rebellion among the young women that goes against stereotypical notions of masculinity in kickboxing. Creative ways of wilfully resisting full and active participation and full effort in training contribute to creating a fun, sociable, leisurely group feeling.

Paper short abstract:

Evangelical fight ministries combine worship with combat sport. In offering a safe space for Christians to play with consensual violence, they provide a unique opportunity to see how Christians invoke voluntarism to imbue with moral significance unChristlike behaviors, like hurting others for fun.

Paper long abstract:

I present two evangelical Christian churches in Rio de Janeiro that use combat sport as a social outreach program. In their evangelical fight ministries (EFMs), pastors combine worship and close-contact grappling to help young people learn about God, each other, and themselves. These programs offer lessons and sparring sessions in the submission-based martial art, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, bookended with worship activities.

Based on my experiences worshiping, fighting, living and speaking with members of these ministries, I find arête, the more common justification for Muscular Christian activities, does not explain how or why EFM participants find it morally acceptable to hurt each other for sport.

Instead, it is voluntarism, which ascribes moral transformation to consensual interactions, that provides the common ground between evangelical Christianity and combat sport. The change in moral status for both of these practices is based on people's willing participation and acknowledgment of mutual interdependence. In evangelicalism, people must accept Jesus into their hearts, and they must let God speak through them. Likewise, combat sport tests the categorical limits of cooperation since the infliction of pain is neither a byproduct nor against the rules: it is the point of the game. Without consent, it is assault.

EFM participants put a lot of faith in what they feel. When they voluntarily agree to an interaction that would be illicit otherwise, they experience moral transformation directly. In voluntarism, have they found an alternative path to converting the world around them? Instead of converting people, have they moved on to converting actions?

Paper short abstract:

In Milan, at the EASA conference two years ago, I presented some ethnological work-in-progress material based on hitchhiking. The paper was clouded in theory. So before putting the cart before the 'tramper' yet again, this version sketches out some fieldwork data collected since that summer.

Paper long abstract:

Hitchhiking has expanded to include virtual and meta-conceptual encounters (Purkis 2012; Kendall 2016; 'Suomen Antropologi'Forum-2017). I refer here, however, to actual events of 'randomly' thumbing lifts (with little reference to verbally asking, except once a vehicle driver has accepted to 'roll down the window', in order for a conversation to begin). My ongoing research on auto-stopping intends to grapple with such categories as: artistry/creativity, (in)alien/nation, deception/truth, non-places/nowheres, Self/Other, subject/object, strangeness/estrangement, altruism/utopia, hunting/hermeneutics. When dealing with stress, risk and certain levels of exhaustion - hitchhiking (like many extreme leisure pursuits) allow for a 'reading' of body languages (ours/Other's). This is important for data collection since the researcher's attention focuses on interpreting non-verbal forms of communication. Moreover, this encounter format requires chit-chat, if any extensive spoken exchange takes place at all. As a hap-hazardous, anxiously serendipitous and threshold crossing form of displacement, HH is a more-than-human assemblage of infrastructures, vehicular cultures and kindness. It persists in a neoliberal age by cloaking itself as a stochastic form of mobility that connects to alternative systems of care. It can be chaotic, frustrating, dangerous and causelessly rebellious, especially in a hyper-modern age that frowns at those who cannot afford to drive, or who wish to remain too individualistic. Yet it is equally creative and supra-human in adapting/incorporating 21st century technologies to find new forms of expression. Hitching is thus not dead. It survives as a hybrid type of collaborative expression for deep'n'dark play.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the treatment of the human body in the rating and censorship of video games, focusing specifically on the 'problem' of depictions of hands with four digits and the cultural, historical, political and economic context within which this prohibition has developed and persists.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between the rating and censorship of video games in Japan and the human body, which figures prominently in rating and censorship guidelines and criteria both in Japan and elsewhere. Based on research related to the production, rating and censorship of video games in Japan conducted over a period of several years and drawing on conversations and interviews with dozens of video game producers/creators and other representatives of Japanese video games companies, as well as interviews and meetings with representatives of CESA (Computer Entertainment Software Association) and CERO (Computer Entertainment Rating Organization), the paper focuses on the issue of bodily dismemberment, which is an area of particular concern in the rating and censorship of games in Japan and, specifically, the 'problem of four fingers' - the prohibition of depictions of hands with missing digits and/or hands drawn with only four digits. It is argued that concern with this issue is best understood with reference to the historical and political relationship between organizations representing the interests of the burakumin and the mass media (including the print media, publishing, and entertainment media such as manga, animation and video games) and that, in the context of the rating of video games, the avoidance of depictions of four fingers is motivated, primarily, through fear of triggering criticism and negative publicity.