Paper short abstract:

Putting descriptive phenomenology to practice, I show how Thai boxers’ corporeal movements instantiate particular times and values under local conditions of precariousness in military-industrial Thailand.

Paper long abstract:

Based on apprenticeship-participation research with northeast Thai boxers and their families in Bangkok, I reevaluate critical expectations equating sovereign cultural movement with street-based revolutionary practice, instead considering Thai boxers' rural-urban(e) (s)paces as--in an extension of the Husserlian lifeworld--a deathworld where sovereign-subjects ritually manage relative rates of decay and strength. In the shadow of spectacular populist—nationalist representational political processes given way to state delegated torture, nested within the hypertrophy of architectures productive of the military-industrial regime, I trace how Thai boxer's movements make certain times and values under local precarious conditions. In this paper I will be especially concerned with the rest and off-hours of Thai boxing competition, insofar as these regenerative programs mark off a negative gestalt from which to draw efficacious--i.e. memorable--action. I find that this storage space of reflexive and ritual substitution provisions a form of life which opens anew an address appropriate to de-composing structures of inequality and temporality amongst manifold violences which stake claim to the present in Thailand.