Contrapuntal non sequiturs

There is a poignant moment in Keith Basso’s classic, Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), where he meditates on his incapacity to discern a vernacular setting in which text and actions, while intelligible to him in their emergent and immediate surface representations, ultimately become non sequiturs unless one understands them within a longer chronotopic durée of their entextualization.

Here, Basso is confronted with figures and forms that he is unable to order in spite of his years of Apache language study and decades of lived experience in this community’s cultural and linguistic calibrations of their material environment. Through inquiry and an elaborate exercise in historical sleuthing (of the kind that most contemporary ethnographers have little patience, time, or inclination for), Basso is eventually able to unravel the complex historical and cultural ecology that lends vernacular specificity to the otherwise intelligible but intractable sentences spoken by his Apache interlocutors. Through considerably less sleuthing, the sentence “He really likes pineapples” as well as why pineapples are funny became clear only when I came to discern the transnational context and co-texts out of which the sentence emerged. As in Basso’s case, “He really likes pineapples” does not stand alone as a non sequitur but rather emerges contrapuntally within an array of variously sensed and embodied “texts” (cf. Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Summerson Carr, Gal and Nakassis2023): like the dangerous intensity of my imminent strangulation; including the historical and ethnographic movement processes that led to this event—all with various segments of independently incomplete interpretability.

A few days following my bout with Shark, I encountered him at an open mat: This is a more informal setting in which jiujitsu practitioners—often from different gyms—can come together and either do sparring rounds or work on specific skills with training partners seeking to do the same. One could think of this as a tutorial group or study meeting outside of formal technique or competition classes. Shark was training with another practitioner, and they were doing a competitive round. In a flurry of legs and hips, Shark was on his opponent’s back, strangling him nearly unconscious. Another onlooker shouted: “Wa, bolo!” (trans. “Wow, pineapple!”). Seeking to unravel a correlation, I went to speak with Shark about his love of pineapples at the end of the round. He laughed at my confusion and pulled out his phone, opened his VPN, and accessed YouTube in order to show me a video titled, “Berimbolo Doesn’t Work.Footnote ⁴” Australian grappler Levi Jones-Leary was being interviewed about something called a berimbolo. “I’m out here doing berimbolos all day,” he notes. The interviewer asks: “So, it works?” “Yeah,” Jones-Leary responds wryly, “I think it semi-works.” A sequence of images, unfolding to the groove of German rapper Peter Fox’s (Reference Fox2008) Alles Neu followed. They were videos of jiujitsu competitors performing movements similar to Shark’s: not mutually identical, but I was beginning to discern a patternistic sense of their commonality.

So many questions needed to be answered. How could I learn this berimbolo? Why did Jones-Leary need to motivate that the berimbolo worked? What was compelling about the berimbolo as a “style” of play as well as an emblem of personal attributes? It mattered to both Shark and Levi-Jones Leary that the latter was a bolo player. I began my tutelage and research on the subject in earnest. The berimbolo or berimbolar, I came to learn, was derived from a narrow vernacular slang in urban Brazilian Portuguese-speaking jiujitsu communities. It initially meant (loosely) “to scramble”—a messy, seemingly indiscernible flurry of movements leading to the addressor of the berimbolo “taking the back” of their opponent addressee. I further came to learn that particular genealogies of teachers and students subsequently formalized the berimbolo as a systematic approach to jiujitsu.

The respective Mendes brothers (from Art of Jiujitsu or AOJ) and Miyao twins (from Unity Jiujitsu)—all fighting out of Brazil—are credited with demonstrating competitive success with the berimbolo at the highest levels of the sport. The story behind Jones-Leary’s insistence on the efficacy of this technique is a tale of competitive intrigue involving at least one of these genealogies. As the Miyao brothers were blowing out jiujitsu competitions and cementing the hegemony of Brazilian competitors, an American competitor named Keenan Cornelius was—perhaps not so—quietly formulating an approach to jiujitsu that was meant to negate the dominance of Brazilian champions in the sport. His approach emphasized control and a deliberate shutting down of the agile, creative approaches that characterized—or stylistically enregistered (Agha Reference Agha2007, 185)—Brazilian play. He and the Miyao twins entered into a rivalry that was substantially escalated through Cornelius’s virally circulated coining of two phrases that made him a controversial figure among the then Brazilian gatekeepers of formal competitions. The first, “American jiujitsu,” was Cornelius’ characterization of a divergence from an almost sacred kinship of the sport as the product of one Brazilian family—the Gracies; the second, a direct provocation of the Miyao twins and their New York-based academy, Unity: “The Berimbolo Doesn’t Work.” Levi Jones-Leary, though a more recent addition to Unity, as well as an Australian grappler, was also a product of the Miyao brothers’ lineage, school, teachers, as well as a high-profile exponent of the berimbolo approach developed within this genealogy. In this light, the YouTube video Shark had shown me not only featured Jones-Leary as a vindicator of the Miyao legacy but also featured several students of the Mendes brothers (AOJ) all having new success with the same bolo approach.

Through this indexical juxtaposition of texts—including Peter Fox’s liberatory statement Was Sie nicht gefällt, mach neu! (Gr. If it doesn’t please you, make it new!)—the video diagrams how the berimbolo can be understood as being politicized in a contestation between families, schools, and nation states (Brazil versus US). More than merely representing style contrasts in American versus Brazilian jiujitsu, the divergence in an approach to jiujitsu diagrams figures of personhood that scale up into “national” and “cultural” stereotypes of identity: agile, crafty, and stylistically creative Brazilians versus American players deliberately sabotaging the former’s flair with a control-based, often brutal, approach characterized by a targeted shutting down of their opponents’ attributes. To be sure, nationhood is not the only vector of identity being enregistered through jiujitsu competitors’ encounters.

Gay guards and manly passes

As my research continued in jiujitsu communities in the US, China, and elsewhere, I came to understand the berimbolo’s style contrast with “top-heavy” or “passing” styles to additionally entail gendered and sexualized dimensions. These dimensions become foregrounded in the context of a highly intimate sport where techniques of the body explicitly encounter a friction with sensoria and forms of physicality that are experienced as outstripping apprehension: In the ways language can be experienced as gendered or sexualized only when language itself becomes segmentable. By analogy, a recognition or meta-awareness of the “segmentability” of jiujitsu—what Edward Sapir (Reference Sapir1921) might express as its form-feeling—includes a communicative medium and its “parts” that become imbricated in the very process of identity-formation within the jitsuverse.

In this context, the berimbolo—through the labor of players associated with particular teams and countries—becomes stereotyped as emblematic of an approach to jiujitsu that falls within the broader characterization of “guard” play. In a jiujitsu encounter, there is in every instance a division of labor between two distinct participant roles: guarding and passing. The former can be understood as occupying “bottom” position, while the latter can be understood as playing “top.” To be sure, the affordances of engendering and sexualization of these approaches are embraced along predictable lines. The sentence, “I don’t pull guard, because I’m a heterosexual male,” quickly engenders a divided response within the transnational jiujitsu community. Here, “pulling guard” is the action of going to ground in the context of a jiujitsu match, without having been “taken down.” In competitive settings, it refers to an unforced choice to sit to ground at the moment of making haptic contact with an opponent—taken as signifying the opposite of dominating and imposing one’s will on one’s adversary. One could characterize the language of critique around guard play—particularly in the jitsuverse’s Anglosphere—as diagramming a predictably generic “alpha male” ethics. As an insider sentiment among some practitioners—that “pulling guard” symbolizes a questionable masculine ethics—it certainly finds its counter in an irreverent and playfully antagonistic queering of this position by an equally popular demographic of trickster-like competitors like Craig Jones:

Jones, who popularized a rainbow-colored jiujitsu rashguard (upper body garment worn by jiujitsu players) with the words “Keep Jiujitsu Gay,” frequently identifies as bisexual and openly mocks expressions of toxic and fragile masculinity among leading figures in the sport. He has also campaigned for equitable pay in women’s jiujitsu and has vocally condemned predatory practices as well as sexual abuse in jiujitsu gym culture. In the context above, Jones is pragmatically deploying “gay”—in a polyvalent manner—to criticize alpha males, who he frequently caricatures as homophobic, for their homoerotic infatuation with kitsch masculinist aesthetics; as well as reflexively indexing an external perception of the sport of jiujitsu as “looking very gay” on account of its apparent physical intimacy.

Here, Jones is a figure who has not only popularized guard play, but in fact has leaned into an anti-Alpha persona through his self-branding as jiujitsu’s second best grappler and a member of jiujitsu’s second best team, the B-Team. This kind of playful rejection of “top” play and “top” position contests the kinds of unironic celebrations of domination and endangerment that might, for instance, inspire a gym owner to have “stay on top” as a WiFi password. In a humorous Instagram short video titled, “Why People Who Make Fun of Pulling Guard are WRONG”Footnote ⁷ jiujitsu influencer, Beatrice Jin (AKA berimbozo) pokes fun at this phenomenon, presenting four highly enregistered stereotypes of subjects who would make fun of pulling guard: 1) “Three hundred pound Jim who thinks size doesn’t matter”; 2) “Bowling ball guy with no neck”; 3) “Joe from the office who watches UFC [and does not train jiujitsu]”; and 4) “Your coach who won the NAGA [North American Grappling Association] Masters division [for grapplers over the age of 30].” Among my own encounters with guard play critics, one fellow Masters competitor—Vladimir from Russia—checked three of the boxes: Weighing in at around 300 lb, and shaped like a neckless bowling ball, he had won a number of Masters tournaments with a top-heavy style, driving fellow elderly grapplers into the floor. However, Vladimir insisted that it was because he was an alpha male with a will to kill, and that his success at crushing my own guard game with overwhelming pressure was due to his excellent technique rather than his frame and late-life steroid regimen (jiujitsu tournaments are unregulated for substance abuse at the Masters level).

It is within an ecology of co-texts and personae, then, that the berimbolo is not just one move among many arbitrary possibilities of motion—in the same way in which “top” and “bottom” are not neutral propositions of scale, degree, or orientation in space. Ethnographically, one might say that connecting these encounters around the unravelling of this technique was the beginning of a form-feeling consciousness around the berimbolo in terms of both its physical “repertoire” (cf. Cohen Reference Cohen2021)—the unlimited potential permutations of a limited set of affordances; as well as its mass-mediated chronotopes (Agha Reference Agha2007b)—the virtual and boundable space-time within which recognizable, discursive as well as embodied, repertoires are able to unfold and be discerned. Within this repertoire and its chronotopes, then, the motion text called a bolo or berimbolo was beginning to emerge as an enregistered style (Agha Reference Agha2007; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2016), where the subject of the video—Levi Jones-Leary—was clearly an initial personification of, or “icon of personhood” (Carr Reference Carr2010) for, jiujitsu’s berimbolo.

Kinesic enregisterment

Anthropologist Asif Agha defines enregisterment as a “[process] whereby diverse behavioral signs (whether linguistic, non-linguistic, or both) are functionally reanalyzed as cultural models of action, as behaviors capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics of incumbents of particular interactional roles, and of relations among them” (Agha Reference Agha2007, 55). Following this understanding, the berimbolo, while referring to a series of distinguishable techniques and reactions, comes to stand for more than a set of isolated bodily actions, but rather a more holistic set of personal attributes (cultural and stereotypical) that are recognizable within a community aligning with these actions, along with an array of co-texts—including a (re-analyzable) meta-language through which the berimbolo, its execution (requiring recognizable interactional roles), and its social after-effects (emerging from assumed social relations) diagrams an ecology of personhood (along with distinguishable cultural models) within the broader jitsuverse.Footnote ⁸

Levi Jones-Leary, in his ordinary life, is many different things and likely occupies a diverse set of participant roles. Within the jitsuverse’s ecology of personhood, however, he is one of the personifications of a bolo-player, referred to frequently as the Xanadu God and sporting a wide array of striking hair colors with often matching fingernail paint. In a short documentary featuring his first two years competing at black belt, Jones-Leary’s eccentric personality—as a stereotype of bolo-players—is on display, with unfiltered public statements like: “It’s kind of weird, seeing something so much in your head and for it to all come to fruition. I almost feel like I can see the fucking future or something or that I’m a psychic god. I mean that sounded a bit hubris—I apologize.Footnote ⁹” This statement, and others like it, can be contextualized with reference to Jones-Leary’s narration of his own journey as a competitor in which he credits his discovery of fantasy and visualization as coping mechanisms for dealing with five years of disappointing losses at the international competition level. The Xanadu God, on the one hand, could be seen as an “alter ego”; but on the other as a dissociation from a self that needs to bear the incredible psychic burdens of either failure or success. Shedding light on both the origin of the Xanadu God and the source of his possible need for a self that could stand in for self-dissociation, Jones-Leary narrates a shift in mindset earlier in his career:

Xanadu, what Jones-Leary understands as “paradise,Footnote ¹¹” is a chronotope of sublimation in which he is the master of a realm, in which all scripted outcomes come to fruition—a zone in which effort is rewarded and invulnerable personae are realized. As a being from a time existing out of time, the Xanadu God is invulnerable to the contingencies of a precarious life, in a precarious sport, unfolding in a precarious world. Thus, when Jones-Leary began to experience substantial success from brown belt onwards, eventually winning world championships did feel like self-fulfilling prophesies and the Xanadu God was in fact realized.

For Levi Jones-Leary to be the Xanadu God of berimbolos, the berimbolo—whatever it may be—must be rendered efficacious. This gets at the heart of why Jones-Leary was being asked whether the berimbolo works in Shark’s YouTube video: there is a contingent relationship between the efficacy of the bolo (as Jones-Leary’s approach and path to victory) and the maintenance of Xanadu and its God. In this way, the berimbolo—as an approach re-popularized by Jones-Leary—becomes associated with a kind of transgressive eccentricity in the sport: a self-apologetic hubris that rejects top-play in favor of an “aesthetic” jiujitsu that is oriented around highly choreographed, “beautiful movements”—in the words of another well-known bolo-player and teacher, Margot Ciccarelli. Describing the technique of the berimbolo, Ciccarelli diagrams a sophisticated linguistic scaffolding that acts as a mnemonic for diachronically narrating the berimbolo as a kinesic event that will ultimately be apprehended as a non-diachronic motion text:

To demonstrate that Ciccarelli’s diachronic narration of the berimbolo is in many ways interpretable as a generic text artifact in the pedagogical universe of jiujitsu—as a motion text that can be rendered portable across space, time, and events of social decoding among members of an international jiujitsu community—I recruited one of my coaches in Hangzhou, Marco “Marcola” Alvarado, to participate in an ethnographic experiment in which I would cold call him to teach the same technique as above. Here, I had Alvarado’s partner, Katreena Dyrek, both take a video of him teaching the move, as well as letting him direct action shots of moments in the performance of a berimbolo that he felt were most germane to teaching the move from a photographic record. With the exception of some nuanced technical details and Ciccarelli’s expert execution, there was a clear transposability between Alvarado’s photographic and Ciccarelli’s verbal texts in spite of a radical divergence in their real-time reference subjects and contexts.

In Figure 1, my training partner Yifei Mo and I are clearly wearing rash guards while performing a more contemporary variation of the berimbolo. This is referred to as “no-gi” in Ciccarelli’s transcript, because we are not wearing a traditional gi—the type of uniform that will be familiar to readers as a “judo” outfit and which is worn in many competitive gi-jiujitsu settings. As Ciccarelli points out, the no-gi bolo-player has to use grips on the leg in the absence of the lapel, belt, and pant grips they are able to utilize in the gi (where the technique was initially developed).

Figure 1.

Setup for no-gi berimbolo with author; training partner, Yifei Mo; and Coach Marco (Photo Credit: Katreena Dyrek).

Having set up the De La Riva hook (my left leg/foot hooked behind his right knee) in Figure 1, I use my ankle grip and right foot on Yifei Mo’s hip to bring him to the ground in Figure 2. Though some of the details in Ciccarelli’s transcript have been skipped here, I do still have the De La Riva hook in place, with my foot position and ankle grip serving as a setup for the sequence of bodily inversions that will follow into the back-take:

Figure 2.

Author off-balancing Yifei Mo using De La Riva hook (with left leg); ankle grip with left hand; and right foot on Yifei Mo’s hip.

In this sequence (from Figures 3 and 4), I invert and roll toward Yifei’s head, cupping his left hip with my left hand, thus partially lifting his hips off the ground and pinning his back to the floor. The speed of the inversion that Ciccarelli emphasizes is necessary for generating momentum that can allow the lifting of Yifei’s hips so that an opportunity to take his back arises. Of course, not all berimbolos require this momentum dependency or, in fact, the use of inversion, but in both Alvarado and Ciccarelli’s texts, this is a fairly consistent approach in executing a “standard” no-gi berimbolo.

Figure 3.

Author beginning inversion using De La Riva hook and right foot across Yifei Mo’s hips.

Figure 4.

Author completing inversion using De La Riva hook and right foot across Yifei Mo’s hips.

Here, in Figure 5, the ultimate goal of performing the berimbolo is beginning to emerge: back exposure. As Ciccarelli emphasizes, “what we want from the berimbolo movement [is] to expose the back so we can get to the back control position.” This sequence is completed in Figures 6 and 7:

Figure 5.

Author makes use of cupped left hand and Yifei Mo’s raised hip to gain back exposure.

Figure 6.

Establishing back control and setting up a choke or other potential submission threats consolidating back control: the goal of the berimbolo.

Figure 7.

Consolidating both back control and a choke submission: completing a berimbolo sequence.

Both Alvarado and Ciccarelli utilize diachronic narration, and thus diachronic texts, in teaching techniques like the berimbolo (see Figure 8). In fact, the capacity to state where a berimbolo begins or ends as a boundable event, or to apprehend it as a learnable choreography, will entail diachronic conceptualization. However, comprehending its execution, permutations, and stylistic features as a motion text requires a mode of kinesic enregisterment that—while presuming a diachronic referentiality—anticipates a complete and non-linearly derivable sense of completeness through an acquired form-feeling: In the same way one can complete or correct an incomplete or incorrect sentence as a native speaker without knowing grammatical rules; In the same way one does not work from the top left portion of a sheet of paper to the bottom right corner when drawing a vase of flowers; Or in the same way one knows where one is going to finish the song, Happy Birthday no matter at what point in it one begins singing.

Figure 8.

Marco Alvarado’s visual text (left); and Margot Ciccarelli’s verbal text (right).

Similarly, Marco Alvarado and Margot Ciccarelli’s respective visual and verbal texts, while linearly diachronic in their narration, are ultimately derived from endless permutations, countless exceptions, and diverging executions of the no-gi berimbolo. Even while both instructors share a linear pedagogical language reflecting a commonality across sensory modalities and chronotopes, both understand the broader mass-mediated chronotope of berimbolos and their bolo-players to be a somewhat less tractable, but not semiotically elusive zone of encounter—for the berimbolo and the bolo player can be recognized even if both might be tricky to thwart. Here, the commonality between Alvarado and Ciccarelli’s pedagogical approaches, as well as the recognizability of berimbolos and their players across contexts, emerges from the berimbolo’s reiterability and transposability as a repertoire segment across space and time. This is what I understand through its propensity as a motion text; a boundable repertoire segment—kinesically recognizable as a complete and referable bodily movement or choreography—that thus becomes portable across discursive modalities and remote space-times of its emergence. Here, understanding the berimbolo as a transposable motion text, and the bolo-player as an icon of personhood (Carr Reference Carr2010; Ke-Schutte Reference Ke-Schutte2019, Reference Ke-Schutte2023) necessitates understanding the berimbolo—a segmentable kinesic event—as being part of a semiotic register:

For a motion text to “move” across space and time, a sociohistorical and cultural infrastructure must be understood to be present, so as to render its intelligibility—however partial or remote. The sociohistorical phase that then permits enregisterment across space-times thus is a space-time in itself which reaches across bounded event-chronotopes: As Agha (Reference Agha2007b) has also suggested, mass-mediated chronotopes can imbricate or connect disparate face-to-face space-times, even while face-to-face space-times—as spatiotemporal nexuses that ground virtual and real-time interactions—are dialogistic portals into other sociohistorical phases that afford or evade recognition at various scales of reflexive awareness (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1981).

Thus, this understanding of motion text needn’t pertain only to the motion of physical human bodies in martial encounters, but also to the motion of discourse that in its flow must be apprehended as existential, sequential, diachronic, and linear; yet can evocatively be encoded in sensorially impossible space-times: emptiness, nothingness, infinity, multiversality, the void, or even within dialectical and dialogical chronotopes. A more general, less-obviously embodied, expression of the contrapuntal nature of motion texts can be demonstrated in the contrast between the ethnographic space-time of my berimbolo research (Figure 9) and the account of historical space-time I was able to diagram from it (Figure 10).

Figure 9.

Ethnographic motion from bolo to bolo-player.

Figure 10.

Historiographic motion from berimbolo to bolo-payer.

In the diagram above, the segmentable diachronic phases through which I encountered the berimbolo and bolo-player, as a researcher, differ from the segmentable historical phases of their emergence that I was able to retrospectively reconstruct through the research process (in the diagram below). The ability to conceive of bounded space-times outside of diachronic time, only to re-order them again in a different diachronic time of reception, requires not only a chronotopic capacity to bound and move encodable events across time—in the Bakhtinian sense—but also a form-feeling-like anticipation of historical and cultural motion—in the metacultural sense (Urban Reference Urban2001)—that permits a coherent reception of seemingly incoherent experiences, sensory impressions, and events.

The respective ethnographic and historiographic motion texts above—while seemingly diachronic in their narrations—will, in retrospect (that is, after reading), interweave in all kinds of ways with the reader’s own transtemporal associations of discursive and sensorial experience. As the berimbolo and the bolo-player emerge as robust, kinesically enregistered motion texts and ecologies of personhood that are recognizable as semiotic totalities outside of the diachronic segments that choreograph their technical mechanics and social histories; so too ethnography and historiography must be comprehended as robust, polychronic totalities even while their initial apprehension unfolds in seemingly diachronic, linear segments.