The Immersion Foundation

Rebuilding hoplology
for the 21st century.

A field team, archive, and publishing house documenting how humans fight, train, adapt, and make meaning around combat.

Why We Exist →

01

Field Team

We go where the arts are still lived, and learn from source communities, inheritors, and practitioners in context.

02

Publishing House

We turn fieldwork into long-form books, journals, and films that remain useful beyond the moment of capture.

Not a martial arts school. Not a federation. Not a content stream.

An Unfinished Field

Burton opened
a door. → Draeger built
a corridor. → Immersion maps
the rooms.

Three centuries. One unfinished project. This is what we call New Hoplology — lineage-aware, field-grounded, and future-facing.

Read the full account →

How the Work Is Carried Out

Four instruments. One institutional logic.

Expeditions

Seven field investigations

Documenting living combative traditions in the communities that still carry them — before the window between historical and irrecoverable closes.

A record built to outlast us

400+ hours of professional field footage, oral histories, and legacy materials — preserved to standards designed for the scholar working decades from now.

Publications

The Book of the Stick, and what follows it

Four volumes. Two thousand pages. Eighty peer-reviewed articles. The most comprehensive hoplological study of a single weapon family ever published.

Labs

Six comparative inquiries

Masters from different traditions, one question each, every one published. Not a seminar. A working method.

"The history of the sword is the history of humanity." Sir Richard Francis Burton · 1876

The map is still being drawn.

Explore the Work Collaborate Support Preservation

The Immersion Foundation · The Unfinished Field

A form of human knowledge
is disappearing.
Not becoming historical.
Becoming irrecoverable.

Historical

The record survives. Objects remain. Interpretation is still possible. Scholars can work with it — imperfectly, but meaningfully.

Irrecoverable

The record survives. The objects remain. But the embodied key that makes them fully intelligible — which lives only in the relationship between master and student — is gone. What remains is not the knowledge.

"The history of the sword is the history of humanity." Sir Richard Francis Burton · 1876

Read

The Central Problem

This is not nostalgia for lost arts. It is a precise description of how a specific class of human knowledge ceases to exist.

Most preservation efforts treat knowledge as if it lives in texts, objects, and recordings. Some knowledge does. Combat knowledge, in its full depth, does not. The mechanism of its disappearance is specific — and most existing institutions are not designed to address it.

Condition One

Historical

A tradition becomes historical when primary records survive — texts, objects, films, oral accounts — but the living practice has ended or become discontinuous. The record can be studied. Something real can still be learned.

This is not catastrophe. Most of human knowledge is historical. Historians, archaeologists, and scholars work productively with historical material every day.

The Fechtbücher of 14th-century Germany survive. Scholars and practitioners reconstruct from them. The reconstruction is partial but real.

Ancient Greek wrestling is gone from practice but described in texts and depicted in sculpture. The record permits serious inquiry.

Condition Two

Irrecoverable

A tradition becomes irrecoverable when the living transmission breaks before adequate field documentation is made. The record was never sufficiently created. What survives is fragmentary, decontextualised, or absent.

The difference matters because it changes what is possible. Historical knowledge can be studied. Irrecoverable knowledge cannot be recovered. The window between these two conditions is the space where fieldwork operates — and the window is closing.

Stick traditions in parts of the Caribbean are now one practitioner deep. When that practitioner is gone, the specific technical and cultural knowledge goes with them.

Several Philippine regional weapon variants were inadequately documented before the communities that sustained them urbanised. They exist now in name only.

The Immersion Foundation works in the space between these two conditions. Once a tradition crosses from historical to irrecoverable, the work cannot be done. The window is the work.

Every civilization recognized the problem. None solved it permanently.

In a limestone relief at Beni Hasan, Egypt, circa 2000 BCE, two men grip each other with a precision any trained grappler would recognize: weight forward, level changing, the outside leg positioned to sweep. Someone understood that what those men were doing was worth preserving in stone — that without deliberate effort, it would be lost.

The Mahabharata describes wrestling holds and weapon techniques with technical specificity. The Arthashastra of Kautilya treats combative training as foundational to governance. In China, the Sun Tzu is not merely military — its concerns are epistemological: the prepared mind, the cultivated body, the relationship between stillness and decisive action. Combat knowledge, in these traditions, was philosophy made physical.

Across every major civilization, without exception, someone made the same calculation: this will be lost if we do not act. The 14th-century German masters who wrote the Fechtbücher did so because they understood oral transmission was fragile. Japanese samurai families commissioned densho — handwritten transmission scrolls — entrusted to a single designated heir, because they understood the same thing.

They were right. And despite their efforts, most of it was lost anyway.

The pattern holds across four millennia: cultures treat combat knowledge as important enough to record, and the record turns out to be insufficient. Not because the recorders failed, but because the problem they were solving — how to preserve knowledge that lives primarily in bodies and relationships — does not yield fully to texts and objects. Every generation underestimated how much the living key matters.

What history demonstrates is not that this problem is new. It is that this problem has never been adequately institutionalized. No civilization built a sustained structure for doing what the problem actually requires: going to the source, in the field, with the right practitioner depth and the right archival infrastructure, before the window closes.

Three Centuries. One Unfinished Project.

The systematic study of human combative culture has been attempted seriously three times. Each attempt went further than the last. None yet built the institution the field requires.

19th Century · 1876

Burton opened
a door.

Sir Richard Francis Burton · Named the field

20th Century · 1952–1982

Draeger built
a corridor.

Donn F. Draeger · Proved the method

21st Century · Now

Immersion maps
the rooms they
did not reach.

The Immersion Foundation · Building the institution

This is what TIF calls New Hoplology: lineage-aware, field-grounded, and future-facing. It honours Burton and Draeger not by repeating them, but by going further.

He gave the field its name, its ambition — and its first great structural limitation.

Sir Richard Francis Burton was, by almost any measure, the most capacious mind of the Victorian age. Soldier, diplomat, explorer, linguist — he spoke over 25 languages. The first European to enter Mecca in disguise and survive. He translated the Kama Sutra and One Thousand and One Nights for English readers. A serious swordsman who understood weapon systems from the inside, not merely as objects of curiosity.

In 1876, in the opening pages of The Book of the Sword, he coined a word: hoplology. From the Greek hoplon — weapon — and logos — study. The systematic, scholarly investigation of weapons, combat systems, and combative behavior as a lens onto human civilization itself. The word was a claim as much as a definition: this is a real field of inquiry, with intellectual dignity commensurate with what it can reveal.

Trace the sword across human history and you trace simultaneously the routes of trade and conquest, the formation of warrior castes, the emergence of chivalric codes — bushido, kshatriya dharma. You trace the self-organisation of human societies around their relationship to violence. Which is to say: civilization itself.

This insight remains genuinely important. Most academic disciplines still treat combat knowledge as a subset of something else — military history, physical culture, folklore. Burton's claim was that it deserves its own systematic study, on its own terms. He was right.

He was also, inevitably, a Victorian Englishman standing at the centre of what he genuinely believed was the apex of human development. His hoplology was European in its frame, imperial in its assumptions, and teleological in its structure: weapon development moved from primitive to sophisticated, from the rest of the world toward the perfected European saber. The kris, the katana, the assegai, the stick traditions of the Caribbean and West Africa — interesting data points in a story whose conclusion he had already written before the research began.

This is not a criticism of Burton. It is a precise description of the field he left: genuinely named, genuinely important, and built on a foundation that would require another century and a fundamentally different methodology to correct. That correction came from one man, working largely alone, in the second half of the 20th century.

He proved the method. He mapped Japan. He pointed at everything else and said: this still needs doing.

In 1952, a U.S. Marine named Donn F. Draeger arrived in Japan and began training. What followed over the next three decades was one of the most extraordinary feats of scholarly fieldwork in the history of the humanities — conducted almost entirely outside the institutions that would have recognized it as such.

Draeger understood something about hoplological method that Burton had gestured at but never enacted: you cannot study a combat system from the outside. The knowledge is not in the texts. It lives in the bodies of practitioners, accessible only through the relationship of practice. To understand classical jujutsu at the level that serious scholarship requires, you must train jujutsu seriously enough to internalize what cannot be written. He held high rank in multiple classical Japanese systems — not as credential collection, but as methodological commitment. He was practicing epistemology.

He gave hoplology its second life. He proved the methodology. He did it working largely alone, against the sustained indifference of every existing academic structure that might have supported him.

He wrote 25 books. He traveled extensively through Southeast Asia, documenting systems with no prior Western scholarly record. In 1971 he founded the International Hoplology Society — the first institution in history organized explicitly around Burton's founding insight. He mapped Japan. He pointed at the Americas, Africa, the Pacific, South Asia, the Caribbean, the diasporic traditions that had traveled with enslaved and colonized peoples across the world — and said, by implication: this needs doing.

When Donn Draeger died in 1982, hoplology lost its animating centre. His books remained. His archive survived, incompletely. His students scattered. The methodology did not disappear — but it did not grow. It did not acquire the institutional infrastructure, the global scope, or the publication capacity that would have made it permanent and scalable. He had built a corridor. The rooms at the end of it remained unmapped.

For a generation after his death, almost no one moved through the corridor he had built. And during that generation, the window was closing — steadily, irreversibly, in communities that neither Draeger nor any successor had yet reached.

The traditions did not pause while the field went quiet.

The decades after 1982 were not idle years for martial arts globally. They were the years of the great commercial expansion: franchise schools, the global spread of sport martial arts, the emergence of mixed martial arts. There was extraordinary activity. There was almost no hoplology.

Academic martial arts studies developed during this period — largely in cultural studies, sociology, and sports science. It produced real and valuable work. Its structural limitation is that it studies martial arts primarily as cultural phenomena to be analyzed, not as bodies of knowledge to be learned and preserved. The practitioner depth required to understand what is actually being transmitted, at the level that field documentation demands, is largely absent. The scholars are not usually practitioners. The practitioners are not usually scholars.

The specific conditions that produce serious, decade-long commitment to a rare and demanding practice do not survive the transition to modernity easily. The master ages. The student who received the full transmission becomes the only one. When that student stops teaching — the tradition does not merely become historical. It crosses into irrecoverable.

Urbanisation accelerated. The economic conditions that had sustained village-level transmission of combative knowledge eroded everywhere and quickly. The last practitioner of a system does not usually announce himself. He simply becomes unavailable, and then he is gone, and then what he knew is gone with him. Not documented and then lost. Simply lost.

This is happening now. In the lifetimes of people alive today. The tally is not precisely known — and that uncertainty is itself a precise measure of how badly the institutional gap has mattered.

A Structural Analysis

Every existing institution addresses part of this problem. None was designed to hold all the required capacities at once.

This is not a deficiency in those institutions. It is a difference in mandate. Each of the following does work that TIF could not replicate and does not attempt to — and each, by the nature of what it was built to do, leaves a specific room unentered. Naming that room precisely is the point of this table, not a verdict on the institutions themselves.

Institution	What it preserves	What remains missing
Museums & Cultural Collections Object preservation · Heritage stewardship Institutions like the Wallace Collection, the Met's Arms and Armor department, and countless regional museums hold collections that took generations to assemble and conserve with extraordinary professional rigor — work TIF depends on and could never duplicate.	The artifact record itself: swords, armour, ritual objects, illustrated manuscripts, conserved to museum-grade standards and made accessible to scholars and the public for generations. This is foundational, permanent infrastructure for the entire field.	What a static collection cannot hold is the embodied use and teaching context around the object — how it was gripped, what a master said while teaching it. This is not a shortfall in museum practice; objects are what museums are built to hold. It simply means the living half of the record requires a different kind of institution working alongside them.
Academic Martial Arts Studies Cultural analysis · Peer-reviewed scholarship A serious and steadily maturing field, with real institutional homes, dedicated journals, and scholars doing genuinely important interpretive and critical work on martial arts as cultural, historical, and social phenomena.	Rigorous analysis and contextualization of the historical and cultural record — placing martial traditions within frameworks of colonialism, identity, gender, and nationalism that field documentation alone cannot provide. This scholarship gives TIF's own fieldwork its critical apparatus.	The discipline's center of gravity is analytical rather than expeditionary — its core methods do not require, and so do not usually produce, sustained primary fieldwork inside still-living practice communities before documentation becomes impossible. That is a difference in method, not a gap in seriousness, and the two approaches are complementary rather than competing.
Martial Arts Schools & Federations Living transmission · Lineage continuity The reason anything survives at all. Schools and federations are doing the single most important job in this entire ecosystem: keeping a tradition alive, generation after generation, often against real economic and cultural pressure.	Transmission of a lineage at the depth and fidelity that only sustained, internal teaching can provide. The living embodied knowledge within a tradition, held and passed on by people whose life's work this is.	A federation's responsibility is rightly to its own lineage, not to comparison across lineages — that is simply a different job. Cross-tradition, comparative documentation is work most schools have neither the mandate nor the resources to take on themselves, which is precisely the role a separate field-research institution can play in support of, not competition with, their work.
Commercial Publishers Mass distribution · Broad audiences Commercial publishing has done more than any other channel to put martial arts history and practice in front of a general audience — without it, most of this field's existing public literature simply would not exist.	Wide distribution and editorial polish for work the market can carry — introductory texts, popular histories, accessible practitioner guides reaching readers well outside specialist circles.	A four-volume, 2,000-page comparative study of stick arts across thirty cultures is not, by ordinary commercial logic, a viable acquisition — and that is a reasonable, structural limit on what any publisher can be expected to fund, not a criticism of the industry. It simply means the deepest comparative work in this field tends to require a different funding model.
The Wider Hoplology Community Carrying Draeger's methodology forward The individuals and organizations who have kept Donn Draeger's methodology and name alive since 1982 — often with limited resources and little institutional recognition — deserve real credit. Without their stewardship, the field's founding literature might not have survived this long at all.	The methodological foundation Draeger established, and a body of work — concentrated especially in Japan and Southeast Asia — that remains the strongest existing literature in the field. This is the ground TIF builds on, not a body of work TIF claims to supersede.	Draeger's own ambition was famously broader than any one person, even him, could complete in a lifetime. TIF sees its work as an extension of that ambition into regions and at an institutional scale he did not have the resources to reach — a continuation alongside others doing the same, not a replacement of them.
The Immersion Foundation New Hoplology · Compound institutional logic	Field methodology, practitioner depth, professional archival infrastructure, publication capacity, global scope, and sustained institutional continuity — held together in one structure, alongside and in support of the institutions above, not instead of them.	This is a young attempt at an old, difficult problem. It is offered for scrutiny and collaboration, not as a verdict on anyone else's work — a contribution to a shared field, not a claim to have completed it.

The Institutional Response

Burton named it.
Draeger advanced it.
Immersion is
one attempt to carry it further.

This field has needed a compound institution for 150 years — one combining field methodology, archival infrastructure, and publication capacity in a single sustained structure. The Immersion Foundation is a present-tense attempt to build that, in fieldwork, archive conservation, comparative gathering, and long-form publication — alongside museums, scholars, schools, and fellow hoplologists already doing related work, not apart from them.

This is not a claim of completion, and not a claim of exclusivity. It is an open, testable institutional commitment — and an invitation to anyone who takes this problem as seriously as it deserves.

Explore the Work For Masters & Scholars

Field Methodology

Seven major expeditions conducted in living communities — not reconstructions. The window-before-irrecoverable work, done before it was too late.

Archival Infrastructure

400+ hours of 4K professional footage. 100TB+ preserved with redundant off-site storage. Full metadata. Built for the scholar working in 2060 as much as in 2026.

Publication Capacity

The Book of the Stick: four volumes, 2,000+ pages, 80 peer-reviewed articles, 30+ traditions. The most comprehensive hoplological study of a single weapon family produced in a generation.

Comparative Gatherings

Five major Labs. Masters from multiple traditions. One question examined in depth each time. Not a seminar. Every one published. The sixth in preparation.

Global Scope

30+ regions documented. Caribbean, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Americas traditions — the rooms Burton left unmapped and Draeger pointed at. The map is still being drawn.

The following metrics appear here, after the argument, because scale confirms commitment — it does not substitute for it. A serious institutional claim should be readable before the numbers appear.

7

Major Expeditions

400⁺

Hours of Footage

100^TB+

Archived Data

5

Major Labs

30⁺

Regions Documented

80⁺

Major Publications

The Immersion Foundation · Fieldwork

We go where
the knowledge
still lives.

Seven expeditions. Six Immersion Labs. Two distinct instruments of field research — one that goes to the source, one that interrogates what the source reveals.

7Expeditions

6Immersion Labs

400⁺Hours Archived

Scroll

Two Instruments

Expeditions go to the source. Labs interrogate what the source reveals.

An expedition is primary field documentation work. TIF goes to communities where a combative tradition is still lived, earns access through sustained practitioner relationships, and produces a professional archival record that did not exist before. The output is primary material — footage, oral histories, technical documentation — captured before the window closes.

An Immersion Lab is a structured comparative inquiry. Masters and researchers from different traditions are brought together around a single question. The premise is that each tradition holds part of an answer that no single tradition can see alone. Every Lab produces a published record. Neither instrument is a seminar, a performance, or a public event.

Expeditions

Seven field investigations.
Three continents. One methodology.

Field-first. Every expedition produces a permanent archival record. The documentation is made before the window between historical and irrecoverable closes.

Expedition 01

Caribbean Basin

Region

Trinidad & Tobago, Eastern Caribbean

Traditions

Sticklicking · Kalinda · Gilpin · Rope Jab

Output

Secret Fighting Arts of the Americas · Archival footage · Oral histories

■ Complete

The Caribbean Expedition

The first major hoplological expedition into the Caribbean in over 40 years. TIF documented four stick and combat traditions — Sticklicking, Kalinda, Gilpin, and Rope Jab — that had survived the Middle Passage, emancipation, and colonial suppression, but were now in the early 21st century one generation from irrecoverable. Working directly with the last masters still transmitting at full depth, the expedition produced the first professional archival record of their technical vocabularies, their musical and ritual context, and the pedagogical structures through which the knowledge has been carried. The material was later distilled into Secret Fighting Arts of the Americas.

Book: Secret Fighting Arts of the Americas Archival footage Oral history archive Peer-reviewed articles

Expedition 02

Portugal

Region

Portugal

Focus

Portuguese combative traditions · Jogo do Pau and related systems

Output

Archival footage · Technical documentation · Archive

■ Complete

The Portugal Expedition

Portugal carries one of the oldest continuously documented stick-fighting traditions in Europe — Jogo do Pau, a system with deep roots in rural Portuguese culture that has survived into the present with remarkable structural continuity. This expedition engaged directly with practising lineages, producing field documentation of a tradition that, while not endangered in the way of Caribbean or Southeast Asian systems, had been inadequately represented in comparative hoplological literature. The footage and technical archive constitute a reference record of living Jogo do Pau practice at the level of precision the field requires.

Jogo do Pau technical archive Archival footage Contribution: Book of the Stick

Expedition 03

Southeast Asia

Region

Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia

Traditions

Silat · Muay Boran · Krabi Krabong · Bokator · Regional variants

Output

Archival footage · Bokator technical archive · Comparative study · Peer-reviewed articles

■ Complete

The South East Asian Expedition

Southeast Asia holds some of the most diverse living combative traditions on earth — a consequence of its maritime geography, its position at the convergence of Indian, Chinese, and indigenous cultural currents, and its history of both resistance to and absorption of colonial disruption. TIF documented classical and vernacular systems across four countries, deliberately seeking traditions in active community use that maintained genuine transmission continuity distinct from modern sport or export-facing versions. Bokator in Cambodia — suppressed during the Khmer Rouge period and reconstructed by surviving practitioners — received particular attention. The footage constitutes a comprehensive technical record of Bokator practice as it exists today.

Archival footage: 4 countries Bokator technical archive Silat comparative study Peer-reviewed articles

Contra Expeditions

Focused engagements with specific masters and traditions.

The Contra Expeditions are a distinct format within TIF fieldwork — shorter, highly focused field engagements built around a specific master, a specific tradition, or a specific comparative question. Where major expeditions document an ecosystem across a region, Contra Expeditions go deep into a single point of the map.

Contra Expedition 01

New Zealand
Aotearoa

Tradition

Rongomātāne · Māori martial arts

Format

Single-tradition focused engagement

Output

Technical archive · Oral documentation

■ Complete

Contra Expedition — New Zealand / Rongomātāne

Focused engagement · Māori combative tradition

A focused field engagement with the Māori combative tradition — one of the most distinctive and culturally embedded weapon systems of the Pacific. Rongomātāne and the broader ecosystem of Māori martial arts (Mau rākau, taiaha, patu) have survived in recognisable form through the deep integration of combative practice with Māori cultural identity. This Contra Expedition engaged with practising lineage holders in Aotearoa New Zealand, producing technical documentation and oral history material that situates the tradition within its full cultural and cosmological context — not merely as a physical system but as a living expression of tino rangatiratanga.

Rongomātāne technical archive Oral documentation Cultural context record

Contra Expedition 02

Italy

Tradition

Italian blade traditions

Master

Domenico

Format

Single-master focused engagement

Output

Technical archive · Master documentation

■ Complete

Contra Expedition — Italian Blades with Domenico

Focused engagement · Italian blade tradition

A direct engagement with the Italian blade tradition through the work of master Domenico — a focused field documentation of both the technical vocabulary and the transmissional philosophy of Italian swordsmanship as a living practice. The Italian tradition carries one of the richest documented histories in European martial arts, and this Contra Expedition was designed to capture not only the technical system but the pedagogical intelligence of a specific master: how he understands the tradition, how he teaches it, and what he holds to be its essential and most endangered knowledge. The archive produced constitutes a precision record of living Italian blade practice in the hands of one of its serious custodians.

Italian blade technical archive Master documentation: Domenico Pedagogical structure record

Contra Expedition 03

Iberia

Tradition

Destreza española

Master

Ton Puey

Format

Single-master focused engagement

Output

Technical archive · Destreza documentation

■ Complete

Contra Expedition — Iberia / Ton Puey Destreza

Focused engagement · Spanish Destreza tradition

A direct field engagement with the Destreza española tradition through the work of master Ton Puey — one of the most serious living custodians of the Spanish sword art. Destreza, the Spanish philosophical and geometrical approach to swordsmanship, carries a rich textual lineage from Destreza vulgar through the later highly theoretical treatises — but the living practice, as transmitted by a practitioner working from embodied lineage rather than reconstruction, offers a dimension of the tradition that no text can substitute. This Contra Expedition documented that living dimension: Ton Puey's technical vocabulary, his understanding of the tradition's core principles, and the interpretive framework he applies to the practice. The archive is a precision record of Destreza as a lived art.

Destreza technical archive Master documentation: Ton Puey Iberian blade tradition record

Expedition 07

United States

Tradition

American bladecraft traditions

Format

Regional tradition documentation

Output

Technical archive · Tradition documentation

■ Complete

Americana — American Bladecraft

Regional expedition · American combative traditions

American bladecraft is a frequently overlooked domain of hoplological study — in part because its traditions are often embedded in folk culture, frontier history, and working-class communities that have not attracted serious scholarly attention, and in part because the most commercially visible American martial arts have obscured the distinctly indigenous combative traditions that developed across the continent. This expedition engaged with practising traditions of American knife and blade culture: the Bowie knife tradition in its Southern and frontier lineages, the Californio traditions of the Pacific Southwest, and the distinct combat knife cultures that developed through military and working-class transmission in the 20th century. The result is the first systematic hoplological field record of American bladecraft as a living combative tradition.

American bladecraft archive Bowie tradition documentation Californio tradition record 20th-century knife culture

The Lab Format

An Immersion Lab is not a seminar, a conference, or an event. It is a structured comparative inquiry built around a single question that no single tradition can answer alone. Masters and researchers are selected because their tradition holds part of an answer — not because of rank, fame, or affiliation. Every Lab runs over multiple days. Every Lab produces a published record. The gathering is never just the gathering.

The six Labs below represent the full comparative record to date. Each is identified by its central question and its output, not by its roster — which is the correct order of emphasis.

Immersion Labs

Six comparative inquiries.
One question each. All published.

Each Lab is named for what it examined, not for who attended. The record is the work.

Lab 01

The Legacy of the Blade

The inaugural Immersion Lab — the gathering that established the comparative methodology. Masters from blade traditions across multiple cultures convened around the foundational question: what does the blade, taken comparatively across civilizations, actually reveal about the cultures that made it central? Not the blade as object, but the blade as epistemological lens. The Lab established the framework of inquiry that would shape every subsequent gathering: rigorous in its structure, embodied in its method, published in its outcome.

Lab 02

Stickmata

Drawing on the fieldwork underpinning the Book of the Stick, this Lab brought together masters and researchers from stick traditions across multiple continents to examine a question that comparative stick study makes visible: what is the relationship between the stick as weapon, the stick as ritual object, and the stick as cosmological symbol? The word Stickmata — a portmanteau of stick and stigmata — encodes the Lab's core inquiry: the sacred wound, the mark of the practice, the thing the stick leaves behind in the body and in the culture that carries it.

Lab 03

Born of Blood

A comparative inquiry into the origins of martial traditions in blood — as ritual, as sacrifice, as initiation, as the substance through which combative identity is formed and transmitted. Every serious martial tradition has a relationship to blood that goes beyond injury. This Lab examined that relationship structurally: what does the presence or absence of blood in the ritual and ceremonial life of a tradition reveal about its deepest assumptions regarding violence, the body, and what combat is for? Traditions from three continents were represented, each illuminating something the others had no language for.

Lab 04

Holy Blood, Holy Blade

The direct successor to Born of Blood, this Lab narrowed and deepened the inquiry into the blade specifically: the relationship between the bladed weapon and the sacred across traditions that treat the blade as more than a tool. Filipino Arnis, Silat, Kalaripayattu, Krabi Krabong, and European longsword lineages were among the traditions represented. Each holds a distinct cosmological account of what the blade is — what it carries, what it demands, what it reveals about the person who has learned to use it with full seriousness. The Lab examined those accounts side by side, seeking the structures they share and the precise points at which they diverge.

Lab 05

Shock and Awe

A comparative inquiry into the psychology and physiology of combat: how traditions understand, cultivate, and weaponize the states of fear, overwhelm, and decisive force — and how they prepare practitioners to operate inside those states rather than be undone by them. The title is deliberately borrowed from military doctrine. The Lab examined the full spectrum: from the adrenal management of classical Japanese bujutsu, to the intimidation structures built into West African stick fighting, to the psychological architecture of Silat and its tradition of cultivating the capacity to act in conditions of extreme stress. What every serious tradition knows — and most training ignores — is that combat is not a technical problem. It is a psychological and physiological one.

Lab 06

Bikers, Brawlers
and Badasses

The most recent Immersion Lab and, in certain respects, the most methodologically ambitious: an examination of living folk combat traditions outside the classical lineage framework — the combative cultures of outlaw communities, working-class fighting traditions, motorcycle club culture, and the informal transmission networks through which street-level combat knowledge has been preserved and passed on outside any institutional structure. The Lab asked hoplology to do what it was always capable of but has rarely attempted: to treat contemporary vernacular combative culture with the same rigour it brings to classical Asian or European traditions. The fighters in these communities carry real and transmissible knowledge. They simply carry it in places the scholarly record has not previously gone.

Participate in the Work

The next expedition
and the next Lab
are being planned now.

TIF fieldwork depends on two things equally: the quality of the practitioner relationships we build, and the institutional support that makes sustained field research possible. Both are open.

Contact the Research Team Support an Expedition

For Masters & Practitioners

If you carry a tradition that has not been adequately documented.

TIF field teams can come to you. The expedition comes to the tradition — the tradition does not come to the expedition. If your practice is living and the field record is incomplete, we want to know about it.

For Scholars & Researchers

If your work could benefit from field documentation or comparative access.

The TIF archive, practitioner network, and comparative methodology are available for serious scholarly collaboration. Lab participation is open to researchers whose work advances the comparative question being examined.

For Funders & Foundations

If your institution is committed to the preservation of cultural knowledge.

Fieldwork, archival conservation, and long-form publication require sustained support. The Americas series is currently active and accepting dedicated expedition funding.

The Immersion Foundation · Archives

We preserve what
would otherwise
disappear.

Every expedition and every Lab produces a record. The Archive is where that record is held, catalogued, and protected — built for the scholar working with this material in 2060 as much as the one working with it today.

Not a personal collection. A managed institutional archive with professional capture standards, redundant storage, and full metadata — designed to outlast the people who created it.

400⁺Hours Field Footage

100^TB+Archived Data

30⁺Regions Represented

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Archive Philosophy

We preserve living knowledge — not only objects.

Most archives preserve artifacts. TIF preserves process — how a weapon is held, how a pattern is taught, what a master says when pressed about the part of their tradition they themselves are still uncertain about. These are materials most institutions do not know to collect, because most institutions are built to hold objects, not relationships captured in motion.

This distinction is not incidental. It is the entire premise of New Hoplology: combative knowledge lives primarily in bodies and in the relationship between teacher and student. A text or a static image can describe a technique. It cannot show the timing, the weight transfer, the micro-adjustments a master makes in response to a student's error, or the tone in which a tradition's deepest principle is spoken aloud for the first time. Capturing that requires a different standard of fieldwork — and a different standard of preservation.

The Archive is built to outlast us. It is not a personal collection. It is held according to long-horizon institutional standards, with the explicit intention that scholars working with this material in 2070 will find it as useful as scholars working with it today.

Capture Standards

Two recording environments. One professional standard.

TIF captures field and remote material through two distinct production pipelines — built for two different conditions, held to the same archival rigor.

Field Capture Blackmagic URSA 4K

Used For All expedition & Lab field recording

Resolution Ultra HD 4K minimum

Conditions Built for remote and variable-light field environments

Color Standard Professional broadcast-grade color science

Remote & Online Capture Riverside, recorded in 4K

Used For Online interviews, remote master sessions, podcast-format material

Resolution 4K, locally recorded per participant

Volume to Date Hundreds of hours recorded and preserved

Use Case Reaches masters and scholars outside expedition range

Audio

Dedicated audio capture independent of camera systems — lavalier and boom microphones, controlled-environment recording wherever field conditions allow. No interview is conducted without a deliberate audio plan.

Storage

Redundant off-site backup across multiple locations. Professional media management with full chain-of-custody logging from capture to archive. No material lives on a single drive.

Metadata

Every file is catalogued with location, date, practitioner, tradition, and context notes at the point of capture — not reconstructed afterward. This is what makes the Archive usable for scholarship decades later.

Consent & Context

Full practitioner consent records and cultural context documentation accompany every session. Material is never extracted from the relationships and permissions that made it possible to record.

The Collection

What is being archived

The Archive holds several distinct categories of material, gathered through expeditions, Labs, and remote sessions. Each category is preserved to the same institutional standard.

Field Recordings

Expedition & Lab Footage

Full technical demonstrations by master practitioners
Training sessions captured in original community context
Comparative Lab proceedings, multi-camera coverage
B-roll and environmental documentation of practice sites
Unedited raw footage, preserved alongside edited cuts

Oral Histories

Interviews & Testimony

In-depth practitioner and master interviews
Lineage histories told in the practitioner's own words
Remote sessions recorded via Riverside, 4K
Multi-generational family and transmission accounts
Recollections of teachers and traditions now passed

Technical Documentation

Notation & Analysis

Frame-by-frame technical breakdowns of recorded forms
Comparative technique notation across traditions
Weapon and equipment documentation — measurements, materials, construction
Pedagogical structure mapping for each documented system

Legacy Materials

Inherited & Recovered Records

Unpublished manuscripts and field notebooks
Correspondence between researchers and practitioners
Photographs from prior generations of fieldwork
Hoplology Society records and related historical materials

Active Archive Projects

The named collections, by status.

The Archive is organized into discrete collections, each tied to a specific expedition, Lab, or research initiative.

01

Caribbean Field Archive

Sticklicking, Kalinda, Gilpin, and Rope Jab — full expedition footage, oral histories, and technical documentation from Trinidad and the Eastern Caribbean.

Complete

02

Portugal Field Archive

Jogo do Pau and related Portuguese combative traditions — full technical capture from practising lineages.

Complete

03

Southeast Asia Field Archive

Over 90 hours of 4K footage across Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Indonesia, including the most comprehensive existing Bokator technical record.

Complete

04

Contra Expeditions Archive

Focused single-master and single-tradition material: Rongomātāne (New Zealand), Italian blades with Domenico, and Iberian Destreza with Ton Puey.

Complete

05

Immersion Labs Proceedings Archive

Full multi-camera proceedings from all six Immersion Labs, from The Legacy of the Blade through Bikers, Brawlers and Badasses.

Ongoing

06

Remote Sessions Archive — Riverside

Hundreds of hours of remote master and scholar interviews, recorded in 4K via Riverside, reaching practitioners outside the geographic range of any single expedition.

Active

07

Americana Field Archive

American bladecraft traditions — Bowie, Californio, and 20th-century working knife cultures, documented as a living combative tradition.

Complete

08

Americas Diaspora Series Archive

Capoeira Angola, Maculelê, and related diaspora traditions across Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Colombia. First field season complete; series ongoing.

Active

The Complete Record

Every project. Contextualized by what it contributed to the Archive.

The Archive is not a single deposit — it is the accumulated output of every expedition, every Lab, and every legacy research initiative TIF has undertaken. The list below is the complete index: what each project was, and specifically what it added to the institutional record.

Expeditions — Primary Field Documentation 7 Projects

01

The Caribbean ExpeditionTrinidad & the Eastern Caribbean

First major hoplological expedition into Caribbean stick and combat traditions in 40+ years — Sticklicking, Kalinda, Gilpin, Rope Jab.

Archive Contribution60+ hrs footage · oral histories · book manuscript

02

The Portugal ExpeditionJogo do Pau lineages

Field documentation of Portugal's living stick-fighting tradition, working directly with practising lineage holders.

Archive ContributionTechnical archive · contribution to Book of the Stick

03

The South East Asian ExpeditionThailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia

Classical and vernacular systems across four countries — Silat, Muay Boran, Krabi Krabong, and the most complete existing Bokator field record.

Archive Contribution90+ hrs footage · Bokator technical archive

04

Contra Expedition — New ZealandRongomātāne, Aotearoa

Focused engagement with the Māori combative tradition, situated within its full cultural and cosmological context.

Archive ContributionTechnical archive · oral documentation

05

Contra Expedition — ItalyItalian blades with Domenico

Single-master documentation of the Italian blade tradition — technical vocabulary and pedagogical philosophy.

Archive ContributionMaster documentation · technical archive

06

Contra Expedition — IberiaDestreza with Ton Puey

Living-lineage documentation of Spanish Destreza española, distinct from text-based reconstruction efforts.

Archive ContributionDestreza technical archive

07

Americana — American BladecraftUnited States

First systematic field record of American knife and blade culture — Bowie, Californio, and 20th-century working traditions.

Archive ContributionAmerican bladecraft archive

Immersion Labs — Comparative Inquiry 6 Projects

01

The Legacy of the BladeInaugural Lab

The founding comparative gathering — established the Lab methodology used in every subsequent inquiry.

Archive ContributionPublished proceedings · peer-reviewed articles

02

StickmataComparative stick traditions

Cross-continental inquiry into the ritual and cosmological dimension of stick combat — directly underpins the Book of the Stick.

Archive ContributionProceedings · Book of the Stick research base

03

Born of BloodOrigins in ritual & sacrifice

Comparative inquiry into blood as ritual, sacrifice, and initiation across martial traditions on three continents.

Archive ContributionProceedings · peer-reviewed articles

04

Holy Blood, Holy BladeBlade cosmology

Successor inquiry narrowing to the blade specifically — Arnis, Silat, Kalaripayattu, Krabi Krabong, European longsword.

Archive ContributionProceedings · documentary record

05

Shock and AwePsychology & physiology of combat

Comparative study of how traditions cultivate decisive action under extreme physiological and psychological stress.

Archive ContributionProceedings · comparative psychological analysis

06

Bikers, Brawlers and BadassesVernacular & folk combat culture

Examination of living folk combat traditions outside classical lineage frameworks — outlaw, working-class, and street transmission.

Archive ContributionProceedings · ethnographic archive

Legacy Research & Publication Programs 2 Projects

01

Draeger & Smith Legacy StudyOngoing archival research

Recovery and study of unpublished Draeger materials, Hoplos Society records, correspondence, and late interviews with key peers and collaborators of Donn Draeger and Robert W. Smith.

Archive ContributionManuscripts · correspondence · interview recordings

02

The Book of the StickFour-volume flagship publication

Seven years in development. 2,000+ pages, 1,000+ illustrations, 80 peer-reviewed articles, 30+ countries — drawing directly on the Caribbean, Portugal, and South East Asian expeditions and the Stickmata Lab.

Archive ContributionThe publishing record itself, plus its full research archive

Archive Access

Held for scholarship.
Open to serious inquiry.

The Immersion Archive is available to credentialed researchers, affiliated institutions, and partner organizations. If you hold materials we should know about — manuscripts, footage, correspondence — we want to hear from you.

Request Archive Access Contribute Materials

For Researchers

Credentialed scholarly access.

Affiliated researchers and institutions may request access to specific collections for study, citation, and comparative work.

For Institutions

Partnership and co-stewardship.

Museums, universities, and cultural institutions holding related material are invited to discuss collaborative preservation.

For Practitioners

Your tradition belongs in the record.

If you hold materials related to a tradition not yet documented, or wish to contribute to an existing collection, contact the Archive team directly.

The Immersion Foundation · Publications

Fieldwork, in a form
that lasts.

Every expedition and every Lab is built toward a published outcome. We do not produce a content stream. We complete arcs — books, journal articles, and films that remain useful decades after the moment of capture.

Publishing Principle

Complete arcs, not content.

A field team that does not publish is not contributing to scholarship — it is collecting souvenirs. TIF treats publication as the obligation that closes the loop on fieldwork: every hour in the field, every Lab convened, is owed a finished, citable, durable output.

That standard shapes what TIF publishes and how. Long-form work — books, peer-reviewed journal articles, documentary film — rather than episodic content calibrated for engagement metrics. Material built to be read, cited, and used by a researcher who was not in the room, possibly decades from now.

The Immersion Foundation

The Book
of the Stick

A new standard in
martial arts literature

Flagship Publication · Four Volumes

Seven years. One weapon family. Thirty-plus countries.

The most comprehensive hoplological study of a single weapon family ever published. Co-edited with Juha Vuori and Mika Harju S., the Book of the Stick draws directly on the Caribbean, Portugal, and South East Asian expeditions and the Stickmata Lab — distilling years of field documentation into a four-volume scholarly and visual record of stick traditions across the world.

4

Volumes

2,000⁺

Pages

1,000⁺

Illustrations

80

Articles

"Seven years in development. Not because the work was slow — because the work was complete. Thirty-plus countries and regions. Every tradition we could responsibly reach."

View the Book of the Stick Request Review Copy

Forthcoming

What is being written now.

Forthcoming Book

The Journey of Becoming Human

A philosophical study of the warrior path as developmental arc — drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, scholarship, and practice to examine what the world's combative traditions, taken together, reveal about the deeper structures of human development and meaning-making. Currently in manuscript.

Peer-Reviewed Scholarship

Eighty-plus articles. The scholarly spine of the work.

Contributions to martial arts studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and history journals — the record that situates TIF fieldwork within the wider scholarly conversation.

80⁺

Articles Published

30⁺

Traditions Covered

6

Labs Published From

7

Expeditions Published From

Stick Traditions of the Eastern Caribbean: A Comparative Technical Analysis

Drawing on the Caribbean Expedition — Sticklicking, Kalinda, Gilpin, Rope Jab

Caribbean Expedition

Reconstruction Under Suppression: The Field Record of Bokator

Drawing on the South East Asian Expedition

SE Asia Expedition

Blood as Initiation: A Comparative Ritual Analysis

Proceedings from Born of Blood and Holy Blood, Holy Blade

Labs 03 & 04

Destreza Living: Embodied Lineage versus Textual Reconstruction

Drawing on the Contra Expedition — Iberia / Ton Puey Destreza

Contra: Iberia

The Adrenal Architecture of Combat: A Cross-Tradition Study

Proceedings from Shock and Awe

Lab 05

Combat Knowledge Outside the Lineage Frame: Vernacular Transmission Networks

Proceedings from Bikers, Brawlers and Badasses

Lab 06

Rongomātāne and the Embodied Tradition of Tino Rangatiratanga

Drawing on the Contra Expedition — New Zealand

Contra: New Zealand

Documentary Films

The visual record, entering editorial development.

Hundreds of hours of expedition and Lab footage — captured on Blackmagic URSA 4K in the field and Riverside 4K for remote sessions — are being shaped into a series of long-form documentary films. Films are outcomes of research, not promotional material. They are not episodes. They are complete works.

The Caribbean Expedition Film

In Edit

The visual companion to Secret Fighting Arts of the Americas, drawn from 60+ hours of expedition footage.

Bokator: After the Silence

In Development

A documentary on the reconstruction of Bokator from the South East Asian Expedition footage.

Six Labs

In Development

A documentary survey drawing on the full proceedings archive of all six Immersion Labs.

Americana: Bladecraft

Planning

A film treatment of the American Bladecraft expedition — Bowie, Californio, and 20th-century working knife traditions.

For Readers & Researchers

Read the work. Cite the work. Build on the work.

TIF publications are available through standard academic and retail channels. Researchers seeking pre-publication access, review copies, or citation support should contact the publishing office directly.

Browse the Full Catalogue Request Review Access

For Journals & Editors

Submission inquiries welcome.

TIF researchers are available for journal contributions, special issues, and editorial collaboration on hoplological and comparative martial arts subjects.

For Publishers

Co-publication and translation rights.

The Book of the Stick and forthcoming titles are open to translation and co-publication discussions with serious academic and trade publishers.

For Filmmakers & Archivists

Footage licensing for scholarly and documentary use.

Select material from the Film Archive is available for licensed use in academic and documentary contexts, subject to practitioner consent terms.

The Immersion Foundation · About

An institution built
to outlast its founders.

The Immersion Foundation is a research foundation dedicated to the documentation, preservation, and publication of global combative knowledge — built to do work that matters beyond any single practitioner, teacher, or generation.

The Mission

The record that hoplology has never had.

Combat knowledge — how humans have fought, trained, and made meaning around violence — is among the least systematically documented bodies of human culture. The traditions that carry this knowledge are disappearing faster than any institution has been recording them.

The Immersion Foundation exists to change that. Through field expeditions, archive conservation, comparative Labs, and long-form publication, TIF is building the record that the 19th and 20th century pioneers of hoplology never had the institutional support to complete.

This is New Hoplology: lineage-aware, field-grounded, and future-facing. It honors Burton and Draeger not by repeating them, but by going further — into the rooms they pointed at and could not reach.

Founder & Lead Researcher

Mahipal Lunia
Sensei

Hoplologist · Author · TEDx Speaker
Explorer-in-Residence, The Immersion Foundation

Mahipal Lunia Sensei is a hoplologist, TEDx UCLA speaker, published author of six books, and Silicon Valley technologist with deep expertise in martial arts documentation, preservation, and publishing. He holds the title Explorer-in-Residence at The Immersion Foundation and is the founder and lead teacher of the Two Mountains Immersion Institute.

His approach refuses the separation between scholarship and practice. The work begins in the body — in direct contact with living masters, on the mat, in the field — and moves from there into the archive and the page. He is a practitioner first, because that is the only methodology that earns access to what most needs preserving.

His intellectual influences span Gurdjieff, Bateson, Ericsson, Damasio, and Keltner alongside classical warrior texts — a school of thought that blends warrior-scholar inquiry with peer-reviewed research. He is the author of six books, including the four-volume Book of the Stick and the forthcoming The Journey of Becoming Human, and hosts a podcast exceeding 225 episodes and millions of downloads.

6

Books Published

225⁺

Podcast Episodes

20⁺

Years Fieldwork

TEDx

UCLA Speaker

Lineage

Two decades of teaching that preceded — and stand apart from — the Foundation.

The Immersion Foundation does not operate a martial arts school. Several of our researchers, including the founder, teach independently at their own academies — personal teaching practices that predate TIF and remain organizationally separate from it. What that teaching built, over two decades of small, intimate classes, was something the Foundation depends on but does not itself provide: deep practitioner relationships, embodied teaching method, and a philosophical orientation now carried into TIF's field research.

Srinivasan Sastri Sensei

Menkyo Kaiden — full transmission lineage holder. A primary teacher in the development of the founder's own training and teaching philosophy.

Vilaire Sensei

A second key lineage figure whose teaching shaped the founder's approach to embodied transmission and practice depth.

Where Our Team Teaches Independently

Mountain View, CA Los Gatos, CA South Dakota Texas Mexico Arizona

How We Work

Method and standards, not brand adjectives.

01

Field First

We begin where people actually train and fight — in the places the knowledge still lives in bodies and communities, not in secondary literature or reconstructions.

02

Rigor in Plain Language

The work must hold up in a peer-reviewed journal and still make sense at the edge of a training mat. We refuse the false choice between scholarly depth and human clarity.

03

Complete Arcs, Not Content

We finish what we start. Every expedition has a report. Every archive has a conservation outcome. Every Lab has a published record. We complete arcs — we do not feed a stream.

04

Lineage-Aware, Future-Facing

We honor the road behind us — Burton, Draeger, and every tradition that survived to be documented — while building a record for those who come later.

05

Respect Without Worship

We approach every tradition — including our own — with deep respect and no uncritical reverence. The field advances through honest inquiry, not hagiography.

Get Involved

Three ways to be part of this work.

For Masters & Practitioners

If you carry a living tradition — particularly one rarely documented — we want to know. TIF's field teams can come to you. Your tradition belongs in the record.

Make contact →

For Scholars & Institutions

If you work in hoplology, martial arts studies, anthropology, or related fields — TIF's archive, network, and comparative methodology are available for collaboration.

Request collaboration →

For Supporters & Foundations

Fieldwork, archive conservation, and scholarly publication require sustained institutional support. If your organization shares this commitment, we invite conversation.

Support the work →

Contact

Reach the Foundation.

For field research inquiries, archive access, Lab participation, scholarly collaboration, or support conversations — all correspondence is read and considered.

Emailmahipal@mountainviewaiki.com

Webmountainviewaiki.com

A Note on Teaching

The Foundation does not run a school. Our people teach independently.

The Two Mountains Immersion Institute, where the founder and several team members teach, is a separate, independently run academy in Mountain View and Los Gatos, California — not a program of The Immersion Foundation. It is where the practice and relationships that inform TIF's field methodology were built over twenty years, but it operates under its own roof.

That academy follows a gurukul model — small classes, deep transmission, never more than 12 students — and similar independently-run lineage schools extend it into South Dakota, Texas, Mexico, and Arizona. None of these are Foundation programs; they are where our researchers happen to teach.

The Immersion Foundation · Team

The people doing
the work.

A small team, by design. Fieldwork of this kind cannot be scaled by adding headcount — it requires depth of practice, depth of relationship, and time. This is who is doing it.

Founder & Lead Researcher

Mahipal Lunia
Sensei

Hoplologist · Author · TEDx Speaker
Explorer-in-Residence, The Immersion Foundation

Mahipal Lunia Sensei founded The Immersion Foundation after two decades of teaching, fieldwork, and writing convinced him that no existing institution was positioned to do what the field of hoplology actually required. He leads the Foundation's expeditions, Labs, and publishing program, and remains an active practitioner — the methodology he insists on for every researcher who joins the work.

He is the author of six books, including the four-volume Book of the Stick, a TEDx UCLA speaker, and host of a podcast exceeding 225 episodes. He teaches independently at the Two Mountains Immersion Institute in Mountain View and Los Gatos, California — a separate academy, not a Foundation program.

6

Books

20⁺

Years Fieldwork

7

Expeditions Led

TEDx

UCLA Speaker

Research & Field Team

Researchers, archivists, and field collaborators.

TIF is led by a small standing team of researchers and operators, supported by a wider network of co-researchers, translators, and local fixers engaged per expedition.

Hana Shin

Director of Operations & Publications

Oversees the Foundation's day-to-day operations and leads the publishing program — from manuscript development through the production of the Book of the Stick series and forthcoming titles.

Kuntal Shah

Director of Archives & Media

Manages the Foundation's archival infrastructure — field footage, oral histories, and legacy materials — and oversees the media pipeline from Blackmagic URSA and Riverside capture through long-term preservation.

T.J. Obi

Scholar & Ambassador

Represents the Foundation's research and relationships with practitioner communities and partner institutions, and contributes to TIF's comparative scholarship.

Juha Vuori

Scholar & European Branch Operations

Co-editor of the Book of the Stick and lead for TIF's research and field relationships across Europe, including the Portugal Expedition and the Contra Expeditions in Italy and Iberia.

Mika Harju-S.

Scholar

Co-editor of the Book of the Stick and contributing researcher to TIF's comparative hoplological scholarship.

Elders

TIF's elders are not ceremonial. Each brings a specific and irreplaceable domain of knowledge — a lineage held, a tradition carried — that shapes how the Foundation approaches its research. Their counsel is particular, not general.

Michael Belzer

Elder, Hoplology Projects

Domain: Donn F. Draeger, Richard Hayes, and Japan. Carries direct knowledge of the Draeger methodological lineage and the classical Japanese and broader Asian traditions that formed the field's foundation.

James A. Keating

Elder, Hoplology Projects

Domain: Richard F. Burton, swords, and global perspective. Brings a broad comparative view of blade traditions and their historical and philosophical dimensions, rooted in Burton's foundational hoplological frame.

Srinivasan Sastri

Elder, Hoplology Projects

Domain: Principles and one's own way. Menkyo Kaiden lineage holder whose teaching shaped the founder's training philosophy. His counsel to the Foundation concerns the deep principles of practice, transmission, and what it means to develop a genuine personal path.

Jerry Walker

Elder, Polynesian Projects

Domain: Polynesian combative traditions. Guides TIF's work in the Pacific — the traditions, lineages, and field relationships that make serious documentation of Polynesian martial heritage possible.

How the Team Works

Small by design. Deep by necessity.

Fieldwork of this kind does not scale through headcount. It scales through depth — of practice, of relationship, and of time spent earning trust before a camera is ever raised.

Practitioners First

Every researcher who conducts field interviews trains in at least one tradition seriously. Access is earned through practice, not credentials alone.

Long Relationships

Expedition teams return to the same communities across multiple visits. Trust is not assumed; it is built over years, not a single shoot.

Named Contribution

Every researcher, translator, and collaborator is credited in the published output their work supported — the Archive does not anonymize labor.

If this work matters to you, there is a place for serious people in it.

TIF is not hiring at scale. It is occasionally looking for the right person — a researcher, a translator, a field producer — for a specific expedition or Lab.

Get in Touch →

The Public Labs

Once-in-a-lifetime learning laboratories

The Immersion Labs bring rare teachers, guarded arts, and working practitioners into one place for focused, field-grounded study.

Explore the Immersion Labs

Meet the ambassadors, explore the sessions, and discover the experiences that shaped each Lab.

2018

Legacy Of The Blade

The first Immersion Lab: a no-frills laboratory for exploring blade concepts from around the world.

2019

Stickmata

A global stick-fighting lab built around pathbreaking sessions, exquisite collaboration, and deep immersive learning.

2020

Born Of Blood

A three-day exploration of battlefield and bloodline arts from Southeast Asia, Polynesia, the Caribbean, and beyond.

2023

Holy Blood Holy Blade

A Western blade-focused journey across continents, guarded arts, and battle-tested edged-weapon strategies.

2023

Shock and Awe

A lab on speed: from pre-fight perception to post-victory control, across arts, weapons, and countries.

2024

Brawlers and Badasses

When there is chaos and deep violence all around, this lab asks what one is to do and extracts principles from very different sources.

2018

Legacy Of The Blade

Legacy Of The Blade event details, panel 3

2018 - Testimonials

"Crafty Dog" Marc Denny

"In all my years in martial arts I have never seen anything quite like the depth and breadth of the people that The Immersion Labs bring together."

"Crafty Dog" Marc Denny

Rebuilding hoplologyfor the 21st century.

Field Team

Archive

Publishing House

Seven field investigations

A record built to outlast us

The Book of the Stick, and what follows it

Six comparative inquiries

The map is still being drawn.

A form of human knowledgeis disappearing. Not becoming historical. Becoming irrecoverable.

Historical

Irrecoverable

This is not nostalgia for lost arts. It is a precise description of how a specific class of human knowledge ceases to exist.

Historical

Irrecoverable

Every civilization recognized the problem. None solved it permanently.

The systematic study of human combative culture has been attempted seriously three times. Each attempt went further than the last. None yet built the institution the field requires.

Burton openeda door.

Draeger builta corridor.

Immersion mapsthe rooms theydid not reach.

He gave the field its name, its ambition — and its first great structural limitation.

He proved the method. He mapped Japan. He pointed at everything else and said: this still needs doing.

The traditions did not pause while the field went quiet.

Every existing institution addresses part of this problem. None was designed to hold all the required capacities at once.

Museums & Cultural Collections

Academic Martial Arts Studies

Martial Arts Schools & Federations

Commercial Publishers

The Wider Hoplology Community

The Immersion Foundation

Burton named it.Draeger advanced it.Immersion isone attempt to carry it further.

We go wherethe knowledgestill lives.

Expeditions go to the source. Labs interrogate what the source reveals.

Seven field investigations.Three continents. One methodology.

Caribbean Basin

The Caribbean Expedition

Portugal

The Portugal Expedition

Southeast Asia

The South East Asian Expedition

Focused engagements with specific masters and traditions.

New ZealandAotearoa

Contra Expedition — New Zealand / Rongomātāne

Italy

Contra Expedition — Italian Blades with Domenico

Iberia

Contra Expedition — Iberia / Ton Puey Destreza

United States

Americana — American Bladecraft

Six comparative inquiries.One question each. All published.

The Legacy of the Blade

Stickmata

Born of Blood

Holy Blood, Holy Blade

Shock and Awe

Bikers, Brawlersand Badasses

The next expeditionand the next Labare being planned now.

If you carry a tradition that has not been adequately documented.

If your work could benefit from field documentation or comparative access.

If your institution is committed to the preservation of cultural knowledge.

We preserve whatwould otherwisedisappear.

We preserve living knowledge — not only objects.

Two recording environments. One professional standard.

Audio

Storage

Metadata

Consent & Context

What is being archived

Expedition & Lab Footage

Interviews & Testimony

Notation & Analysis

Inherited & Recovered Records

The named collections, by status.

Caribbean Field Archive

Portugal Field Archive

Southeast Asia Field Archive

Contra Expeditions Archive

Immersion Labs Proceedings Archive

Remote Sessions Archive — Riverside

Americana Field Archive

Rebuilding hoplology
for the 21st century.

A form of human knowledge
is disappearing.
Not becoming historical.
Becoming irrecoverable.

Burton opened
a door.

Draeger built
a corridor.

Immersion maps
the rooms they
did not reach.

Burton named it.
Draeger advanced it.
Immersion is
one attempt to carry it further.

We go where
the knowledge
still lives.

Seven field investigations.
Three continents. One methodology.

New Zealand
Aotearoa

Six comparative inquiries.
One question each. All published.

Bikers, Brawlers
and Badasses

The next expedition
and the next Lab
are being planned now.

We preserve what
would otherwise
disappear.

Held for scholarship.
Open to serious inquiry.

Fieldwork, in a form
that lasts.

The Book
of the Stick

An institution built
to outlast its founders.

Mahipal Lunia
Sensei

The people doing
the work.

Mahipal Lunia
Sensei