About

Our History

The Immersion Foundation (TIF; previously known as The Immersion Labs FoundationTM, or ILF) was founded in 2017 with the mission of reviving the study of hoplology , or the study of human combat. Its founder, Mahipal Lunia, cites three key influences that came together to inspire the conception of the Foundation:

1. As a life-long student of several rare forms of martial arts, he had a vision for saving those arts and passing them on to posterity. One of his teachers, however, advised him that he should save all the arts, not just his own, and this was a major turning point in his thinking and orientation for his life’s work.

2. As a child, he had been fascinated by movies like Indiana Jones and The Librarian , and stories about finding and saving hidden treasures. He had adored explorers like Sir Richard Francis Burton and Donn F. Draeger (both credited as pioneers of the field of hoplology), and wanted to follow in their footsteps to find and save hidden knowledge around the world.

3. As a teacher of martial arts, he would often bring his students to train with some of his own teachers or other masters. After one particular seminar with the much respected Guro James Keating, he and his students formulated the initial idea for an immersive, global martial arts seminar series— The Immersion Labs .

So, in 2018, Legacy of the Blade was launched, bringing together Ambassadors (teachers, masters, and/or representatives) of 12 different blade traditions from around the world for a 3-day intensive seminar. In the subsequent years, Stickmata (2019) and Born of Blood (2020) were hosted with success, exploring the stick traditions of the world and the arts of Southeast Asia / the Pacific Islands, respectively.

Alongside the Immersion Labs, the Foundation has expanded its work over the years to include several international expeditions, documentary production, peer-reviewed publications, podcasts and interviews, and numerous archival projects with Ambassadors of various arts from around the world.

Initiatives

The Immersion Foundation’s mission is to rekindle the fire of hoplology that was once lit by Sir Richard Burton and sustained by Donn Draeger through parts of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Now in the 21st century, the Foundation seeks to not only follow in the footsteps of these giants, but to vastly expand and transform the very way hoplology can be done— to create a “New Hoplology”—by utilizing new technologies and synthesizing exciting, creative modes of expression to adapt to an ever-changing world.

Aims

• Preserve, recover, and promote disappearing and/or little-known martial art traditions around the world.

• Expand shared hoplological knowledge with scientific rigor and through living, embodied experience. Our methods are:

• Interdisciplinary —bringing together martial artists, scholars, musicians, storytellers, etc. to examine arts and their cultural contexts in a holistic way;

• Comprehensive —extracting concepts and principles rather than just fighting techniques, and examining common threads across multiple arts;

• Immersive —diving deep into studying and understanding each art and its environment through sustained collaboration with its practitioners.

• Explore the relationship between the body, movement, and neural mechanisms as it relates to the goals of and the environments in which different arts developed, and establish the discipline of Neuro-HoplologyTM .

• Nurture a lively community of collaborators across disciplines and professions, and inspire the next generation to continue the legacy of hopological exploration and innovation.