Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

More footnoting. Peter Vail in his 1998 dissertation sketching out a socio-religious basis for gambling, and Muay Thai gambling in particular, as an aspect of masculinity and charisma. See also this piece on Peter Vail's comparison of Muay Thai Masculinity to the Monk and the Nakleng (gangster): Thai Masculinity: Postioning Nak Muay Between Monkhood and Nak Leng – Peter Vail

One of the most confused aspects of Western genuine interest in Thailand's Muay Thai is the invisibility of its social structure, upon which some of our fondest perceptions and values of it as a "traditional" and respect-driven art are founded. Because it takes passing out of tourist mode to see these things they remain opaque. (One can be in a tourist mode for a very long time in Thailand, enjoying the qualities of is culture as they are directed toward Westerners as part of its economy - an aspect of its centuries old culture of exchange and affinity for international trade and its peoples.). If one does not enter into substantive, stakeholder relations which usually involve fluently learning to speak the language (I have not, but my wife has), these things will remain hidden even to those that know Thailand well. It has been called, perhaps incorrectly, a "latent caste system". Thailand's is a patronage culture that is quiet strongly hierarchical - often in ways that are unseen to the foreigner in Muay Thai gyms - that carries with it vestigial forms of feudal-like relationships (the Sakdina system) that once involved very widespread slavery, indentured worker ethnicities, classes and networks of debt (both financial and social), much of those power relations now expressed in obligations. Westerners just do not - usually - see this web of shifting high vs low struggles, as we move within the commercial outward-facing layer that floats above it. In terms of Muay Thai, between these two layers - the inward-facing, rich, traditional patronage (though ethically problematic) historical layer AND the capitalist, commerce and exchange-driven, outward-facing layer - have developed fighter contract laws. It's safe to say that before these contract laws, I believe codified in the 1999 Boxing Act due to abuses, these legal powers would have been enforced by custom, its ethical norms and local political powers. There was social law before there was contract law. Aside from these larger societal hierarchies, there is also a history of Muay Thai fighters growing up in kaimuay camps that operate almost as orphanages (without the death of parents), or houses of care for youth into which young fighters are given over, very much like informal adoption. This can be seen in the light of both vestigial Thai social caste & its financial indenture (this is a good lecture on the history of cultures of indentured servitude, family as value & debt ), and the Thai custom of young boys entering a temple to become novice monks, granting spiritual merit to their parents. These camps can be understood as parallel families, with the heads of them seen as a father-like. Young fighters would be raised together, disciplined, given values (ideally, values reflected in Muay Thai itself), such that the larger hierarchies that organize the country are expressed more personally, in forms of obligation and debt placed upon both the raised fighter and also, importantly, the authorities in the gym. One has to be a good parent, a good benefactor, as well as a good son. Thai fighter contract law is meant to at bare bones reflect these deeper social obligations. It's enough to say that these are the social norms that govern Thailand's Muay Thai gyms, as they exist for Thais. And, these norms are difficult to map onto Western sensibilities as we might run into them. We come to Thailand...and to Thailand's gyms almost at the acme of Western freedom. Many come with the liberty of relative wealth, sometimes long term vacationers even with great wealth, entering a (semi) "traditional" culture with extraordinary autonomy. We often have choices outside of those found even in one's native country. Famously, older men find young, hot "pseudo-relationship" girlfriends well beyond their reach. Adults explore projects of masculinity, or self-development not available back home. For many the constrictures of the mores of their own cultures no longer seem to apply. When we go to this Thai gym or that, we are doing so out of an extreme sense of choice. We are variously versions of the "customer". We've learned by rote, "The customer is always right". When people come to Thailand to become a fighter, or an "authentic fighter", the longer they stay and the further they pass toward that (supposed) authenticity, they are entering into an invisible landscape of social attachments, submissions & debts. If you "really want to be 'treated like a Thai', this is a world of acute and quite rigid social hierarchies, one in which the freedom & liberties that may have motivated you are quite alien. What complicates this matter, is that this rigidity is the source of the traditional values which draws so many from around to the world to Thailand in the first place. If you were really "treated like a Thai", perhaps especially as a woman, you would probably find yourself quite disempowered, lacking in choice, and subject only to a hoped-for beneficence from those few you are obligated to and define your horizon of choice. Below is an excerpt from Lynne Miller's Fighting for Success, a book telling of her travails and lessons in owning the Sor. Sumalee Gym as a foreign woman. This passage is the most revealing story I've found about the consequences of these obligations, and their legal form, for the Thai fighter. The anecdote of the disorienting photo op meet is exemplar. While extreme in this case, the general form of obligations of what is going on here is omnipresent in Thai gyms...for Thais. It isn't just the contractual bounds, its the hierarchy, obligation, social debt, and family-like authorities upon which the contract law is founded. The story that she tells is of her own frustrations to resolve this matter in a way that seems quite equitable, fair to our sensibilities. Our Western idea of labor and its value. But, what is also occurring here is that, aside from claimed previous failures of care, there was a deep, face-losing breech of obligation when the fighter fled just before a big fight, and that there was no real reasonable financial "repair" for this loss of face. This is because beneath the commerce of fighting is still a very strong hierarchical social form, within which one's aura of authority is always being contested. This is social capital, as Bourdieu would say. It's a different economy. Thailand's Muay Thai is a form of social agonism, more than it is even an agonism of the ring. When you understand this, one might come to realize just how much of an anathema it is for middle class or lower-middle class Westerners to come from liberties and ideals of self-empowerment to Thailand to become "just like a Thai fighter". In some ways this would be like dreaming to become a janitor in a business. In some ways it is very much NOT like this as it can be imbued with traditional values...but in terms of social power and the ladder of authorities and how the work of training and fighting is construed, it is like this. This is something that is quite misunderstood. Even when Westerners, increasingly, become padmen in Thai gyms, imagining that they have achieved some kind of authenticity promotion of "coach", it is much more comparable to becoming a low-value (often free) worker, someone who pumps out rounds, not far from someone who sweeps the gym or works horse stables leading horse to pasture...in terms of social worth. When you come to a relatively "Thai" style gym as an adult novice aiming to perhaps become a fighter, you are doing this as a customer attempting to map onto a 10 year old Thai boy beginner who may very well become contractually owned by the gym, and socially obligated to its owner for life. These are very different, almost antithetical worlds. This is the fundamental tension between the beauties of Thai traditional Muay Thai culture, which carry very meaningful values, and its largely invisible, sometimes cruel and uncaring, social constriction. If you don't see the "ladder", and you only see "people", you aren't really seeing Thailand.

Here is a 6 minute audio wherein a I phrase the argument speaking in terms of Thailand's Muay Femeu and Spinoza's Ethics.

Leaving aside the literary for a moment, the relationship between "techniques" and style (& signature) is a meaningful one to explore, especially for the non-Thai who admires the sport and wishes to achieve proficiency, or even mastery. Mostly for pedagogic reasons (that is, acute differences in training methods, along with a culture & subjectivity of training, a sociological thread), the West and parts of Asia tend to focus on "technical" knowledge, often with a biomechanical emphasis. A great deal of emphasis is put on learning to some precision the shape of the Thai kick or its elbow, it's various executions, in part because visually so much of Thailand's Muay Thai has appeared so visually clean (see: Precision – A Basic Motivation Mistake in Some Western Training). Because much of the visual inspiration for foreign learned techniques often come from quite elevated examples of style and signature, the biomechanical emphasis enters just on the wrong level. The techniques displayed are already matured and expressed in stylistics. (It would be like trying to learn Latin or French word influences as found in Nabakov's English texts.) In the real of stylistics, timing & tempo, indeed musicality are the main drivers of efficacy. Instead, Thais learn much more foundational techniques - with far greater variance, and much less "correction" - principally organized around being at ease, tamachat, natural. The techne (τέχνη), the mechanics, that ground stylistics, are quite basic, and are only developmentally deployed in the service of style (& signature), as it serves to perform dominance in fights. The advanced, expressive nature of Thai technique is already woven into the time and tempo of stylistics. This is one reason why the Muay Thai Library project involves hour long, unedited training documentation, so that the style itself is made evident - something that can even have roots in a fighter's personality and disposition. These techne are already within a poiesis (ποίησις), a making, a becoming. Key to unlocking these basic forms is the priority of balance and ease (not biomechanical imitations of the delivery of forces), because balance and ease allow their creative use in stylistics.

To help in greater theoretical discussion, The Magician's Doubt's parsing of signature from style. In my discussion above the uses of a fighter's style perhaps would be best understood as a blending of both Michael Wood's "style" and "signature" below:

When we spoke to them during our filming they at first said that they were closed to non-Thais, but a little while later they changed their mind and said they were open to it, but that if you trained there you could not come and go, ie, you would have to treat it like a camp, and train in the restricted Thai fashion. I think this would be very difficult to manage if you did not speak Thai, to be honest about it. Most western friendly Thai gyms have enough English to get by, but Chor Hapayak is very, very Thai, at least as we encountered it. Also of note, believe that Wangchannoi is no longer a trainer there, though Bangsaen Tor. Kotsan (who is also in the Muay Thai Library) still is.

Further afield, here is a discussion of Thailand's Muay Thai in terms of the Aesthetics of Deleuze, especially as it relates to the Western student/fighter in Thailand. This also is a grasping of aesthetics as it is distinguished from ethics, and addresses the idea of Living One's Life as a Work of Art.

This thesis of the aesthetic is perhaps most telling in its (very rare) failure, in the two losses of Samart Payakaroon, the acknowledged greatest fighter of Thailand's Muay Thai. Below are the two fights, he is not at his peak as a fighter in both cases. Unfortunately there is no preserved video from his prime, when he was a regular stadium fighter before he left for boxing. Both of these fights are interesting from the aesthetic question, for you get to see Samart shift into aesthetic attempts to take flight over difficulties...in these cases to have such a flight fail. In the negative you can imagine how such styles must have operated at this time of true greatness, of which we only have eye-witness report: Dieselnoi vs Samart Wangchannoi vs Samart In the negative you can also see Karuhat's failed attempt to climb to victory using the aesthetics of his style in his 3rd fight vs Wangchannoi (a fight he to this day felt like he won), or his early fight vs Hippy. In these negative examples you can see the role of style, as it doesn't-quite-cross the chasm. Karuhat vs Wangchannoi After two losses to Wangchannoi Karuhat really set his mind to winning the third fight vs the much bigger Wangchannoi. You can visibly see Karuhat style climbing on him, seemingly to real effect, but the judges ruled it just wasn't enough. And Karuhat vs Hippy This fight is quite extraordinary, very early in Karuhat's career before he fully matured, in that Karuhat seeks to style climb on Hippy, and Hippy style climbs right back at him. What I mean by "style climb" in the above are the ways in which Thailand's traditional Muay Thai rewards stylistic displays of being above or beyond the fight, aspects of which are culturally coded (for instance certain body positions (ruup), or qualitative tempos, or musicalities. You can read about the role of dominance in the traditional form of the sport here: The Essence of Muay Thai: 6 Core Aspects Which Make it What it Is. More obviously fighters which employ stylistics are of the more Muay Femeu (technical, artful) variety, though there are distinct stylistics to its counterpart, Muay Khao.

This beautiful quote from The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction uncovers a powerful observation on the function of style for an artist. What is in question is the way in which Nabokov comes to what really are aporias - difficult crossings - in his writing, discussions of the roots of knowledge or of ethics. It is the particular way in which Nabokov can dive down into some of the most beautiful writing in the English language, only to then surface into parodies of literary styles, or even almost parody of himself. The quote places the leverage point at the level of the difficulty of the answer. What this opens up is a separable understanding of the uses of aesthetics, of style, itself. The way in which style can be used to overcome doubts, or certain impassible gaps, an aesthetic solution to the next moments of living. It is as if one's style, if fully invested, can briefly give you wings to cross short chasms until you can land on the other side, when the style becomes more grounded, has more footing. What comes to mind, if we allow ourselves to leave literature and enter the traditional Muay Thai ring is the fighting style of Karuhat Sor. Supawan, who may be the greatest stylist of Thai history. What the stylistics of traditional Muay Thai can teach us of the pragmatic role of style is the very firm-footed nature of these brief flights into personalized aesthetics. When you study Karuhat's fights - you can find 32 of them here - especially as he matures as a fighter, you can locate very contested sections of fights where he will almost inexplicably pass into style. He may or may not be scoring, but it is the weightlessness of his ascent, at those very times that feel the most difficult, most uncrossable, that displays the power of style. It is as if, when you do not know what is next, what can be done, you pass into style, almost as if humming the bars of a song you have forgotten the words to, passing into pure melody. And, once alighting on the other side, you return again to the lyrics. Karuhat's style has many components, techniques, pieces, bars. His side shuffle along the rope, the interruptive trip-out, the snake-charmer's sway, the delay on an already released kick, the syncopated swing step, short popping crosses or hooks, all techniques in a deepseated personal melody. And at a time of great crisis he can pass into style alone. This Muay Thai Scholar video will give you some reference to elements of Karuhat's Style: While I would consider Karuhat Thailand's greatest stylist, I believe this aesthetic rule, the pragmatism of Style can be found throughout the legendary fighters of Thailand's Golden Age: from Samson's drumming dern, smothering tempos, to Samart's deer-like escapes, nonchalance and unexpected power; from Dieselnoi's early round, wading-in, spider-like defensive rhythms, to Wangchannoi's stubborn heavy hand pressures. Samart, widely considered the GOAT of the sport is a great case in point, himself a great stylist. In fact I believe you can see this aspect of aesthetics in the face of difficulty especially in his two notable loses, against Dieselnoi and Wangchannoi, where you can if you watch closely his appeal to style, which does not quite carry him over - a proof in the negative. What is most interesting about Thailand's Muay Thai is that while it is one of the more violent sports in the world, it simultaneously is an art, and this dimension of aesthetics is what shows itself in the efficacy of performance. Style, in brief wing-beats, can carry you across brief chasms of doubt, all the while remaining within the physically constrained grounds of an actual fight, full of real material dangers. The transcendent nature of Thailand's Muay Thai, as an art, resides in this aesthetic dimension, which made its Golden Age fighters the best fighters in the world. As Muay Thai changes, coming under the influence of more commercial, more casual (tourism driven) demands, it is losing its aesthetic dimension. Thai fighters less and less have recourse to individual styles which can guide them across difficulties. Vestigial aspects of Thai aesthetics still remain in the 5th round retreat, the emphasis on defense, the reward of balance, but fewer and fewer fighters have fully developed, personalized style - something also seen in the Thai principle of sanae (charm). The recourse to "techniques" (in particular increasingly memorized combinations), of which styles are more ideally composed, to carry one through difficulties, the dumbing down of styles into practiced singular strikes, is progressively sinking the sport into less expressive states, a movement which ultimately will rob it of its larger meaning and value to the world...its art. Muay Thai is in a certain sense, the literature of fighting. This opens up important questions as to the relationship between the study of techniques, and the development of styles. The Magician's Doubts quote at top also carries another quality of style, which is that when the answer is easy style can become simply "signature", almost a kind of excess. We see this in actors, perhaps like Di Nero whose inimical style in youth became caricature in older age, how a fighter like Saenchai, whose subtle effects carried him through the stadium ranks, then became pure signature and show vs a pool of requisite non-Thais on Thai Fight, according to his late maturity. At its most ideal a fighter's style in a fight would perhaps weave between these poles, ascending to style during a fight's greatest impasses (witness Ali's rope-a-dope or late-rounds shuffle), but also the signing of fights, in during its easier stretches, in displays of style, the author's signature. And in between these poles, the boots-on-the-ground fighting, by which leads are fashioned or protected, a pragmatism of two bodies in conflict caught in the context of twin aesthetic freedoms.

You can look through my various articles which sometimes focuses on this: https://8limbsus.com/muay-thai-forum/forum/23-kevins-corner-muay-thai-philosophy-ethics/ especially the article on Muay Thai as a Rite. The general thought is that Thailand's traditional Muay Thai offers the world an important understanding of self-control in an era which is increasingly oriented towards abject violence for entertainment. There are also arguments which connect Muay Thai to environmental concerns.

There is no video keeping. Patrons get access to the Library, according to tier. $10 subscription will give you access to the entire 140+ video Library, and everything else published (like technique vlogs, podcasts, etc), as long as you are a patron. $1 gives you access to the last 5 sessions we've published, but these keep changing. The truth is that we don't update the tiers very quickly, so right now the $1 tier has the last 11 sessions we've published. But once updated it will be only the 5 most recent. You can see the tiers and their sessions always here, in the Table of Contents: https://www.patreon.com/posts/muay-thai-uncut-7058199

Just very briefly I want to take up one of the most interesting aspects of the fighting art of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, an aspect that really cues for me how I watch fights and weigh the skills of fighters. Managing distance. Many people watch "strikes" and look for "points", but there is an under-fabric to strikes, a kind of landscape of them, no less than how a topography will influence how a battle is fought between armies. Even the most practiced strikes rise and fall to opportunity, and in Muay Thai a significant determination of opportunity is distance. Above is a quick edit of Sylvie's last fight up in Buriram, bringing out all the significant moments of engagement, telling the story in about a minute. (The full fight should be up in a few weeks with Sylvie's commentary, as usual.) I'm going to start with Entertainment Muay Thai as presenting an negative can often be the best way to bring out a positive. Entertainment Muay Thai (and there are many versions of it, so we have to be very broad here), is largely principled by eliminating the importance of distance. What is sought, again being very broad, is a more or less continuous trading in the pocket. The quest is for an easy to follow, by the casual eye, "action". Everything is about the distance of the pocket. Setting up outside of the pocket can be regarded as anti-action (so, if you do, you should regularly charge into the pocket...and trade). And fighting through the pocket, to clinch range, is also devalued by very quick clinch breaks, scoring biases (changing traditional aesthetics). Clinch, which historically is featured in some of the most technical fighting of the sport, in Entertainment Muay Thai is more and more understood as a stall of the main goal. Pocket trading. Much of the art of Muay Thai is actually organized around all those distances that border "the pocket", controlling distance through length, or through grappling. In this fight Sylvie is giving up between 8-10 kgs (perhaps more than 20% of her body weight). Now, imagine it being fought under Entertainment aesthetics. What would it be if she just stood in the pocket, bit down, and just traded over and over with Phetnamwan? Would there be any point of such a fight? Yet, as the Golden Age legend Hippy Singmanee once said when criticizing hyper-aggressive, pocket-trading Entertainment Muay Thai, "Muay Thai is the art where small can beat big." Hippy was one of the most renown undersized fighters of the Golden Era. He knows of what he speaks. This fight, in the broad brush, illustrates some of that. More and more we've come to realize that as traditional Muay Thai evaporates slowly from the urban stadia, the only traditional Muay Thai still being regularly fought is in the provinces of the country. It is there that fights are scored in keeping with the art, and fighters retain the all around, multi-distance skills that make that art happen. Clinch is allowed to unfold. Narrative fight arcs are told as principle to scoring. Ryan, a knowledgeable commenter on Twitter and a very good writer on the sport, right away noticed how the ref let clinch flow. You can see some of our discussion there. I recall a conversation I overheard when attending the funeral of the legend Namkabuan in Nongki. It was the passing of one of the greatest who ever fought. During the day-before cremation a casual conversation arose between other legends of the sport, and very experienced news reporters, people who had been a part of it for decades. One of them insisted, Muay Thai no longer existed in Thailand. Others knowingly nodded their heads. But a Muay Siam reporter objected. "No...it still lives in the provinces." And the others agreed. It still was there. We in the English speaking world tend to think the substance of something is what has been presented to us. The Muay Thai of Bangkok is the real Muay Thai of Thailand because that is what we see...and, historically, many decades ago, it did represent the highest skills of the country. But what largely remains unseen is that more and more of the sport is being designed for our eyes. It is less and less for Thais, and more and more for "us", so we can become quite disconnected from what is real and authentic in a cultural, and even efficacy sense. There rhythms and values of provincial Muay Thai, as it is fought, coached and reffed, are part of the rich authenticity of the sport which falls into the shadows when we just look at what is being shown to "us". This fight, how it is fought, shows "the art of where small can beat big", and it shows why. It's through the control of distance. If you are small you just cannot stand at range. You either have to explore the bubble outside of the pocket, too far, or at its edges, and fight your way in to score...or, you collapse the pocket, smother the strikes, and possess the skill to control a much larger bodied opponent. Clinch, historically, is kryptonite to the striker. Muay Maat vs Muay Khao battles are legendary in the sport. Classic. Who is going to impose the distance which is best for them? It's a battle of distances. And, for this reason, Muay Maat fighters of the past were not experts in trading in the pocket. They were experts in managing clinch fighters, or even high level clinch fighters themselves...and they were experts at hunting down evasive femeu counterfighters as well. Muay Maat fighters were strong. They had to have so many tools in their tool box. In versions of the sport where both fighters are forced to "stand and bang" repeatedly, we have been taken quite far from the glories of Thailand's Muay Thai fighters, and that is because Muay Thai is an art of distance control. This goes to a deeper point about the sport. It isn't really a "sport" in the International, rationalist idea of a sport. Muay Thai is culture. It is Thai culture. Thousands and thousands of fights occur on temple grounds, far from Western eyes. It has grown up within the culture, but also expressive of that culture. And it is a culture unto itself. The more we try to extract from this rich fabric some kind of abstract "rule set" and "collection of techniques" that can be used in other cultures, expressing their values, favoring their fighters, the more we lose the complex art of what Muay Thai is...and in the bigger sense move away from the value it has to the entire world. It's value is that it has a very highly developed perspective on distance management and on aggression. It has lessons upon lessons to teach in techniques of control and fight winning, woven into the DNA of its traditional aesthetics. And these techniques embody the values of the culture. It's all of one cloth. Sylvie has chosen the path less traveled. She's fought like no other Westerner in history (a record 271 times as a pro), and she has devoted herself to the lessor style, the art of Muay Khao and clinch fighting. There are very, very few women, even Thai women, who have seriously developed this branch of the art in the way that she has. And she's done it as a 100 lb fighter, taking on great size disparities as she fights. Because Muay Thai is "the art where small can beat big" there is a long tradition of great, dominant fighters fighting top fighters well above their weight, and developing their in style the capacity to beat them. Fighting up is Muay Thai. Sylvie's entire quest has been to value what may not even be commercially valued at this time, the aspects of the art which point to its greater meaning & capacity. The narrative of scoring, the control of distance, the management of striking through clinch, in the heritage of what it has been. I'm not saying that this is the only way to fight, or that Entertainment Muay Thai has no value for the art and sport. It's not, and it does. But, we should also be mindful of the completeness and complexity of Muay Thai, and the ways that those qualities can be put at risk, as the desire to internationalize it and foreign values become more and more part of its purpose. If we love what we discover when we come to Thailand, we should fight to preserve and embrace the roots of Muay Thai, and the honored aspects of the culture/s which produced it. photos: Khaendong, Buriram, Thailand (temple grounds)

Here's a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BaanRambaaGym and another Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063547570660 and Rambaa's personal Facebook page (which is the most active): https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089593217773

If you are drawn to a big gyms then Fairtex (or Venom) might be your best bet. I'd just throw out there the idea of visiting Rambaa's gym if you'd like a unique experience. There's no other gym that's like it. First of all its one of the last kaimuay in Pattaya, a camp full of local Thai kids training for free, but they also have big fighters, like Peungluang who is undefeated on ONE. A few Westerners train there. It's a small gym, but it even has an MMA cage. Rambaa was Thailand's first MMA World Champion. It's just full of so many contradictions, and Rambaa himself is a great trainer, and has a wonderful fight style. I'm just adding this, in case you'd enjoy something that is unique. Here is an album of the photographs I took there not long ago: https://www.behance.net/gallery/166275057/The-Kaimuay

This is the man who modernized Muay Thai, here Prince Vajiravudh. He would become King of Siam in 1910. Educated in British schools (attended Sandhurst & Oxford), he led the infusion of Muay Thai with the British Boxing example, part of a larger International modernizing movement.