Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

I think CTE is going to go way up, due to the influence of these promotions. Way up. A few reasons why: 1. Defensive excellence is being downgraded in terms of score, so fighters literally will not learn it. 2. There is going to be a lot more head hunting, which isn't the traditional form of fighting. 3. Thais learn to fight at a younger age. To some degree this is mitigated by the strong emphasis on control and defense oriented scoring, the lack of head hunting. But put 1 and 2 together, and bring it to younger fighters, its going to be epidemic. It's really hard to speak now about "Muay Thai" because even within 5 years the sport has significantly changed, and maybe more than once. Fighter skills have devolved, generally, over the past 15-20 years, but now with Entertainment Muay Thai driving the sport you are seeing very different fighting skill sets (less fluent). And, one imagines its just going to get worse, unless there is a backlash in Thailand. Traditionally though, the knockout wasn't chased in the sport, and the defensive awareness and boxing acumen of most fighters kept everyone pretty safe. We've met and known many, many high fight veterans and legends of the sport and almost none of them exhibit obvious signs of CTE. And most of those that do, that I've thought to take note of, have also fought in other combat sports after their career.

You might find this Thai training vocabulary list by Sylvie also helpful: https://8limbsus.com/muay-thai-thailand/muay-thai-vocabulary-understanding-thai-trainer

These are really great observations. Perfectly said.

Nice idea. I'm not sure how many there will be, but here is Chatchai Sasakul vs Manny Pacquiao. Manny wins his very first world title:

I think that with first fights its important to just lower expectations. They are a mental blur. It will be very hard to execute what you feel you know, and because first time fighters tend to hold their breath under the stress they gas out quicker than they think they should or realize. I think just get your cardio up to give you a bit of a buffer, spar as much as you can with an emphasis on relaxation, and go into the fight expecting it to be more out of your control than you think. If you can relax, have solid defense, and enjoy the first fight experience, you've already won. The whole point of first fights is so you can get to your second fight.

Love your description of Rambaa. It's great. @Nightshade

Entertainment Muay Thai, in Thailand, are the 3-round fight formats that change the rules and style of fighting, eliminating clinch and strongly discouraging retreating, defensive fighting. In Thailand, it began with MAX Muay Thai. As the original promoter explained, the new ruleset was designed to help Western fighters win vs Thais, with an unspoken sense that it was kind of a reversal of Thai Fight (which at the time was the most popular MT show on television, a promotion which was designed to highlight Thai greatness, often with lopsided matchups. The Entertainment model was designed to do the opposite. The ruleset was anti-Thai, and for the first few years (at least) it was regular to see mismatches that favored Western fighters, vs lower level Thais. It was designed for Westerners to win, or at least win more frequently. The Channel 8 fights were a spin off of the MAX promotion, with their own differences, but also within the Entertainment model. And since then the Entertainment model has taken hold across Thailand, at least in areas promoting tourism. The Entertainment model, I believe, was also used to evade the control of the Sport Authority of Thailand. These technically were not "Muay Thai fights", they were "shows" for entertainment, so could produce a non-Muay Thai mode of entertainment. ONE also has followed this model of changing Muay Thai, in a way that favors non-Thai fighters, I suspect so Chatri could produce non-Thai "Muay Thai" champions which are helpful for his marketing his promotion to the West. The ONE version of Entertainment Muay Thai has now been brought to Lumpinee Stadium, which no longer is a National Stadium (in the old sense) and which no longer, for the most part, hosts actual "Muay Thai" fights in the traditional sense.

Sorry, I didn't see this post. I actually think Dieselnoi knees would be somewhat effective in a K1 ruleset, in that they aren't overly dependent on the clinch lock, and a lot of them come in space. Yes, he locks to finish fights, but a great of what he's doing is in space, and having to do with length. But, in practical terms, it really would depend on how heavily knees are scored by judges, and how dynamic you could become with them. His technical level was incredibly high, just in terms of power, precision & drive.

Scott finally takes up the dynamics of regular slave raiding. He is in particular interested in the littoral-edge between the valley and hills, but his logic seems quite probable within valleys and plains as well, between small polities, protection spheres, rural elites, a general agnoism of Dry Season warfare and capture. screencaps at length

Here is a proposed set of dichotomies of values involving mandala power. Near the core, and extending out toward the ebb. These values are sometimes from the perspective of the inside, sometimes of the edge, and can express themselves conflictedly within relations, within mandalas, given their shifting sphere. Important in thinking about this is that there is no pure "outside" of mandala power. Mandala powers are nested and overlapping, so these values become relative to specific centers and their sphere of influence.

Let me bend back to this notion of mandala, which historians use to describe how political power was conceived of in Southeast Asian, pre-colonial states. There was no notion of a Nation, or even a country. There was no ideological boundary which defined one's powers or rights. Rather, a Kingdom was defined (and experienced) as a sphere of influence. It's authority went as far as it could extend, not unlike candlelight only goes as far as candlelight goes, in the darkness. And, because ancient Kingdoms considered themselves centers of elevated civilized authority, founded on an Indic concept of royalty wherein the King expressed divinity, the darkness at the edge of that candlelight was seen as primitive, animalistic, savage. Where land was plentiful, and population sparse such concept of madala candlelight was variously easy to establish. Art centers, ritualistic royalty, confluences of international trade became the heartbeats of regions, and because these mandala's of power were fed by surrounding wet-rice field padi agriculture, the more manpower (often slaves) one drew into one's realm, the wealthier and more stable a Kingdom would become. But...mainland SEA had many mandalas over the centuries, and these mandalas competed, often for that manpower which made the candlelight shine bright. There spheres of influence overlapped, not only geographically, but also in terms of time. This graphic from The Art of Not Being Governed shows the idea: But, for our purposes, these mandala of power, these orbs of candlelight, probably did not just exist at the level of Empires and Kingdoms. The modes of symbolic power, on the Indric model, likely extended itself in imitation, across much smaller regions, even village to village. These are all nested, competing spheres of power, all overlapping. If you've spent a great deal of time you likely have run into this, not at the level of Kingdoms, but within Muay Thai itself. Individual gyms have spheres of power (candlelight), individual promotions, (the much bemoaned power gamblers), city officials. Regional Muay Thai - just to use an industry and art example - is often defined by competing and overlapping mandalas of local power. (The above graphic is meant to describe Kingship & nobility mandalas of power in 17th century Siam, but one imagines could just was well ethnographically describe dynamics of power in Muay Thai, in a contemporary city.). Westerners are starting to discover that even moving between gyms in a local scene can produce significant problems, because everything is held in a network of hierarchies and spheres of reach. Even if modern Thailand, far removed from the 17th century, these spheres of reach and power define the way that power, legitimacy and authority exercises itself, symbolically and in realpolitik terms. It is not too far a reach to suggest that even though these micro-mandalas of overlapping spheres of power have not been recorded by written history, they made up the fabric of the lived, political landscape of Siam. And, because - as anthropologists rather widely argue - wealth was made of manpower, and manpower was largely composed of slave capture, the economics of even small spheres of candlight made for a constant agonism of capture. The great wars and captures of history - the worst from the Thai perspective being the fall of Ayutthaya in the 18th century when Burma took an estimated 30,000 slaves back, repatriating many of them within a hierarchy of labor - are what has been written, but countless and likely endless skirmishes & perhaps annual battles made up the living calendar, year to year. The Dry Season, which today is the festival season in the provinces, was also the War Season, and the season for Elephant capture. Following the rains of monsoon, upon harvest of rice, any locality faced the prospects of contest and capture, a real of martial tension.

One of the more interesting struggles in any attempt to describe the origins of Thailand's Muay Thai as an essentially Thai fighting art falls along ideological lines between an urban, cosmopolitan elite (Bangkok and before that Ayutthaya) with its very important royal patronage, high-culture shaping and international influence, and provincial Muay Thai, organized around networks of villages, provinces and various local centers of knowledge. Is Muay Thai of Bangkok? Or is it of "the people" (ie, of provincial development)? While Muay Thai's very thin pre-1900 history is coded in royal record, and the stories of capitals, it is perhaps likely that there was something of a loose dialectic, tides of development of martial prowess & necessity, between the centers of warfare's, occasional, great military sieges of Capitals of Kingdoms, and what may have been a continuous local agonism between shifting centers of local power, in regions that now are Thailand's provinces. It is this unrecorded life of shifting agonism, focused slave-raiding skirmishes (not the seizing of territory as in Europe), the need to know how to defend, capture & escape that would be woven into the fabric of the land, complimenting the warfare centers of Siamese culture, in an ebb-flow sort of way. In thinking about and researching this there were two texts that I found really interesting. There is the essay "Southeast Asian Slavery and Slave - Gathering Warfare as a Vector for Cultural Transmission: The Case of Burma and Thailand" (the article here) which describes the way that large scale slave capture between SEA capitals became avenues of cultural transition, and James Scott's account of SEA hill people in The Art of Not Being Governed. Both works brought out the idea that it may not have been the actual bloodiness of large battles that was the dominant reality of martial awareness, so much as the slave-capturing (and other manpower) dynamics of political power itself, especially as it resided in cultural capitals like Chiang Mai or Ayutthaya, or eventually Bangkok. What Scott argues - apart from his much larger claims to a kind of hidden country of highland peoples which he calls Zomia - is that there was an ebb and flow of populations which variously were captured by mandala powers (city centers of Statelike authority) and which also fled from them, often away from valley centers, and sometimes up into hills or forests. Hills and forests became associated with the uncivilized and barbaric within the dominant Siamese culture, and those value judgements came to be spread across the land in a spectrum, centered in the Capital of Kingdoms. For the purposes of thinking about the origins of Muay Thai these tidal dynamics really flesh out the possible details of what combat consisted of, year upon year, and are suggestive of its possible influences through need. Rich city Kingdom centers like that of Ayutthaya not only engaged in occasional long-distance warfare marches, capturing slave manpower, they likely also exercised annual warfare capture of much lessor scale, replenishing the manpower drain that Scott suggests was continuous (one would imagine). And, provincial, village life, across sparsely populated valleys and plains, may also have faced continual more localized security issues, in the Dry Season, when slave capture warfare began, even annually. In otherwords, perhaps like in the American West (creating a very loose analogy) where there were large scale armed expeditions and wars, there were also sparsely populated demands for family and clan security as well, village & wat centers of security and identity, a fabric of local martial competence and its regular development. Mandala power (centers of influence and patronage) did not likely exhibit itself only in the great cultural orbs of civilization which have made up our historical record, but likely also were found on a much smaller, imitative scale, overlapping spheres of influence of rural elite, or village autonomy, all within the shadow of the manpower economic demand that anthropologists argue comes with plentiful, fertile land and a scarcity of labor. The capture of others was the regular means of developing wealth, afixing identity, and protecting one's own, and there is evidence that this process of wealth concentration, as culture, was practiced and imitated down to the small scale, even quite far from kingdom centers. In short, the sparsely populated villages of the land had martial need to know how to defend themselves, escape & likely also capture. Scott likes to set up a basic dichotomy between large States (anchored by Capital centers) and the hill/forest people that evade them, but the fabric of incorporation and localized, shifting liberty likely was far more nuanced, geographied, even fractal (in terms of smaller and smaller mandalas). For me the main contribution of his approach is the idea that in the story of Muay Thai development there was a kind of ebbing & flowing dialectic of people, culture and skill that came from both city centers and rural identity, and that back and forth this wove together the fabric of what would become Siamese Muay Thai (1300-1900). A warp and weft of Capital vs village which still expresses itself in today's Muay Thai in Thailand, according the ideological sway. As I've suggested in the past, even Muay Femeu vs Muay Khao classic Golden Age dichotomies can express this fundamental divide, city vs rural. And in thinking about how concepts of retreat from the Capital still play out, even our recent documentation of Samingnoom's return to the simple life of Buriram, away from Bangkok Muay Thai, to a hand-built house and a small neighborhood ring, embodies something of this ethic of liberty vs civilization, land vs city, each of which can be idealized. Quite telling in this attempt to piece together elements of Siamese history which have not made it into the dominant written record of Kingdoms, or the lasting architectural remainder, are stories of how armies would devastate and capture, not in their battles, but simply in the marches, consuming an estimated 26,000 square kilometers in even a 10 day march. These thoughts develop from this point in this thread:

James Scott on the "path of war" devastation of large scale Siam war expeditions. It wasn't necessarily the battles which produced hardship, it was the paths of armies, and "booty capitalism" which could enslave: AND, (note the first reference to smaller, more frequent campaigns, not yet speaking of more nested, localized combat) small vassal state banditry mentioned (p 150)

That is a very good question! Sylvie's dying to fight but things have become very difficult in Thailand, and its very hard for her to find fights at all. The combination of COVID over the last 3 years, and the dominance of 3 round Entertainment Muay Thai has had a serious impact on the female fighting we once knew, and, it seems that Sylvie's reputation as a fighter has cleaned out almost all possible opponents, at least opponents we can find and that promoters have tried to book. The first problem is Entertainment Muay Thai itself. It is a mode of fighting that is designed to help Westerners win, and is pretty far from the Muay Thai that Sylvie came here with passion to learn, so Sylvie has tried to hold a firm line in trying to fight in the traditional 5-round style. It's why she fights. This means that there are fewer promotions and fighting opportunities to choose from. It's really become something of an ethical stance for her, as the encroachment of Entertainment fighting is actively eroding the art of Muay Thai itself, in our opinion, and if she can she doesn't really want to become an advocate for it, if she can avoid it. Who knows how long she can hold out? COVID for the last couple of years also impacted female Muay Thai in that a lot of the strong local fighters that Sylvie used to face, giving up a lot of weight, have retired from the sport, so there are fewer possible opponents. Areas where we used to fight very frequently, like in Chiang Mai, simply cannot find opponents for her...we are told. There may be opponents in the provinces, there should be, but provincial fighting is pretty insular, and its been difficult to find matchups there. Everyone wants her to fight someone near her weight (for gambling purposes), but there seems to also be the feeling that she's too strong to fight someone near her weight. A top fighter near her weight has turned down 3 different promoters for a match. So we are in a catch-22 situation. Too strong of a fighter, by some reports, and provincial gambling fights don't see giving up big weight as appropriate. This has to do with the culture of fighting. We have several people looking for fights in the provinces, which hold the best traditional fighting in the sport for women, but none of them can find a match. We can't really seem to crack into Phuket fighting, can't fight in Chiangmai for lack of opponents, local traditional shows like those in Hua Hin can't find anyone who wants to fight Sylvie, and provincial fighting is very difficult to book. It leaves very few opportunities at this point. Sylvie is an exciting fighter and Thais love her when they see her fighting, so it really is just a matter of finding our way into new fight scenes and people enjoying it. All these problems were exacerbated by a significant injury Sylvie suffered, being thrown from a horse into a concrete fence, which really scared us. Luckily she avoided serious injury, but she was immobile for a few weeks, and it took 6 weeks or so to get back to training. So the hunt for fights took a hit in that time as well. So, Sylvie's been training as if she has a fight. She has one lined up in a few weeks (but fights and fighters have pulled out several times lately, so we are just crossing fingers). She's developing as a fighter, sparring with Yodkhunpon every day. It's all good stuff, but Thailand is going through a phase right now, in female fighting. Hopefully the trend will swing back toward traditional fighting, and female Thai fighters will become more numerous now that COVID shutdowns have relaxed. That's the long answer. The short answer: It's very hard to find fights right now, Sylvie would love to be fighting several times a month, we'd really drive anywhere in Thailand to get them. We are doing everything the same as before. Working hard on the Muay Thai Library project, Sylvie's pushing herself as a fighter, developing in training, and we are looking hard for matchups.

Scott's book on Southeast Asia, though from an anti-Statist, or State-critical perspective, provides a very good sense of the systematic aspects of just why States (and likely much smaller statelets, rural elites, and other competing centers of power) became such warfare, slave-taking states. It was very difficult to maintain acquired manpower. They regularly experienced manpower drain. These centuries upon centuries of warfare, slave-capture cultures of agonism is the bed in which Siamese Muay Thai grew. Firstly he points out that mandala Kingdoms themselves overlapped, so peoples were constantly shifting in their penumbra: Here he describes the perpetual struggle for slave-taking manpower in SEA, something that points the eye away from just the occasional large Kingdom, siege-centered, more bloody battles, and likely annual "Dry Season" (War Season), localized strife. This was an agonistic landscape. screen caps from The Art of Not Being Governed: The enduring question, at least for me, is whether this agonism was in fact annual, if there were local political strifes that were more or less continuous because this manpower economic logic pervaded. This question would endure because of the obvious lacuna in the historical record, as it is large Kingdoms that have written their histories. An alternate dimension of this very integrative aspect of Kingdom manpower churn is that Kingdoms had to create very strong yet supple identities that could persist over time, something I think which typified the unique quality of Siam and then Thailand:

More on the deeper performative and ritualistic dimensions of Muay Thai:

If you've followed my write up on the history of warfare in Southeast Asia with a view to why Thailand's Muay Thai may have favored a defensive, retreating style, two citations in that series come from The Ship of Sulaiman, an Iranian report of the court of Ayutthaya in the last 17th century. You can see the full thread write up linked at bottom. But as these citations are important in the picture building of Anthony Reid I want to footnote them here and include the much longer original passage in which they are included. They describe the most symbolic forms of warfare in Siam and Burma, and express the purported reasoning behind the "capture-not-kill" logic of region. Because labor was more important than territory, very blood battles were not favored, because you would be killing those who could labor for you, or at the very least pay tribute from their labor. Here is the citation: Things that stand out are: emphasizing that this is a recount of a battle hundreds of years in the past; the description of warring forces to music, a logic of surrounding capture employing feints and deceptions not only invokes some of the more stylized aspects of Thailand's Muay Thai, but also the spatial logic of the game of Go that I reference in the longer write up; and, the Siamese version of events describe how trickery was used to defeat a much larger/stronger foe in the Burmese prince, including the use of a firearm. The story continues onto another episode of deception when the Burmese seek revenge. At least in some measure there is a pride of winning vs larger/stronger opposition through intelligence and deception, a trait that matches up with other aspects of Muay Thai's retreating style, and the modern Muay Femeu vs Muay Khao dyad, in which the femeu fighter is favored by score.

Reid goes onto to discuss the social status and spirit of the cockfight gambler, n more contemporary times, which is a separate but related point:

I'm putting this citation and screen cap here as a placeholder. To review, my thesis is that cockfighting in Southeast Asia stood in for singular animal sacrifice rituals (instead of sacrificing a cock, having two of them fight), a singular animal sacrifice which ultimately was a stand in for the very ancient Vedic sacrifice of humans. The expiation of sin through sacrifice contains its own ritual logic, and when cocks fight the real ritual aim was for the production of a victim, a loser. This logic of the excluded one can take on a scapegoat power of purification. One of the weaker assumptions may have been my intuition that cock fighting was an expression of an older singular animal sacrifice. This passage in Anthony Reid's Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680: The Lands Below The Winds, brings out this under logic quite powerfully, and records draconian consequences in cases where the King is being represented by a cock: The social group sacrificial power of winning and losing is confirmed, and the representational power of winners as well. Of course this wasn't expressed at the village level of Balinese cockfighting (as Geertz studied), nor at the village level in Siam, but it points towards a structuring logic of sacrificial rite and social capital achieved through winning and losing in staged combat.

Muay Thai is favored in that it has developed through many documented full-contact fightings. Fighters have records in the 100s, so they develop a more applicable, usable style. Someone like Samart Payakaroon of Thailand was/is probably the closest thing to the kind of national hero that you seem to mean. He was both a Muay Thai champion many times, and a WBC World Boxing champion as well.

Further reading, "Southeast Asian Slavery and Slave - Gathering Warfare as a Vector for Cultural Transmission: The Case of Burma and Thailand" by Bryce Beemer, which describes Siam vs Burmese slave taking warfare and works to show how slave taking became an avenue of cultural transmission, tracing how Ayutthaya slaves brought both Chinese and Indian arts/technology to the Burmese. screen caps: and (if artisans and skilled craftsman of every sort were taken in slave capture, and seeded those arts in the new country, one must presume that skilled fighters as well were prized, and that the Siamese art of fighting also became an influence (and may have been influenced) by transmissions such as these): and (the special care for artisan captures, one suspects, would also be mirrored for any highly skilled fighter. The 18th century story of Nai Khanom Tom, who was captured and beat 10 Burmese fighters in a contest before a Burmese King and rewarded, considered a father of Muay Thai, may actually be a story of Muay Thai transmission, as he was said to be granted a change in social status, said to be "free" but perhaps more likely the social status of ahmu-dan, in the possession of the King (exempt from state taxes and levies on labor), and given wives/wife indicating some integrative position within the Burmese culture (the mythography of the event based on only 8 verses of a Burmese chronicle) as martial arts were likely valued. cont. note, in the above it is the majoritarian view of precolonial Thai slavery, that it was embedded in a much wider client/patron social hierarchy, and was not nearly as brutal as the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas. Katherine Bowie's article (cited in the thread above this one, takes a contrarian view to most anthropological takes, bringing evidence that warfare slaves were very harshly treated and suffered trauma from dislocation. She critiques what she sees as a general erasure of captured slave suffering in Southeast Asia in the literature. and, on the transmission of the Ramayana dance to Burma. Between 30,000 and 100,000 slaves are thought to have been taken in the fall of Ayutthaya. and the Ramayana dance performance may itself have been transmitted through Ayutthaya slave warfare captures from the Khmer Empire several centuries prior: It's very hard to imagine that the fighting art of Muay Boran (Muay Thai) and its occasions was not significantly shaped by these very large population and artisan migrations between regions of Southeast Asia.

How do you mean? What kind of heroes are you thinking of?

Background reading to give a sense of the full scope of slave taking in Siam, the article below examines the historical evidence that in Chiang Mai in the 19th century by some estimates 3/4 of the population was slave, most of them taken through warfare. Because of this extensive raiding culture, and small scale kidnapping throughout Siam perhaps Muay Thai as a martial art needs to be evaluated as a developed necessary means of provincial village autonomy and self preservation, as well as a Kingdom military power. In this context the ordination of young men/boys in temples, and the teaching of Muay Thai in temples takes on a dimension of protection. This essay paints an extremely agonistic picture of life. "Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand: Archival Anecdotes and Village Voices" (Katherine A Bowie, 1996) PDF attached Slavery_in_Nineteenth_Century_Northern_T.pdf screen cap and, and, and, and, and,

Putting This In Perspective For me this study of possible deeper thematic roots of Thailand's Muay Thai starts with the historical record of the 1788 fight vs a Frenchman. The context of the fight was that it was set in order to improve Siam's standing internationally, its reputation. This is only two decades after the fall of the Siam capital of Ayutthaya to the North, and six years after the founding of modern day Bangkok as the new capital, closer to the sea. Rama I was the first king of the new Chaktri dynasty. Siam's reputation needed to be reestablished. It is notable that a symbolic boxing fight, a sport fight, would be the means of doing so (not all that different than the ideologies at play in today's farang vs Thai sport match-ups). source: Peter Vail's Modern Muay Thai mythology The report is from the The Dynastic Chronicles, so I believe this is from the Siamese point of view. The Siamese's fighter is portrayed favorably. His retreat is not ill-regarded. It is a moment of great public face, and one imagines the behavior of both French brothers is seen as humiliated and disgraced. It never occurs to the Siamese report that, against probably a much larger man (who was seen as trying to break his opponent's collarbone), one should stand one's ground in some sort of stand-and-bang glory. Instead the retreating, defensive fighting is seen as exemplary, one would imagine. And the loss of control by the aggressor as shameful and punished. These are themes we still see today when Westerners face Thais in traditional Muay Thai (though this is being up-ended in Entertainment Muay Thai). I think it important to see that the Anthony Reid book takes a very wide view. Perhaps a 10,000 foot view, towards the Southeast Asian culture during this time of trade, and it could not be the case that these themes he brings out are definitive of Siamese practices. From this we can extract themes of warfare liquidity, come out of the raid and plunder combat, the material abundance of land & the scarcity of labor as shared broadly across Southeast Asia, but this isn't to say that there were not also fortified martial territories which would complexify the picture. Ayutthaya itself was quite fortified, surrounded by a moat made from the river bend. A painting of the city from the 17th century: Siege concepts were a significant part of warfare and in fact the fall of Ayutthaya was the result of a 14 month siege by the Burmese. As early as the 14th century there is report of a portion of the moat wall of Chiang Mai being knocked down by what may have been a proto-cannon, told in Chronicles of Ayutthaya. Lengthy sieges of fortified towns & cities were common in the North. Temples may have been the most fortified local architecture during some periods of history. Warfare was not of a completely liquid territorial logic. It was mixed, and any land fortification, port or river mouth or straight could become a center point of control. The "Bang" in Bangkok indicates a river bend which was seen as a favorable defensive positioning, a kind of Nature's moat. Topography shapes combat. It is rather to introduce this 10,000 foot view of slave capture and water-trade liquidity into the picture of the development of Muay Thai combat logic, and to see that there are themes of "capture over kill" and "retreat over stand your ground" that likely ran through the wider culture of the region. And that martial logics are better seen also in the context of economic material means, as well as within the values of Buddhism which has shaped the culture for centuries. I've written a sketch of some of the possible water-y influences on the Ayutthaya Kingdom in this series of posts, if you want to read it into just how cosmopolitan Ayutthaya was as a sea-faring empire: I introduce the notions of watery, fluid combat because in many ways the dynamics of Southeast Asia go against some Western conceptions (and combat ethics) inherited from different material conditions. Bringing out these dynamics in some ways involves over-emphasizing them, so they they are more clear in bold-relief. If there is a more watery, less spatially centered, capture martial logic perhaps the game of Go presents an analogical example. Thought to be the oldest board game, originating in China, one can see that its spatial logic tends towards the corners and the edges, when compared to something like chess which favors the center of the board and features concepts of fortification. In the tweeted video below you can see this Go patterning: It's tempting, without a detailed, fleshed-out historical record available to us to see continuity between the martial logic of localized capture in the game of Go and the willingness of Thai Muay Thai fighters to go to the ropes (or even sometimes the corners) to battle out their exchanges. Is there a deeper land vs labor, slave economy material logic behind these differences? Perhaps. If you play the video above it could very well be graphing out positions taken by a femeur fighter in Muay Thai. It is enough to perhaps use the game of Go (with its very different ruleset and topography) to suggest that the traditional Thai stadium Muay Thai is a different sort of game than some forms of combat sport fighting. And in that difference nurtured a particularly high level of skill development toward an excellence in defensive fighting. Thais learned to get really good at doing certain kinds of things because of how sport fighting is viewed and valued in the culture, and some of those values likely go back a very long way in history. provisional note: In thinking about the wateriness, or liquidity of martial territory and victory aims I'm also interested in how water itself may have played a role in skill development. There is some, very brief historical evidence that Siamese fighters were adept at "fighting on water, in a report back to China about the kingdom of Xian (Siam?). A switching, ambidextrous style would actually be much more favorable on unstable platforms like fighting on boats, as a single step can rebalance you. Some of the oldest forms of Muay Thai show a switching, ambidextrous base. Of course, we speak of Thailand (and Siam), and Muay Thai as if it were a singular thing, when in fact it is full of varieties and sometimes great differences. Just looking at the Kingdoms of the Region in the 13th century, and then again in the 16th (below) shows realms of culture that lasted for centuries. In terms of liquidity a northern Kingdom like Lan Na might share very little with the Southeast Asian cultures of trade commerce that Anthony Reid details. And the prolific Anchor Empire with its vast palace complexes might have a differing territorial logic than regions closer to the sea. But each may have had the same liquidity brought by land vs labor slave economies which would produce the same "capture not kill" battle aims. Perhaps Northern and Khorat styles may reflect some of those inherited dispositions. On the other hand the Muay Thai of the Southern peninsula developed in very close proximity to the very "Asian Mediterranean Sea" dynamics that Reid articulates, for over 1,000 years caught in the confluence of India-Persian trade (and Chinese trade), an essential piece in maritime empires, it likely absorbed much of the martial liquidity of the trade basin. It was through this Southern peninsula connection that a majority of Buddhist influence came, and no doubt many martial practices.

Muay Thai, if you have a well-versed coach, can be pretty easy to pick up and you can train it for heath and well-being, or even for passion without ever fighting. The basics can be learned quite quickly.