Jump to content

Saving What Fighters Have Built With Their Bodies & Ethics of Preserving Traditional Muay Thai


Recommended Posts

I'm drawn more and more to the idea that it is the fighters who have built a fighting sport, its art. Yes, arts & sports do not rise unless they are pulled into circles of power and epic centers of cultural focus - just as the great variations of provincial Muay Thai of Thailand were drawn into Bangkok in the early part of the 20th century, with the arrival of railroads (Khorat 1900, Southern Rail 1907, Lampang 1916, Chiang Mai 1921) - and if not shaped by commercial powers, the brilliance of promoters, the patronage of the King or the State - but amid these forces it's the wills of the fighters who performed in the magic squared circle, and their bodies which built it. This is where the bricks are laid...and not just the bricks. It's the living force of these men (and some women), their creative force, which largely gave shape and complexity to a sport, gave it its fabric. It is much less like an architect who tells workers where to put blocks of stone, and much more like an array of weavers who, on looms of the Self, pull strands through and through to create a pattern.

I am well-known as someone who has dug his heels in the sand as Muay Thai is being dragged forward into new, radically different, highly commercialized (and I believe much less capable, more physically illiterate) zones. I was struck by a very fine argument that was sent my way, as I urged Thailand's Muay Thai not to let go of the complexity and immense competency it had developed over the last century, when taking this commercial turn. It was said that I advocate for a distant Muay Thai where fighters are so little paid for their work, harkening back to when fighters were more or less controlled and owned, and fought for so very little. This is a really good point. There are some problems with it, for instance top stars of Thailand's Golden Age Muay Thai, adjusted for the economy, actually were paid quite a bit more money than those of today (in general), and had a stardom in the country that shaped generations. But still, there is a very good point. Ignoring the top earners of the 1990s, there is a real sense in which the Golden Age drew in countless fighters many of which trained and fought in onerous conditions. There is a real sense in which Muay Thai broke backs, and the blood, sweat and tears of the sport did not pay in a way that feels equitable, for the average, hard fighting circuit fighter. The word floating behind this is exploitation. I think it's a complicated word, because it involves us considering what fair recompense is, and recompense is not just baht; but its an important thing to think about.

Is someone like me who holds firm to what Muay Thai has been arguing that we should return to the systems of the past where big promoters steered the sport and gave fighters life or death in the sport in their powerful networks and decision making, often with very little lasting financial reward? Are we to roll the clock back to patronage of OneSongchai and Klaew? Of unbreakable long contracts and the tight networks of gym owners?  I think this is a really good thing to think about when we make decisions on where we stand on the Muay Thai that is being fought. Where are the power centers? And what are the lower-level, circuit fighters experiencing? What is the compensation for their labor?

This is what I'm thinking about. Let's grant that the Muay Thai of the past was in some significant degree exploitative, in the sense that workers were laboring often under great distress to produce a product the windfall of which largely went to promoters and gym owners. If we want to think just in terms of financial reward and labor/cost analysis we can see that. But this is the powerful aspect that is missing from that world view. Firstly, meaning in life does not reduce to income. In fact there are many things much more meaningful to people than the number of zeros in a bank account (though for some this is paramount). When Dieselnoi tells the story of when he was knocked out by lead-handed Kaopong in his lone boxing fight, and how he bounced from rope to rope, staggering to stand before he finally fell, he talks about the fact that the Prince was in attendance. "I could not even stand for the Prince." As he tried with his gigantic heart to straighten up, and failed, he was not thinking of his kadua (fighter pay), or who bet on him. He was thinking of his dignity. His place. The traditional elements of Thailand's Muay Thai have a great deal to do with "place", and much of the reward, in that there was one, is about "place". Many of these fighters came from places in society without much standing, and fought and trained in the sport to gain that standing. And place is not fame. It's related, but it's not. You cannot not forage it.

This is what I'm saying. If we are to mourn the fact that the fighters of the past were not fairly compensated we have to expand our vision to fully see what they were actually compensated with. And a great deal of what they were compensated with was the tremendous and enormous edifice of Muay Thai that they had built. THEY built it, round by round, bell by bell, cut by cut, hand raised by hand raised. It did not stop. It is THEIR artform. They made it. It's like a pyramid made from 100,000 hands. That it stands and that it lasts is part of their compensation, the part they didn't get when the baht was put in their hand. It belongs to them.

This is the fundamental problem with the efforts to radically reduce the complexity, skill sets, traditions and aesthetics of Muay Thai of Thailand. Yes, there might be very good, sensible commercial reasons to do so, especially as market demands have shifted. Yes, it may very well benefit some wonderful fighters who never would have gotten the eye-ball recognition and the financial boon if they had simply stayed in stadium Muay Thai, or just retired as many, many have done. There are good reasons for this, ethical reasons. But as you erase the edifice of Thailand's Muay Thai, to make it more marketable, more readable on the scroll of mobile phones and tiny screens, as you pull into new mechanisms of possible resource extraction, you are actually destroying the one thing all those fighters were paid with, the legacy of the sport itself, as the greatest fighting art on earth. They made that.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu talks about not only financial Capital, but also social Capital, which is your place in a culture, but what I'm talking about goes much deeper than even social Capital. It's about the craftsmanship of 100,000 hands to make something, and for it to have reached a level of incredible capacity. One of the very special things about Thailand's Muay Thai is that it was born both out the cultural traditions & practices which give it a profound (non-commercial) substance, but it was also forged out of probably more than 1,000,000 full contact fights over the last century. In regions styles developed, gym to gym grew specific techniques that won under the aesthetics of the sport, krus, gym owners, fighters all mixed to create an immense vocabulary of fight knowledge - and Amazon-like train forest diversity of it - which made it the most capable fighting art in the world. The fighting IQ and skill display was just eye-wateringly good. This came out of ALL the fighters. Countless fighters you've never heard of. The creation of this was the legacy of all of them. Every run-down village festival ring with gamblers pressed against the apron, every (old) Lumpinee clash of titans. All these fighters had a piece of this, because they made it. It was theirs.

If you take out all those musical notes - too many notes! - change the rules and the scoring (which is the DNA of the living animal of it) and make it something unrecognizable you are erasing their legacy, the one thing they had in compensation beyond the baht put in their hand. When you remove clinch for instance, and your version of the sport comes to supplant the very picture of what Muay Thai is in the eyes of the many, you actively erase Langsuan, Samson, Panomtuanlek, Dieselnoi, Namkabuan and Chamuakpet. You not only will erase their memory (which may exist in nostalgic highlight clips), but you, more painfully so, erase their knowledge, the very thing they put their bodies to work in building, fight by fight, years in the kaimuay. They were technicians, they built something. And, it is not only them. You are erasing the great anti-clincher, the femeu masters like Samart, Silapathai, Hippy, Somrak, Karuhat and Burklerk. The entire vocabulary, a whole species of fight knowledge that has been developed through their contest, and to some degree passed on, is wiped out. It's gone. Not unlike mono-cropping where a old wood forest once stood. And this is just speaking of clinch fighting in the sport. So much more can be said of narrative fight control, contests of ruup signature, dern vs matador dynamics. The elite capacities of Thailand's Muay Thai were not earned by the promoters, or even the gym owners. They were earned by the fighters. They were earned out of the bodies, as artists put to endeavor. I just think we should think long and hard before we erase these kinds of very sophisticated, hard-won, achievements of knowledge, the legacy of which within the living culture, within the living sport is their reward.

It's not just a question of: "How should fighters fight today...to make the most money?" As with all things in life, even things of commercial value, it's about meaningfulness, and in some sense it feels as if we are digging into the cultural pensions of the men who made this sport. The new forms are literally unrecognizable to many of them. They don't even know what they are looking at, so they seldom look...or if they look they look in terms merely as spectacle. There is some element in which we owe these fighters for what they made...even if you want to take what they made and turn it into something else for consumption. We owe them that they can look at the sport, the art, and SEE themselves in it. We owe it to them to to preserve something of the pyramid that has been built by hand. We cannot pull the foundation stones out of what it is and still respect the great feats of knowledge and transformation they created.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Most Recent Topics

  • Latest Comments

    • Well, the PAT announced 24-30 hr weigh-in, a huge change the sport. Get ready for tons of weight bullying (including bigger farang fighting small Thais in trad stadium fights). Basically for all practical reasons all weight classes have been expanded. This is in part in relationship to the labor crisis mentioned above, the capacity to draw from a wider range of fighters to fill cards. Trad Muay Thai will likely have greater skill disparities (shrinking talent pools) and now more massive size differences, as well as drawing in more farang who will become part of this solution. This will also likely mean more farang stadium/promotion belts in trad fighting. Of course laws in Thailand are unevenly forced, so there could be major hiccups in implementation, including a significant problem that fighters now have to come to Bangkok the day before, which means even greater costs to fight...which could ALSO shrink the fighter pool. Already many gyms, small kaimuay, have difficulty even breaking even in Bangkok fighting expenses. Will outlying fighters be able to regularly afford to come to fight in Bangkok, especially in a scene that favors the political power of major Bangkok gyms (they can't dependably recoup their expense by betting on their fighters).  These changes could have a massive stylistic impact on Thailand's trad Muay Thai over time, as it gives even more advantage to size and power. Saenchai was famous for his criticism of the loss of femeu fighting after he left the trad stadium scene, because large-bodied power clinch fighters (who he had some trouble with) had become the gambler's favorite. With the even greater increase in size differential now, and the influence of more smashing and clashing fighting styles of Entertainment Muay Thai, it stands to reason that power will become even more effective over femeu skill than ever before. In the Golden Age there were fairly substantial size differences, but the technical skill level of fighters was such - and the trad artful scoring bias in favor of - that small fighters like Karuhat and many others could handle 2 or more weight class (in the ring) differences. This high level of the art just really is missing in this era, and scoring biases are shifting toward the power aesthetic. Trad Muay Thai may become much more combo-heavy smashy with the big man coming out on top. 
    • Some notes on the predividual (from Simondon), from a side conversation I've been having, specifically about how Philosophies of Immanence, because they tend to flatten causation, have lost the sense of debt or respect to that which has made you. One of the interesting questions in the ethical dimension, once we move away from representationalist thinking, is our relationship to causation.   In Spinoza there is a certain implicit reverence for that to which you are immanent to. That which gave "birth" to you and your individuation. The "crystal" would be reverent to the superstaturated solution and the germ (and I guess, the beaker). This is an ancient thought.   Once we introduce concepts of novelness, and its valorization, along with notions of various breaks and revolutions, this sense of reverence is diminished, if not outright eliminated. "I" (or whatever superject of what I am doing) am novel, I break from from that which I come from. Every "new" thing is a revolution, of a kind. No longer is a new thing an expression of its preindividual, in the ethical/moral sense.   Sometimes there are turns, like in DnG, where there is a sort of vitalism of a sacred. I'm not an expression of a particular preindividual, but rather an expression of Becoming..a becoming that is forever being held back by what has already become. And perhaps there is some value in this spiritualization. It's in Hegel for sure. But, what is missing, I believe, is the respect for one's actual preindividual, the very things that materially and historically made "you" (however qualified)...   I think this is where Spinoza's concept of immanent cause and its ethical traction is really interesting. Yes, he forever seems to be reaching beyond his moment in history into an Eternity, but because we are always coming out of something, expressing something, we have a certain debt to that. Concepts of revolution or valorized novelty really undercut this notion of debt, which is a very old human concept which probably has animated much of human culture.   And, you can see this notion of immanent debt in Ecological thought. It still is there.   The ecosystem is what gave birth to you, you have debt to it. Of course we have this sense with children and parents, echo'd there.   But...as Deleuze (and maybe Simondon?) flatten out causation, the crystal just comes out of metastable soup. It is standing there sui generis. It is forever in folds of becoming and assemblages, to be sure, but I think the sense of hierarchy and debt becomes obscured. We are "progressing" from the "primitive".   This may be a good thing, but I suspect that its not.   I do appreciate how you focus on that you cannot just presume the "individual", and that this points to the preindividual. Yes...but is there not a hierarchy of the preindividual that has been effaced, the loss of an ethos.   I think we get something of this in the notion of the mute and the dumb preindividual, which culminates in the human, thinking, speaking, acting individuation. A certain teleology that is somehow complicit, even in non-teleological pictures.   I think this all can boil down to one question: Do we have debt to what we come from?   ...and, if so, what is the nature of that debt?   I think Philosophies of Immanence kind of struggle with this question, because they have reframed.   ...and some of this is the Cult of the New. 3:01 PM Today at 4:56 AM   Hmmmm yeah. Important to be in the middle ground here I suspect. Enabled by the past, not determined by it. Of course inheritance is rather a big deal in evolutionary thought - the bequest of the lineage, as I often put it. This can be overdone, just as a sense of Progress in evolution can be overdone - sometimes we need to escape our past, sometimes we need to recover it, revere it, re-present it. As always, things must be nuanced, the middle ground must be occupied. 4:56 AM   Yes...but I think there is a sense of debt, or possibly reverence, that is missing. You can have a sense of debt or reverence and NOT be reactive, and bring change. Just as a Native American Indian can have reverence for a deer he kills, a debt. You can kill your past, what you have come from, what you are an expression of...but, in a deep way.   Instead "progress" is seen as breaking from, erasing, denying. Radical departure.   The very concept of "the new" holds this.   this sense of rupture.   And pictures of "Becoming" are often pictures of constant rupture.   new, new, new, new, new, new...   ...with obvious parallels in commodification, iterations of the iphone, etc.   In my view, this means that the debt to the preindividual should be substantive. And the art of creating individuation means the art of creating preindividuals. DnG get some of this with their concept of the BwOs.   They are creating a preindividual.   But the sense of debt is really missing from almost all Immanence Philosophy.   The preindividual becomes something like "soup" or intensities, or molecular bouncings.   Nothing really that you would have debt to. 12:54 PM   Fantasies of rupture and "new" are exactly what bring the shadow in its various avatars with you, unconsciously.     This lack of respect or debt to the preindividual also has vast consequences for some of Simondon's own imaginations. He pictures "trade" or "craft" knowledge as that of a childhood of a kind, and is quite good in this. And...he imagines that it can become synthesized with his abstracted "encyclopedic" knowledge (Hegel, again)...but this would only work, he adds, if the child is added back in...because the child (and childhood apprenticeships) were core to the original craft knowledge. But...you can't just "add children" to the new synthesis, because what made craft knowledge so deep and intense was the very predindividual that created it (the entire social matrix, of Smithing, or hunting, or shepherding)...if you have altered that social matrix, that "preindividual" for knowledge, you have radically altered what can even be known...even though you have supplemented with abstract encyclopedic knowledge. This is something that Muay Thai faces today. The "preindividual" has been lost, and no amount of abstraction, and no about of "teaching children" (without the original preindividual) will result in the same capacities. In short, there is no "progressive" escalation of knowledge. Now, not everything more many things are like a fighting art, Muay Thai...but, the absence of the respect and debt to preindividuality still shows itself across knowledge. There are trends of course trying to harness creativity, many of which amount to kind of trying to workshop preindividuality, horizontal buisness plan and build structures, ways of setting up desks or lounge chairs, its endless. But...you can't really "engineer" knowledge in this way...at least not in the way that you are intending to. The preindividual comes out of the culture in an organic way, when we are attending to the kinds of deeper knowledge efficacies we sometimes reach for.
    • "He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitel sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other."   A beautiful analogy by Simone Weil (Waiting for God), which especially in the last sentence communicates how hard it is to discuss Muay Thai with those who don't know how to "read" its sentences. Yes, I see the effort. Yes, I see the power. Yes, I even see the "technique"...but this is like talking about the color of sentences written out at times.
  • The Latest From Open Topics Forum

    • Hi all, Does anyone know of any suppliers for blanks (Plain items to design and print a logo on) that are a good quality? Or put me in the right direction? thanks all  
    • The first fight between Poot Lorlek and Posai Sittiboonlert was recently uploaded to youtube. Posai is one of the earliest great Muay Khao fighters and influential to Dieselnoi, but there's very little footage of him. Poot is one of the GOATs and one of Posai's best wins, it's really cool to see how Posai's style looked against another elite fighter.
    • Yeah, this is certainly possible. Thanks! I just like the idea of a training camp pre-fight because of focus and getting more "locked in".. Do you know of any high level gyms in europe you would recommend? 
    • You could just pick a high-level gym in a European city, just live and train there for however long you want (a month?). Lots of gyms have morning and evening classes.
    • Hi, i have a general question concerning Muay-Thai training camps, are there any serious ones in Europe at all? I know there are some for kickboxing in the Netherlands, but that's not interesting to me or what i aim for. I have found some regarding Muay-Thai in google searches, but what iv'e found seem to be only "retreats" with Muay-Thai on a level compareable to fitness-boxing, yoga or mindfullness.. So what i look for, but can't seem to find anywhere, are camps similar to those in Thailand. Grueling, high-intensity workouts with trainers who have actually fought and don't just do this as a hobby/fitness regime. A place where you can actually grow, improve technique and build strength and gas-tank with high intensity, not a vacation... No hate whatsoever to those who do fitness-boxing and attend retreats like these, i just find it VERY ODD that there ain't any training camps like those in Thailand out there, or perhaps i haven't looked good enough?..  Appericiate all responses, thank you! 
  • Forum Statistics

    • Total Topics
      1.4k
    • Total Posts
      11.5k
×
×
  • Create New...