Martial Arts vs. Soldiering

So I leave for Thailand in about a week. For any number of reasons, this is more than a little intimidating, but the growing proximity of departure has made the whole project more real to me than it has been since I found out it was going to happen. As I've been thinking more and more seriously about the theoretical nature of the project itself (not in small part to distract myself from the distinctly non-theoretical reality of getting kicked in the face), I have come across perhaps my first major stumbling block in my conception of what it means to be a martial artist.

In the past few months, due to the generally elevated testosterone levels of many of my friends, I have watched more than my share of movies which contain high occurrences of explosions, breasts and biceps. I don't really object to these movies on principle, generally thinking that everyone sometimes needs to experience a world in which gunshots and genitalia bounce and fly with equal ferocity, except that it led me to compare my own studies to the combat taking place on the screen. Fortunately, I have no real notion that my study of martial arts has much to do with Hollywood, but as many of these films feature soldiers in various forms, I began to wonder in what ways soldiering (in its more realistic manifestations) differs from the practice of martial arts.

I should say that before considering this, there has been (and still is) a vague and generally unexplained notion that as a martial artist, I am certainly not a soldier. As I reflected, this seemed a bit strange, as certainly we both employ martial force and act as protectors to a certain way of life, but at least viscerally, I felt that there was some great distinction, if only I could put my finger on what it is.

It is a central tenet of my project that martial arts are representative of the cultures from which they spring. Indeed, the whole reason that I feel it necessary to go to an art's native country is that I feel that in order to understand the art, one must also experience the culture which gave birth to it. At first, it seems to me that this is perhaps a difference between martial artists and soldiers, in that soldiering is created solely by and for purposes of war. In other words, to understand what it means to be a soldier, one must experience war, but not necessarily any specific war. Admittedly, however, this idea is a bit reductive. Surely there are differences between Thai and Brazilian soldiers, just as there are certainly differences between Muay Thai and Capoeira, though those differences are not necessarily the same.

Perhaps it is not then fair to say that militaries are products of war, while martial arts are products of cultures, because certainly soldiers are influenced by their native cultures, and martial arts are demonstrably linked to the early styles of warfare for the people who created them. It seems to me, however, that at the end of the day, each group has fundamentally different objectives, and at this point these objectives are the only difference that I can intelligibly isolate.

Though both soldiers and martial artists practice combat, and though both use styles of combat shaped by the environment and culture from which they came, I think that it is the focus on utility vs. the focus on expression which in the end is the primary distinction. Soldiers fight to win, martial artists fight to fight, which is to say to use the techniques. Even in my own narrow experience, the reasons that martial artists practice their styles vary greatly; some consider aesthetics, some power, some speed, some history, etc., but whatever the case, the objective of learning a martial art is to express what one has personally chosen as worth expressing. For soldiers, by contrast, the objective of being a good soldier is the preservation of an institution, or perhaps the destruction of another, but whatever the case, the objective of soldiering is externally imposed.

Anyway, this is the beginning of what I imagine will be a continuing line of thought, and Dr. Dorian Stuber has recently recommended a book called Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, which (from the little that I've read so far) promises to shed some light on this as well. More to follow.