No Place To Be Small: Warrior Culture

Being a Warrior to Find Your True Identity 

This blog post is a joint adventure. I’m writing (Christophe Clugston) about a phenomenal piece of filmed presentation done by the TIGER CLAN’s resident Filipino Martial Arts expert, Felipe Jocano Jr.  If you’ve read his bio on the  Tiger Clan Experts’ Page you know that Felipe is a cultural anthropologist. This means, among other things, that his research and analytical skills are finely honed. So when he takes us on a short excursion into the Filipino Warrior Culture he does so with accuracy and honor.

Researching Filipino Combat Arts (this is my term) has been and continues to be a journey of self exploration for Felipe. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to the warrior arts have done so to gain personal power on a variety of levels. The obvious to the onlooker is the ability to “stand valiant” (to use a European phrase said about sword duels) while the fray of battle ensues–be that a robbery or the chaos of war.  The level that the warrior seeks but is not often talked about or seen to the onlooker is the level of fighting for self knowledge via self identification. We become defined, as do all people, by that which we spend the most time doing: if you sit and watch TV you are a “fat couch potato,” if you live in the weight gym and focus your social contacts on that you are a “gym rat,” and if you think about earning money and working to gain social position every waking moment you’re a “go getter on the move.”

Now admittedly those are but a few of the social roles that we can adopt within a given society. In the end, within capitalistic societies, you are labeled by what you do for money. In reality there are very few of us who are true warriors. That is to say, very few are making livings by being knight errants, paladins, ronins, gunslingers, contractors, professional fighters or those who teach the aforementioned. Nonetheless, as an academic linguist with undergraduate degrees in sociology and psychology (among others) I find it salient that the words we choose to label ourselves with reflect, at the least, a personal desire for not only what we want others to think about us, but what we want to be.

So watch the following video and see how one man’s warrior quest has changed his skills with las armas and his own concept of self.