Spanish Influence on FMAs

I have to agree that FMA as we know it today is by no means a totally 100% Spanish import, far from it. I firmly beleive it is an amalgamation of two if not more fighting methods i.e. Spanish and Local Tribal Combat Methods, as after all if you are already used to fighting a common enemy you already know how to fight them and which are the best methods to use, but also if you put another method of combat into the mix e.g. Spanish which is also known for sucessfully combating numerous enemies and you combine them you inturn can come up with a more effective method of fighting what is now a common enemy of both parties, Such is the nature of warfare.

Best regards

Pat

 

The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is one artifact that comes to mind when talking about pre-Hispanic influence and culture in the Philippines. Reading the last couple of posts brought it to mind.

 

There was a question possed earlier that if the Spanish have influenced FMA and visa versa do we see lets say Indian MA's influencing British MA.

I am sure if you look deep enough you will find links and cross overs but also look at the British (English) Language, there are infact several Indian words commonly used within our language such is our interaction with India.

Shampoo for instance is a Hindu word meaning to massage the scalp but again you can also look at Indian English or South-Asian English comprises several dialects or varieties of English spoken primarily in the Indian subcontinent. These dialects evolved during and after the colonial rule of Britain in India. English is one of the official languages of India, with about ninety million speakers according to the 1991 Census of India. Fewer than a quarter of a million people speak English as their first language. With the exception of some families who communicate primarily in English, as well as members of the relatively small Anglo-Indian community numbering less than half a million, speakers of Indian English use it as a second or third language, after their respective Indian language(s). Several idiomatic forms, derived from Indian literary and vernacular language, also have made their way into Indian English. Despite this diversity, there is general homogeneity in syntax and vocabulary among the varieties of Indian English.

But I digress so back to the subject at hand.

But also why do we see Spanish as a language used within the FMA and not English as a Language used in Indian or even Hong Kong and Kowloon Based MA's of China and Singapore and Malaysian MA's.

Well for that you have to also look at the two different ways England and Spain colonised different cultures (France also colonised in much the same way as Spain).

Spanish colonies where done under the premiss of God, Gold and Country, along with France all of her colonies answered and where directly ruled by their King where as on the other hand the English Colonies where made under the premiss of Enterprise, they were not done directly under Queen / King and country and purely to make money for the crown, but rather a private Entrepanurial venture of private companies.

The Spanish Colonies had to pay taxes directly to the Crown and everything in and around it had to be converted to Spanish and the methods of the Catholic Church, where as on the other hand the English Colonies where unlike there Spanish and French counterparts allowed to tax themselves (as long as they did not go against the crown) form local governement and make treaties with the local indigenous inhabitants (referance early British settlers in the Americas). They did not spend their time converting to local populace to all things English and Christian (apart from a few missionaries that is) but rather they used and worked with them to build and economy from farming, fishing, manufacture and trade.

In the English colonies other nations where encouraged to join in on their colonisation of regions and it is because of this that the English crown could call on a larger force when in conflict with its old time rivals such as Spain, France and even Holland (Portugal was a long time allie of England but the lesser equal of the alliance), where as the Spanish and French where soley obsessed with converting everything to their way of life, the English on the other hand where more interested in making a profit and it is for this reason the British Empire became larger and was more fruitfull.

You can plainly see evidence of the English Colonisation method in countries such as the USA today, where it is not the nation your fathers come from that is important, it is your entrepunerial skills that are praised and welcomed and your culture is not rubbed out but rather intergrated into the mix in order to take best advantage of it and maximise the trading benefits.

Spain and France was more interested in using indigenous people as slaves which we can see in that 98% of all slave trading in the 16th and 17th centurary was done by Spain and France. Where as although the English did profiteer from Slave trading for a time but was also the first to ban it too, for the most part they concentrated on trading with other nations as opposed to driving them into slavery and conversion.

That is why in the English Colonies we also seen local governments formed, local taxes intorduced, local customs adopted and other nations welcomed to join in the expansion, where as in Spanish and French colonies we seen the absolute conversion of the local populace to Spanish or French methods of living, the down grading of the local indigenous people and the exclusion of all things outside their culture and religion.

And it is for this reason we will see more Spanish methods and terminoligies within the FMA as opposed to seeing more English terminologies and methods in the Indian, Malay or even Chinese MA's.

But dont get me worng here we also have Chinese and Malay words in the Eglish language, for instance Ketchup possibly from Cantonese or Amoy 茄汁, lit. tomato sauce/juice and the Malay word Cooties from kutu, 'lice' and we even have American Indian such as Caribou From Míkmaq qalipu, "snow-shoveler" (from qalipi, "shovel snow", Proto-Algonquian *maka·ripi-). So unlike our Spanish counterparts we would actually embrace the local culture of those we where colonising as oppossed to trying to totally dominate and convert them to our ways. It was more a swapping of cultures as opposed to a complete replacement.



Best regards

Pat

 

Let's go back to Raul's original words:

He didn't say "less". He said he wouldn't give more credit to the Spanish, than to the other groups.
As I said before, without documentation, we cannot really pick apart and say with certainty the extent of the influence of each group.

That's where we differ. I think language is not necessarily reflective of the origin.
Let me give another example. When Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was a young man, he was looking for a way to throw a much larger fellow student, named Fukushima. After looking at books on western wrestling, he came up with kata guruma (shoulder wheel) and successfully threw Fukushima with it. Now any western wrestler would recognise kata guruma as "fireman's carry". But if you just read the name "kata guruma" and did not know the origin, you would assume it was an original Japanese technique based on the language. And if one saw the technique, one might claim it is due to commonality of movement or convergent evolution. So the reverse happened here. The technique is in the local language but the origin is actually foreign. Again, without documentation, what actually happened would not be apparent from language alone. Because Professor Kano recorded it, we know that the technique is of foreign origin.

No problem, that's why we are collecting evidence to see if it supports the hypothesis or not.

Again this is very difficult with only oral testimony. Remember the Pangasinan FMA practitioner I talked about in a previous post? He has since died, so we can no longer ask follow-up questions. All we have left is the interview he gave my Aikido sensei.

Again, please, let's be objective and not engage in ad hominem attacks. It really lowers the level of the discussion.
The scientific process is one of hypothesis, testing, evaluation, and reformulation. To quote Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes,

If the theory is not yet eliminated as being impossible, then it must remain as one of the possibilities, though there may be more probable ones.

 

Which by that very note means based on the high degree of theories, possibilities and probabilities that there is Spanish influence in the FMA.

Best regards

Pat

 

Actually, Pat, it was not the ruling class, composed of the Peninsulares(born in Spain) and Insulares (Spaniards born in the Philippines) that I was alluding to as the clientele, but the rising Illustrado class, from mostly Spanish and Chinese mestizos (mixed marriages). This class had money thanks to improved economic conditions and were chafing at the restrictions imposed upon them by the ruling class. This is the class where Jose Rizal, Marcelo del Pilar, Antonio Luna, and Emilio Aguinaldo came from. A lot of the members of the Katipunan, especially the leadership came from this class. Andres Bonifacio, the founder of the Katipunan, is not included traditionally by historians with the illustrados, but recent research shows that he seemed to have belonged to the lower middle class as evidenced by this work for an English company (British influence again?? ) and then a German Company, and by his educational and literary accomplishments.
So it is this newly empowered class of people, looking for ways to get more rights, that could have been the clients of the FMA instructors. And they could have kept the FMA aspect hidden by labelling it as Western fencing. Maybe even some of the Illustrados themselves could have been inheritors of a family martial art and started systematizing it with Spanish nomenclature to teach their fellow illustrados. Rizal's uncles were well known as martial artists and physical culturists in his native Laguna.

Yes, so did the Spanish officers teach their fighting method to the natives or did they apply Spanish terms to the existing fighting skills of the troops?
Remember that the Spaniards also pitted tribe against tribe eg, Ilokanos vs Pampangos and Cebuanos vs Boholanos when putting down rebellions. On some expeditions there may be contingents from various linguistic groups. So they may have resorted to devising a rudimentary Spanish lexicon to train them together.

I think it is a combination of convergent evolution and cross pollination of techniques.

Again, given the length and extent of Spanish invasiveness (including not teaching the majority of Filipinos how to speak Spanish, this was another form or oppression) in regimenting the lives of the native Filipinos, (to the extent of forcing us change our names) I'm not surprised that a Western form of pedagogy is present in a lot of FMA systems.

This is where I have to differ slightly. We know about the well-known and and well disseminated FMA systems from the Visayas mostly. And I agree that those systems are quite likely influenced by the Spanish. But I believe that there may be less well known systems, perhaps in Luzon that may or may not have less or no Spanish influence. And some of them may have died out so that would be a shame. But again this is conjecture so I am still searching for the evidence.

All the best,

Cito

 

Ginoong Pat, I never denied that there was Spanish influence in a number of FMA systems. What I was saying was that just because a technique has a Spanish term doesn't mean it has a Spanish origin.

All the best,

Cito

 

Pat, this is very possible because the Katipunan and other Filipino revolutionary societies were based on Freemasonry. Rizal, del Pilar, Luna and a lot of other Reformists were Masons as were Bonifacio, Jacinto and other members of the Katipunan. My own great-grandfather, who was a member of the Katipunan, was also a Mason.

All the best,

Cito

 

It doesn't change the past, but it could stand as a symbol for something, Like Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X for example.

Respectfully,

Cito

 

I agree totally.

Best regards

Pat

 

This I beleive is very possible as with all Spanish Colonies, those Spaniards who married into the local populace created an all together different social class acroding to those of pure Spanish blood, they where neither in nor out so to speak. Yes they had all the trappings of the Spaniard but also they had an affinity with the local populace as well and where considered for the most part neither Spanish nor indigenous. Unlike their British Counterparts who would still hold their social status, a fine example being that of John Rolfe who married the American Indian Princess Pocahontas (c. 1595 - March 21st 1617), infact she became quite famous in the last year of her life and a statue of her was errected in London to commemorate her life.

But here is where I have a problem, these intelligent highley educated people kept records, surely at least one of them would have made a record of them forming and teaching at such a club even if it was of a secret society nature and now that the colonial parties have long gone these records would have surfaced, records such as these would be reveard by national historians as an important part of the revolutionary movement would it not?

Now we know that people such as José Rizal where famous fencing enthusiasts too and had trained in fencing schools (escrima) in Spain and France (there is a picture of him somewhere fencing with Luna in Paris) so even he too may have intermingueld both arts as after all you cant forget what you have been taught when it comes to fighting and you will drop into knowledge you know by nessesity. And with such a person being of the littirary type I am amazed that if this theory was so thast he himself would not have made record of it.

Slightly off topic but sort of relative. José Rizal would most definetly have had British influence bearing in mind he spent time practicing as an orthodontist in British Controled Hong Kong and married the Irish girl Josaphine Bracken (who by the way may have links with my wife Lucy Bracken as the Irish Brackens tend to come from the same area of Ireland that is something we are looking into).

Best regards

Pat

 

Raul Ali vs. Raul X

He did say "less" or at least that's the stance he's taking. Raul Ali's or Raul X's point in the beginning was that he was a slave of the Spanish, and they used to rape his women and take away their dignity. For this reason, he wants to revise history or offer an alternative history, to say that the Chinese and Japanese had more influence than the Spaniards.

It's hard to say less or more with very little evidence. But because we were under the Spanish for 300 or so years, we are getting the Spanish-centric versions trickling down to us. Remember, in the 70s and 80s, we thought FMA came from blind princesses, Moro princes and other fairy tales. With Nepangue and Macachor's book we're getting somewhere, albeit in the Visayas. Let's expand on it.

But you're OK with Raul X's little tele-novela speech about how the Spaniards were mean to him and that he was vomiting? Why because one exploitation is in the distant past and one is current? But the point I was trying to make was that exploitation or not, you don't go around revising names, just cause your dignity has been hurt.

As for his Magic 8 ball quip, I'll say it again, it was ignorant. When someone asks you to support your ideas, you offer it or say, I have nothing to support it at this time, it's just an idea. Some ideas are better than others.

Raul X went from the "I know more than thou, because I'm Filipino" to vomiting and eventually cooling off his rhetoric. We're thankful for this. Many of us want to learn here. Either offer something or don't (you obviously have, I thank you).

The rest I'll try to answer later. It is the weekend after all.

 

I'm hoping Pat is just using the syllabic similarities of Hibernian and the coined term "Hebrewan"-(actual term is "Hebraic")- to pull our legs here.

But in case anyone bought it-

Gaelic is Indo-European.

Hebrew is Afro-Asiatic.

2 languages from 2 distinct language families.

And now back to your regularly scheduled topic.

 

Raul X I like that

I can in one way understand his stance on his former colonial masters so to speak, but lets be honest that happened a long time ago. are we to punish the children for the sins of their fathers????

I could do the same with regards to the English / Anglo Saxon Invadors of my islands of which we where invadors before them, what about the Roman's (Italian's) should I refuse to eat Pizza because they invaded Britian over 2000 years ago. Remember at one time Raul's ancesters where colonial invadors too, should he be punished for this.. No of course not.

Like I said, changing your name does not change the past, but with regards to Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, they changed their name and religion at a time when their people where still being oppressed, so it was an active stance during a time of oppression, not an action of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted so to speak.

But hey, anyone has the right to change their name and take a stance against an oppresive regime even if that regime has long gone.

Best regards

Pat

 

Maybe but consider this and please be patient while I go off track this once.

Rev. Eliezer Williams in 1754 wrote and I quote:

Bearing in mind that the Celts/Hiberinian/Iberian/Gaule or what ever other name you may have for them, did not actually start off in Northern Europe, they said to have a distinct connection with the ancient Scythian, as a matter of fact only last year geniologists at the Liecester Univercity trace 90% of English Anglo Saxon DNA to be that of a farm based peoples from Syria.

But anyway enough of the interlude. Back to the movie

Best regards

Pat

 

the moro-moro plays were actually introduced by the spanish. they wouldn't need to meddle to make them 'more' spanish.


tim

 

it likely goes deeper than that, and has more to do with the symbolism behind the number 12. the doce pares of laguna, for instance, is so named after the doce pares de francia, stories of charlemagne and his 12 paladins.


tim

 

i don't know about more authentic and older, but i do know that the moro-moro was used as a cover by some players to spread the rebellion against the spanish, and even the americans. my instructor's great-grandfather was a moro-moro player who went to the visayas to spread the rebellion, under the guise of bringing the moro-moro.


tim

 

can you cite that comparison?


tim

 

This is interesting. The symbolism of 12.

Something of knowledge that the catholic church brought???

The western tempered 12-tonal system for music was developed in the medieval and renaissance period in europe. The catholic church in europe would of documented this perhaps? being in control of the printing in this period.

Most of the universities in Manila were controlled by the catholic church.

The 12 tones are arranged in order of ascending pitch, but the labels of those pitches repeat after the 12th tone, the labels being e.g. C, C#, D, D#, E, etc.

Just saying the significance of 12 and its connection to the catholic church and the influence of the catholic church on the PI.