Research and Discussion Forums

Well of course ninjutsu is better. Everyone knows ninja are capable of flight, teleportation and killing you from several feet away through sheer force of will. In short -"your feeble skills are no match for the power of the dark side". I must say though, being a student of Korean martial...

I'd say the whole situation was almost entirely decided by European geographical advantages. Europeans have access to both horses and cattle, both powerful work animals and in the case of horses, military tools. Central Americans had...Llama's? While Quinoa boasts a very high nutritional content I ...

If this is the case, why study Medieval and Renaissance martial arts at all? In the narrow sense you define above, modern European and American military sciences are clearly superior to pre-modern and early-modern European military sciences, and rather than wasting our time with longswords and so f...

well, first off you cant create sources that don't exist. With that same rationale can you provide evidence that native African armies defeated European ones? Also we need to define "ancient" Ghana, Mali and Songhai. I wouldnt classify medieval and certianly not Renaissance Europe as anci...

I would like for Mr. Clemens to provide evidence of Medieval and Rennaissance European clashes against the forces of ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai which illustrate the alledged (read erroneous) concept that European warriors, using the armaments which make up the corpus of ARMA's curriculum, obser...

As to the supposed egalitarian nature of Western culture, I would argue against such theories, as the Chinese Exclusionary Act of the 19th Cent., Salem witch hunts, African enslavement, the imprisoning of Japanese during WW2, Adolf Hitler's Germany, various "Aryan" rights associations in ...

I'm not trying to degrade anyone, I'm saying that throughout history, certain civilizations have been more technologicaly advanced than others. As long as you look properly at this matter, you'll see that no one culture has had a monopoly on anything advanced. For example, Ta-Seti/Khemit-Ta-Meri/Ta...

I have no doubts that the kaskara was used as a battlefield weapon, since I've seen several mentions of it both in translated snippets from African chronicles and in secondary sources. What I was asking is that was the two-sword style ever used on the battlefield with the kaskara? In the absence of...

Given the cultural and chronological context of the origins of savate, I would not be surprised if it had North African influences, or any of a number of others. Being influenced by something isn't the same as being derived from them, though. Savate may be naturally syncretic in kind of the same wa...

I think its a mistake to look at an art and say , well that sorta looks like this so they must be related. Without proof any ideas of where savate came from are purely theoretical. The only thing feel is proven is that it probably had a start in the Basque area. I see nothing to link it to any Asia...

May I please ask where any of this is going? I am a person of African descent, who rigorously is involved with his ancestral martial traditions but who would like knowledge about non-African MAs, such as displayed here, and who finds nothing constructive in debating the supposed superiority of one ...

From experience, and as I accidentally posted on the "Two-Handed" thread, my own African (Hausa) Gangi tradition uses two swords, and the singular Kaskara type swords, similar to European double edged swords but indigenous to Sudanic Africa, in their extant warrior/hunters traditions. The...

I know little more than nothing about swords and martial arts, but this is what i think. Well, i did´t know that African martial arts existed, but that doesn´t surprise me. African warriors are pretty skilled. Some days ago i saw two warriors( I think they are Massai) fighting with long sticks, and...

Ive heard in some websites that there is a possibility that Savate owes its origins to the kicking arts in Asia, when French sailors brought back techniques they had seen in the Orient, is this true? There is no precedent for savate type kicks in any Asian text I've ever seen. Not in the Bubishi or...

Greetings, After looking at Savate's Grand Baton, I was wondering if it derives in some way from European Two-Handed Sword techniques? I viewed John Clemens performing a beautiful routine with a long two-handed sword years ago on the older site, and was struck by, at least IMO, that there were some ...