Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge

Description

This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book's cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies.

Three central aspects emerge from this book: martial arts as embodied fantasy, as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation, and as a continuous process of identity formation. Contributors explore several popular and highbrow cultural considerations, including the career of Bruce Lee, Chinese wuxia films, and Don DeLillo's novel Running Dog. Ethnographies explored describe how the social body trains in martial arts and how martial arts are constructed in transnational training. Ultimately, this academic study of martial arts offers a focal point for new understandings of cultural and social beliefs and of practice and agency.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Martial Arts, Transnationalism, and Embodied Knowledge
D. S. Farrer and John Whalen-Bridge

Part I: Embodied Fantasy

2. Some Versions of the Samurai: The Budō Core of DeLillo’s Running Dog
John Whalen-Bridge

3. The Fantasy Corpus of Martial Arts, or, The “Communication” of Bruce Lee 
Paul Bowman

4. Body, Masculinity, and Representation in Chinese Martial Arts Films
Jie Lu

Part II: How the Social Body Trains

5. The Training of Perception in Javanese Martial Arts
Jean-Marc de Grave

6. Thai Boxing: Networking of a Polymorphous Clinch
Stéphane Rennesson

Part III: Transnational Self-Construction

7. From Floor to Stage: Kalarippayattu Travels
Martin Welton

8. The Oriental Martial Arts as Hybrid Totems, Together with Orientalized Avatars
Stephen Chan

9. Coffee-Shop Gods: Chinese Martial Arts of the Singapore Diaspora
D. S. Farrer

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Sport
• Arts martiaux
• Arts Martiaux
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Película fotográfica
• Sociology
• Visual culture
• Martial arts
• Electronic
• Film
• Art martial

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438439686
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge
Asian Traditions in a Transnational World
Edited by
D. S. Farrer
and
John Whalen-Bridge

“Chin Woo Fighting Form” cover photograph courtesy of Sifu Ng Gim Han, and Sifu Chow Tong
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martial arts as embodied knowledge : Asian traditions in a transnational world / edited by D. S. Farrer and John Whalen-Bridge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3967-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Martial arts. 2. Martial arts—Social aspects. I. Farrer, D. S. II. Whalen-Bridge, John.
GV1101.M283 2011
796.8—dc22                                                                                                                                                    2011009301
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

D. S. Farrer dedicates his work on this volume to Master Huo Yuanjia .
John Whalen-Bridge dedicates his work on this volume to Takamiyagi Shigeru and Charles Johnson .

Illustrations 5.1 The highest exercise of rasa , figured by the meditation of Arjuna 5.2 A breathing posture from Merpati Putih 5.3 A pair of metal targets broken by a fourth-level student 5.4 A second-level student breaks through concrete during an examination 5.5 Getaran detection during a National Day event in Jakarta 8.1 Ron Nix performing in Okinawa 8.2 Raymond Mbazima performing a double-flying-front kick 8.3 Raymond Mbazima performing a side-thrust kick 9.1 Chow laoshi and Ng sifu perform Spear vs. Three-Section Staff in the late 1950s 9.2 Ng sifu offers joss sticks to Luang Pu Tuat (Phra Ko), in a temple in Hat Yai, Thailand 9.3 AMK125 coffee shop, Singapore 9.4 King of Ghosts, Singapore 9.5 Guan Gong, at the entrance of Choi Lee Fat Kwoon, Guangzhou, China

Acknowledgments
D. S. Farrer wishes to thank the Yan Chin Martial Arts Association, Singapore, for their assistance during his research. Sifu Ng Gim Han, Sifu Chow Tong, and Sifu Tan Mon Joo deserve special recognition. Mr. Yong Feng acted as my translator in several countries where we experienced some difficult, even dangerous, situations. Thanks also to Master Tan of Northern Praying Mantis, Melaka, and the masters and students of the Chin Woo Athletic Federation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Chin Woo Athletic Federation in Foshan and Guangzhou, China. Master Chia of Hong Shen Choi Lai Fut, Singapore, provided invaluable lessons. Many thanks go to Sifu Paul Whitrod, of Southern Praying Mantis, who adopted me into the kung fu fraternity two decades ago. The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Guam provided a seed grant toward this research. Bryan Turner encouraged this project from the outset. Many thanks to John, for sharing some of his no-holds-barred publishing techniques.
John Whalen-Bridge thanks the National University of Singapore for sabbatical leave in 2009 that helped him finish several projects including this book. Thank you Robbie Goh for working out a way for me to spend a whole year writing and not grading a single paper. I also thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for a grant in 2010 that allowed for some help from excellent research assistants such as Rodney Sebastian and Nirmala Iswari. I would especially like to thank my martial arts teachers from Okinawa who made my five years there (1993–1998) time well spent: Shigeru Takamiyagi, Toshio Higa, Katsuyoshi Higa, Sokei and Hatsuko Machida, and Hirokuni Yamashiro. Domo arigato gozaimasu . Thank you to my various sparring partners—whether on the mat or across laptop computers—who have helped define life over the last twenty-five years. And thank you Douglas for convincing me this project could be done.
1
Introduction
Martial Arts, Transnationalism, and Embodied Knowledge
D. S. Farrer and John Whalen-Bridge
The outlines of a newly emerging field—martial arts studies—appear in the essays collected here in Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World . Considering knowledge as “embodied,” where “embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience,” means understanding martial arts through cultural and historical experience; these are forms of knowledge characterized as “being-in-the-world” as opposed to abstract conceptions that are somehow supposedly transcendental ( Csordas 1999: 143 ). Embodiment is understood both as an ineluctable fact of martial training, and as a methodological cue. Assuming at all times that embodied practices are forms of knowledge, the writers of the essays presented in this volume approach diverse cultures through practices that may appear in the West to be esoteric and marginal, if not even dubious and dangerous expressions of those cultures. The body is a chief starting point for each of the enquiries collected in this volume, but embodiment, connecting as it does to imaginative fantasy, psychological patterning, and social organization, extends “far beyond the skin of the practicing individual” (Turner and Yangwen 2009). The discourse of martial arts, which is composed of the sum total of all the ways in which we can register, record, and otherwise signify the experience of martial arts mind-and-body training, is the topic par excellence through which to understand the challenges of embodied knowledge, fantasy, and the body. 1
The subject of martial arts studies may cause some readers to pause as it invokes a series of disturbing dialectical linkages between philosophy, religion and violence, self-defense and aggression, Buddhism and brutality, and points toward an Asian war machine supposedly usurped by the “evolution” of sophisticated modern (read Western) methods of remote disembodied technological warfare. The valorizing words that tether experience of various sorts to “knowledge” appear to be greased in the places where martial artists are most likely to attempt to catch hold. In Western academe, precisely because martial arts seem like an awkward pretender to “knowledge,” the problems associated with embodied knowledge and scholarly resistance to it are apparent. However, studies of the body and embodiment have resisted becoming the materialistic fall guy to “mind” or “spirit.” The growth of martial arts studies has almost certainly been stunted by one of the paradoxes of postcolonialism: the conceptual apparatus of embodied thinking, in its reflexive effort to liberate the body from its role as mind's subordinate other, too often goes too far in the direction of what Spivak (1996: 214) has called “strategic essentialism.” The term “martial arts” signifies “Eastern” and can be accessed to champion, as a counterdiscourse to effeminizing Orientalist clichés, the contemporary paradigmatic image of the Asian-yet-masculine martial arts icon (think of Bruce Lee). To the degree that this reactionary response is highly predictable, so does the cumulative effect of Asian martial arts discourse serve, in spite of its advocates' best intentions, to reify and falsely unify the notion of a centered, stable, objective Asian culture.
Martial arts, meaning the things done to make the study of fighting appear refined enough to survive elite social prohibitions, has never been exclusively an Asian matter, but martial arts discourse , meaning the expectations that help order the texts and images of martial bodily training and its entourage of cultural side effects, remains predominantly projected onto the Asian body. In Western representation martial arts are powerfully associated with specifically Asian traditions and practices. The association of particular physical skills with particular kinds of socialization gathers even more complexity when we figure in the role of Orientalist fantasy. According to Edward Said (1979) , we (especially the empowered “we” of the West as opposed to Asia) construct a fantasy self, and this fantasy self uses a distorted version of an Other to brace itself. One casts oneself into a primary role and casts the other—the fantasized Other—into an often unflattering role, thus producing a foil for the fantasized self. The very act of imagining other civilizations is its own form of war, according to extreme extensions of this model, and so we must approach martial arts as a vehicle of intercultural transmission and communication with caution and care.
Martial arts considered as embodied knowledge offers a rapidly changing, ambiguous, contradictory, and paradoxical quarry. Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World approaches the study of Asian martial arts with such built-in conceptual problems firmly in hand. Whereas martial arts discourse often produces “positive” images of the Asian body, a positive image, if it is a stereotype, can be demeaning even as it apparently flatters in terms of its semiotic content. Therefore, we must figure into our corrective reconsiderations that the celebration of achievement in a purely physical sphere also offers a compliment in a manner that may ultimately be a put down. The language and intellectual habits of “globalization” have begun to unsettle the illusory and not especially productive fantasies of an enduring Asian identity that is articulated within and often defended by heroic practit