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Abstract
There is often a perceived conflict between practising martial arts and the academic study of martial arts. Those who practise it do not need to know the history of martial arts, and those who study it do not need the physical practice to inform their research. This paper argues that practitioners will improve their practice by study, in particular, they will gain a demystified sense of the origins of martial arts. The construction of traditional martial arts is the result of the East Asian reaction to Western imperialism and modernity. Moreover, this category developed in direct response to the introduction of modern sports into Asia. Critical to this modern creation was the development of styles of martial arts, where before there were scattered and disparate schools. Styles suggested greater national unity and cultural coherence than schools, thus aiding the building of modern nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Notes
1. Paul Bowman, ‘Is Martial Arts Studies an Academic Field?’, Martial Arts Studies no. 1 (2015), 3–19.
2. Barry Allen, Striking Beauty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 112–58.
3. ‘Self-cultivation’ requires some definition. For my purposes here, I take it to mean a self-conscious effort to improve oneself with respect to one’s own standards of mental, moral or psychological performance. Physical performance may be a means to this end, but the non-physical aspects must be paramount in order to distinguish the pursuit from the direct improvement of strength, agility, endurance or other physical attributes.
4. Allen, Striking Beauty, 103–4.
5. This last trend had led to the curious trend of established Brazilian Jiu Jutsu practitioners ‘outing’ perceived frauds by filming a visit to the ‘fraudulent’ school and posting the video on YouTube.
6. Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo, Jingwu: The School that Transformed Kung Fu (Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2010).
7. Benjamin Judkins and Jon Nielson, The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).
8. Bowman, ‘Is Martial Arts Studies an Academic Field?’, 3–19.
9. Judkins and Nielson, Wing Chun, 216–52.
10. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 2.11, 11.