Breaking ceramic action figure by Martin Klimas. Source: http://www.whudat.de/exploding-porcelain-action-figures-by-martin-klimas-7-pictures/

Introduction

Welcome to the fifth entry in our series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.”  If you missed the first essay by D. S. Farrer (which provides a global overview of the subject), the second by Daniel Mroz (how to select a school or teacher for research purposes), the third by  Jared Miracle (learning new martial arts systems while immersed in a foreign culture), or the fourth by Thomas Green (who is only in it for the stories) be sure to check them out!

Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly democratic flavor.  Many individuals are introduced to these systems while students at a college or university and are interested in seeing a more intellectually rigorous treatment of their interests.  And certain practitioners want to go beyond reading studies produced by other writers and undertake research based on their own time in the training hall.   The emphasis on ethnographic description, oral and local history, as well as the methodological focus on community based collaborative research within Martial Arts Studies (itself a radically interdisciplinary area), makes participation in such efforts both relatively accessible and highly valuable.  Or maybe you are a student about to embark on your first ethnographic research project?

Dr. Daniel Amos is a pioneer of modern ethnographic research on the Chinese martial arts.  His work opened a window onto the social world of southern Chinese martial artists (both in Hong Kong and Guangzhou) during the late 1970s and early 1980s.  This was an incredibly important time in the spread of the modern Chinese fighting styles, making his detailed observations all the more important.  His work was hugely helpful to me when I began my own writing on the region a few decades later.  As such I am thrilled that he has agreed to join this discussion.  In the following essay Dr. Amos will tackle a number of questions regarding a researcher’s ethical responsibilities as they first become members of, and then report on, various (often marginal) communities.  While the political situation in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution threw these issues into stark relief, they are a topic that no ethnographer can afford to ignore.

Lies I have told about martial artists

by Daniel M. Amos, March 17, 2016
hungchongshan@yahoo.com

Recently, I joked with a friend of mine that I did not actually do ethnographic fieldwork in Post-Mao, Guangzhou, China and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, but rather invented my studies of Cantonese martial artists while enjoying the sunshine of Santa Monica Beach.  At the very least, I can be thought of as a suspicious character.  My schoolmate at UCLA was Carlos Castaneda.  We shared the same graduate student mailbox (for surnames A-C), the same dissertation chair, and had many of the same anthropology faculty members on our dissertation committees.  Carlos was accused of poetic license, of embellishing the details of his well-known accounts of flying Yaqui brujos who perform magic in the Sonoran desert.  In his review of Castaneda’s first book, Edmund Leach, the eminent social anthropologist, observed that “…this is a work of art rather than of scholarship, and it is as a diary of unusual personal experiences that the book deserves attention (Leach 1969).”

Carlos frequently visited the UCLA anthropology department during my early graduate student days there, and he spoke with and cultivated a number of graduate students, mostly women.  I was not a member of Carlos’ inner-circle and only vaguely associated with him.  Yet it is probable that our ethnographic writing shares at least one trait: All the characters that appear in my ethnographic descriptions of martial artists in southern China during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s are fiction.  My fiction, however, differed from that of my famous schoolmate in that I considered my study to be largely a political study.  During the time of my dissertation research (1976-1981) in two neighboring Cantonese cities, impoverished socialist Guangzhou and comparatively wealthy colonial Hong Kong, I felt that Chinese martial arts in both places could be partly understood as a form of cultural play that illuminated and revealed conflict between social classes.

Ultimately, the fictionalization of my ethnographic writing about Chinese martial artists was generated out of concern for protecting the privacy and personal identities of the participants in my study.   In Hong Kong from the beginning of colonial rule through the end of British rule in 1997, practitioners of Chinese martial artists who belonged to martial arts brotherhoods were suspected by the colonial government of being involved in criminal activities, organized crime, members of Triads.   A Hong Kong police report prepared in the 1970s by the Hong Kong Triad Society Bureau for Hong Kong police officers at the rank of lieutenant and above, for example, stated that one-third of independent Hong Kong martial arts brotherhoods were associated with Triads and engaged in criminal activities.

“In many cases local gymnasia, particularly gymnasia associated with the more traditional forms of Chinese martial arts training, serve as the local headquarters for Triad society factions, especially in respect of local enforcement work.  A percentage of the staff, managers, and instructors of such establishments are known to be or are suspected of being Triad officials or active Triad members.   Of the 419 such establishments in the Colony, 141 are suspected of Triad associations (Hong Kong Triad Bureau 1974:54)”

Although I could not definitively prove it, my own biases led me to feel that the strong official association of martial artists with criminality was exaggerated, generated out of natural fear by the ruling and middle classes of a mobilized and semi-militarized segment of the impoverished and working poor.  In a society where there were no guns except those carried by the local British-led military and police, the higher social orders felt anxiety about working class youth and adults who developed martial skills within their own voluntary associations.

However, I knew Hong Kong martial artists who, while not members of criminal Triad gangs, would suffer physical, psychological, social, economic, or legal harm, or damage to their dignitary if my writing exposed their identities and behavior.  I knew Hong Kong martial artists who were alcoholics, opium users, organizers of dog fights and gambling, butchers and sellers of dog meat, gay and transgender martial artists, frequenters of prostitutes, those with sexually transmitted diseases, martial artists who could not read, unemployed martial artists and martial artists who were undocumented immigrants.  For this reason I wrote fiction, not identifying individuals, but attempted to describe a variety of cultural scenes related to martial arts in Hong Kong.

Already sensitive about the potential harm to those who participated in my study of martial artists, my concern about protecting the identities of the participants in my study of martial artists in Guangzhou was heightened because of the Mosher Affair.   Steven Mosher, a Stanford University anthropology graduate student had conducted research in a Guangdong village for several months, from the end of 1979 to the beginning of summer 1980.  He was the first anthropology graduate student from the United States permitted to do ethnographic research in mainland China since the end of the Cultural Revolution.  The Chinese authorities repeatedly complained about Mr. Mosher’s behavior during his time in Guangdong province.  They abruptly ended his study and he was not permitted to remain in China.

As far as I am aware, I was the second U.S. graduate student ethnographer to do research in China during this time.  Although my stay in Guangdong province (June 1980 – August 1981) was of longer duration than Mr. Mosher’s, it caused far less controversy with the Chinese authorities and with fellow anthropologists.

During the time of Mr. Mosher’s project and my research project in China the fundamental rule taught to every beginning ethnographer and formally accepted by all in the field was that researchers were obligated to protect the participants of their studies.  The code of the American Anthropological Association at the time clearly stated this most basic requirement: “In research, an anthropologist’s paramount responsibility is to those he studies.   When there is a conflict of interest, these individuals must come first.  The anthropologist must do everything within his power to protect their physical, social and psychological welfare and to honor their dignity and privacy (Van Ness, The Mosher Affair, The Wilson Quarterly, 1984:160-172).”  

During his stay in the village where he did his research, Mr. Mosher discovered that some Chinese women had been forced by local officials to undergo involuntary abortions, sometimes late in pregnancy.  In May 1981, writing under the name Steven Westley, Mr. Mosher described forced abortions in Guangdong province in an article he produced for a popular Taiwanese magazine (Ibid.).  Taking no care to disguise their identities, in the same article he published photographs of women who had been forced to undergo this procedure (Ibid.).  By publishing their photos, clearly identifying and exposing those who had undergone involuntary abortions, Mr. Mosher subjected the women he wrote about to punishment by the Chinese government.

Both the Stanford University academic committee investigating his case and Mr. Mosher separately interviewed me about the incident.  I had nothing to add to their investigations.  Chinese officials had not shared information about Mr. Mosher with me, a lowly U.S. graduate student.

Based on information gather during the academic committee’s investigation of the affair, Stanford University produced a report, shared it with Mr. Mosher, and expelled him from the university’s anthropology program.  Neither side has revealed the contents of the report.

The fates of the women Mr. Mosher exposed to harm are unknown to me, but it is my hope that the damage they experienced from his selfish, reckless actions was not severe.  Clearly, they were the most important actors in this event, and had the most to lose.

At present, because of irresponsible researchers in the past who showed no concern about the consequences of their research on those who participated in their studies, there are now more rigorous institutional safeguards for research which use human subjects.  Researchers affiliated with a university or government agency must have their research projects approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB).   Research participants need to be informed and consent to research which involves them. They should understand the purpose and nature of the research, and their role in it.  Before proceeding with their investigations, researchers must rigorously assess and minimize possible harm to participants, and assure the confidentiality of their identities, including protecting them from exposure through photographs, videos, audio recordings, and computer records (Robert Yin, Qualitative Research from Start to Finish, 2016:49).  Hopefully, contemporary undergraduate martial arts researchers experience more rigorous human subjects training and research review of their projects than anthropology students of 40 years ago.

When I was in Guangzhou, I knew many martial artists who would suffer physical, psychological, social, economic, legal harm or damage to their dignitary if my writing exposed their identities, thoughts and actions.  Some hated Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, others engaged in gambling and fighting, some were alcoholics, others had pre-marital sex, then an illegal activity, and many others had positive, uncritical fantasies about developed, capitalist countries and hoped to emigrate.

The first several months I lived in Guangzhou I practiced kung fu with a private martial arts brotherhood.   Most mornings I awoke at 5 a.m. and rode my bicycle several miles into the city from Zhongshan University.   1980 was before the massive growth of Guangzhou, and at that time the university was on the outskirts of the city.  In my early ethnographic writing about Chinese martial artists, because of the sensitive nature of my research, none of the martial artists with whom I practiced kung fu appeared in the pages of my dissertation and early publications.  The identities of the martial artists I wrote about were changed.  Further, in my early publications all the martial artists from Guangzhou whom I described in detail had left the People’s Republic of China, and were residing in Hong Kong, Macau, overseas or were deceased.  In summary, my ethnographic descriptions did not portray any martial artist then living in the People’s Republic of China, and any similarity to any individual residing in China was strictly unintentional and coincidental.

When I finished my fieldwork, I brought home dozens of recorded interviews and translated and transcribed interviews with martial artists, articles and works in Chinese about martial arts, books of field notes, photographs, Super 8mm film, and video-recordings.    My primary field advisor, Barbara E. Ward, a brilliant, generous, creative anthropologist, with an appointment at Cambridge, and founder of the Anthropology program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, asked me what I was going to do with all my marvelous ethnographic data.   I did not have the slightest idea of where to begin, and was immobile, petrified, buried under a mountain of stuff.   Barbara said, “OK, start with this,” and handed me a copy of James Liu’s work, “The Chinese Knight-Errant (1967).”  Liu discussed how martial arts have long been associated in Chinese culture with knight errantry, an ancient symbol of resistance against social constraints.  He described the Chinese knight errant as a playful warrior who is rebellious, loyal to friends, altruistic, courageous, an extreme individualist who despises society’s conventions, but desires honor and fame.  Liu’s Chinese knight errant sounded a lot like some of the martial artists I knew in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.  Even more Chinese martial artists told stories about people who were similar to the Chinese knights Liu described.

The point that Barbara was making when she handed me James Liu’s book was that you can have a mountain of ethnographic data, but if you don’t come around to having an accurate and useful understanding of what you’ve discovered, it can be useless.   Like many anthropologists of my generation, the work of Victor Turner helped to illuminate my data.  Carlos G. Velez, one of my dissertation committee members, greatly influenced me on the topic of social marginality, as did the work of my friend Jean DeBernardi on social marginality in Penang’s black societies.

I have used the ideas of my mentors and friends and of the scholars that I admire to analyze the data about martial artists that I brought back with me.  It is my hope that the lies I have told about Chinese martial artists have been honest ones, protecting them, while adding some light to the field.

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About the Author: Daniel M Amos has practiced martial arts for forty years, and has taught social science courses or been a faculty researcher at five Chinese and five U.S. universities, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Beijing Normal University, Wuhan University, Clark Atlanta University, and the University of Washington. He was awarded a PhD degree in Anthropology from UCLA in 1983.

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If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Dr. Daniel Amos Discusses Marginality, Martial Arts Studies and the Modern Development of Southern Chinese Kung Fu

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Introduction

A few months ago I decided to make a more concerted effort to report on academic conferences and seminars happening within the field of martial arts studies.  My hope is to promote greater awareness of current discussions within our growing research community.  Readers interested in following these trends might want to begin by check prior reports here, here and here.

This is something that I cannot do without your help.  If you have recently attended a conference or seminar please consider submitting a brief report that can be shared with the Kung Fu Tea community.  Its a great way to keep the conversation going even after everyone returns to their normal schedules.  Simply shoot me an email, message me on the facebook group, or leave a comment if you know of an event that should be covered.

Today’s report is reblogged from the Martial Arts Studies Research Network (you can see the original here) and was written by Paul Bowan.  As always, Paul did a great job of capturing not only essence of the arguments that various researchers put forth, but the overall “tone” of the event as well.  For those of us who could not attend, reports like this are the next best thing to being there.  Enjoy!

Kung Fury: Contemporary Debates in Martial Arts Cinema
Paul Bowman

A key aim of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network is the forging connections; and specifically of two kinds of connection: on the one hand, connections between academics approaching martial arts from different perspectives and different disciplines; and on the other hand, connections between those working on martial arts inside the university and those on the outside. The first Martial Arts Studies Research Network event at Brighton University in February 2016, saw academics from the social sciences in particular enter into discussions and debates on issues related to gender, youth, sexuality and class with a range of teachers, coaches and practitioners from outside of academia. The second event, at Birmingham City University on 1^st April 2016 brought scholars, researchers and teachers of martial arts in film and visual culture into dialogue with film-makers, distributors, festival organisers and other industry professionals.

The event was hosted by Drs Simon Barber and Oliver Carter from Birmingham City University, who arranged a fast-moving and fascinating day, involving keynotes, panels, plenaries, buffets, receptions and a film screening, all of which went off without a hitch.

The first main event was a keynote address by Bey Logan – a writer, martial artist, actor, director and producer, who is well known for his wide-ranging work within all aspects of the Hong Kong film industry. He began by reporting that his presentation title was initially going to be something along the lines of ‘Why Kung Fu Movies Matter’, but that he changed it to ‘Why I Love Kung Fu Movies and Why They Matter’.

In his talk, Logan’s argument was that although kung fu movies are obviously so much fun for the viewer, they also ‘propose dreams’, dreams that kung fu training itself can in a way make real. I found myself to be in complete agreement with Logan throughout his discussion of the relations between cinematic fantasy, escapism and real life, and I have made similar arguments myself, many times. However, just because Logan’s argument was familiar to me, does not mean it was predictable. Rather, Logan spiced his presentation with a range of interesting and often hilarious biographical and industry references and anecdotes that made for a very fresh and lively presentation.

Bey Logan with Jo Morrell, who has also written her own report on the event which you can read here.

In the process, he also proposed an image for one useful way to understand the logic of the development of martial arts cinema in Hong Kong. The image is that of a bending and stretching mirror. If we think of this image, he proposed, it is possible to see the ways that film production develops, with new films mirroring earlier films, but not identically. Rather, because of the variations and angles of reflection, different films produce exaggerated or stunted dimensions, some flip over from serious to comedy, and others flip back from comedy to serious, and so on, and so forth, in endless dialectical permeations and permutations. (In a way, this image mapped onto an image proposed by Susan Pui San Lok’s later presentation of her artwork projects, in a paper entitled ‘RoCH Fans and Legends’.

I cannot easily do justice to the richness and diversity of Bey Logan’s presentation. But hopefully we will see it in print in the not-so-distant future – Simon Barber and Oliver Carter are keen to develop the conference proceedings into a special issue of the journal Martial Arts Studies (http://martialartsstudies.org/). Suffice it to say that Logan discussed a wide range of films and issues, ranging from accounts of the personalities of key figures in the Hong Kong film industry to an argument in favour of the specific variant of feminism that he sees as unique to Hong Kong martial arts films.

The following panel saw papers by Jonathan Wroot, Hyunseon Lee and Felicia Chan. Wroot discussed issues in the distribution of Hong Kong films in the West in general; Lee explored the transnational and intermedial connections between martial arts film and Chinese opera; while Chan asked the question ‘Must a Chinese (Auteur) Filmmaker make a Martial Arts Film?’

All three papers were stimulating in different ways; but I think that Chan’s paper spoke most directly to my own interests, as it essentially operated at the level of discourse, proposing that not only is the category of the ‘auteur’ socially constructed, and not only does it serve a range of interests, but it also – when we think of how many East Asian ‘auteur’ directors turn to making a martial arts film or two at the mid to late points of their careers – shows us the ways in which a range of forces, expectations and gratifications play themselves out in the types of film production we can see from certain figures in certain times and places. Chan also rather deftly deployed a reflection on the growth of ‘simplified Chinese script’ in such a way as to pose questions of the ways Chinese ‘auteur’ (and) martial arts films are elaborated.

After lunch came an industry panel discussion on the making and distribution of martial arts film, featuring Bey Logan, Paul Smith, and Spencer Murphy, each in their own way representing the realms of film production, promotion, and distribution.

The final session of the day featured presentations from Susan Pui San Lok, Kyle Barrowman and Colette Balmain. Lok showed sections of short films she had made from myriad jumping and flying scenes from the many episodes of different versions of the Condor Trilogy / Return of the Condor Hero, alongside discussion of her ongoing art practice, in a complex argument about the (re)iteration and dissemination of textual elements.

Is this what they mean by “mixed martial arts”? Source: PEGASUS MOTION PICTURES

Kyle Barrowman followed, with a paper that he proposed took issue with aspects of Bey Logan’s arguments about the supposed differences between Hong Kong and Hollywood film. Barrowman argued – contra Logan – that MMA is not an ethically or morally barren world compared to traditional martial arts, and that signs of its complex lifeworlds can be discerned in the emerging movement of MMA films. Barrowman’s overarching project involves reconsidering the American martial arts film, and obviously MMA films seem to map onto this concern; but Logan proposed that MMA has clearly been incorporated into a number of Donnie Yen films, which suggests that there is no necessary correlation of ‘MMA film’ with ‘Hollywood’. In a similar spirit, I proposed – only half joking – that perhaps the best example of a film about MMA and/as ‘culture’ might be Keanu Reeves’ directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi.

Colette Balmain concluded the academic proceedings with a discussion of the heroines of Hong Kong cinema, in an enjoyable and challenging paper that sought to examine the problems and possibilities of female agency within the traditional martial arts film. Her argument was that such cinematic feminism is at once gesturing towards a kind of emancipation whilst always operating within the strictures of certain established representational codes and conventions.

In many ways, then, Bey Logan turned out to have been the ideal keynote for this event. His opening keynote unexpectedly set the scene – and many of the terms – of and for the ensuing academic and industry discussions and debates, all of which made for a wonderfully interconnected and cross-fertilizing day.

But the day was not over yet. After a Chinese buffet and drinks reception, Oliver and Simon led us across to the next building, an erstwhile IMAX cinema, where we watched the eponymous yet hitherto largely unmentioned or undiscussed star of the day – the half hour film Kung Fury.

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If you enjoyed this report you might also want to see: After Action Report on the First Annual Martial Arts Studies Conference

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A young TY Wong, right, at the 1928 Central Goushu Institute’s national martial arts demonstration in Nanjing, China. Source: From the Collection of Charles Russo.

The Sturdy Citizen’s Club circa 1965. TY Wong, top row second from right, with students in his basement studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Source: From the collection of Charles Russo.

Working the Beat: One Journalist’s Efforts at Perfecting the Fine Art of Hanging Out

So I’m up to my elbows in cobwebs chasing down a dead man in a nearby Necropolis…and to be honest, it’s all really a lot of fun.

Let me rephrase that: I’m in Gilman Wong’s garage in the city of Colma, California, trying to find a picture of his dad – TY Wong. For almost a century now, San Francisco has buried its dead in the city of Colma, just a couple miles to the south. At present, there are about 1,500 living souls in Colma and 1.5 million dead ones. That’s quite a ratio, and driving over to Gilman’s house past the massive graveyards, it’s easy enough to daydream in the direction of a zombie apocalypse.

TY Wong (or, Wong Tim Yuen) is one of the pioneering martial artists that I profile in my book, Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America.  A Sil Lum master who was quickly recruited by the local branch of the Hop Sing Tong upon his arrival to San Francisco, TY – along with his senior contemporary Lau Bun – oversaw the martial arts culture in Chinatown for more than a quarter century. Despite his many key contributions to the martial arts in America, TY has mostly fallen through the cracks of popular memory. So now, I’m in the graveyard city of Colma, trying to pull him out.

It’s taken me two years to get in touch with TY’s son Gilman. And after letters and phone calls and go-betweens, here we are in his garage dusting the cobwebs off of a photo from the 1940s in a broken frame beneath cracked glass…and it’s a real gem.

If you would ask who my favorite practitioner was that I profiled in my book about the pioneering martial arts scene on San Francisco Bay in the early 1960s, I’d have a hard time settling on just one person. From the old guard in Chinatown, to the innovators in Oakland, to a young trash-talking Bruce Lee, one figure was more compelling than the next. But when it comes to photographs, all of my favorites seem to involve TY Wong.

There’s the 1965 photograph of of him with seven teenage students in his Chinatown school: the Kin Mon Physical Culture Studio (or, The Sturdy Citizen’s Club). Here, TY is pictured next to his one white student at the time: Irish teenager Noel O’Brien. Beginning in 1960 with Al Novak, TY was known to accept the occasional non-Chinese student despite the prevailing exclusionary etiquette of the times.

A true martial artist, there is also the photograph of TY playing the violin in his living room (“he was self-taught,” according to Gilman). But best of all, is the image of TY at the 1928 Central Guoshu Institute’s national tournament in Nanjing, China. TY is on the right in a tai chi pose, with his teacher Long Tin Chee in the center, and senior student Chew Lung on the far left. It’s just a beautiful glimpse of martial arts history, and up to now that image has been my standout favorite.

However, looking through the cracked glass at this photograph of TY, it might just be a contender for my new front-runner. It’s a parade scene from San Francisco in the 1940s, and TY is surrounded by a large team of martial artists. He stands at the center of the entire congregation all in black, holding butterfly swords. Despite the many men around him and his slim stature, TY looks quietly authoritative and formidable.

Gilman and I retrieve this image and several others from the garage, including what we originally came for – the photos from the Arlene Francis show (more on that later). We then proceed inside to talk shop for a few hours. As I said, it’s all quite a lot of fun.

TY Wong standing with butterfly swords, center, during a San Francisco street parade during the 1940s. Source: Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong.

Celebrated veteran journalist Gay Talese once said that good journalism is predicated on “mastering the fine art of hanging out”…which of course, is possibly the least academic sentiment ever written, though that’s not to say it’s without merit.

Working a beat as a journalist is a simple enough concept. It means to cover a particular topic thoroughly and on a consistent basis. You get to know the people, the places, the issues, and the nuance by frequently putting yourself in close proximity to them. In this sense, Talese was talking about investing enough time so that something or someone can be seen from many angles; the myriad facets beyond the cultivated identity that is projected to the world.

For my book, I applied a beat reporter’s approach to this particular era of martial arts history. I suppose that is a more formal way of articulating my efforts at perfecting the hangout. Whatever you want to call it, here are a few aspects of the approach that seem the most essential.

Bruce with his new girlfriend (and future wife) Linda Emery, along with James Lee, Ed Parker, and Ed Jr., outside the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium in December of 1963, where Parker was set to launch his inaugural tournament. Bruce and Linda had traveled south from Seattle to Pasadena over Christmas recess (picking up James Lee in Oakland along the way) presumably to watch the Huskies in the Rose Bowl. But really, Bruce just wanted an excuse to visit Ed Parker. Source: Photo courtesy of the Parker Family.

The Horse’s Mouth

While studying History (for my grad and undergrad) I kept noticing something peculiar. It was constantly being explained to me how important primary sources were, of seeking out the accounts of people who experienced events first-hand. Yet, there was zero emphasis on actually talking to those people. You could read their books or archived papers, but no one ever picked up the phone to speak with them directly. Once, when a classmate was discussing his questions about the aging author of a labor struggle memoir, I blurted out – “Why don’t you just call him?” The whole seminar turned around in shock and glared at me, as if I had said – “Why don’t you just assassinate him?”

Over in the journalism department, it was the opposite. My professors berated me for not having enough sources, for not trying hard enough to track people down. It knocked me out of my comfort zone, but in the long run I knew they were right. After all, you can’t ask follow up questions to a book, only to it’s author.

In 2012, tai chi master James Wing Woo published a really nice book about his career and method, titled SIFU. Woo was a perennial figure of the West coast martial arts scene dating back to the late 1930s. His book contains a short interview conducted by well-known journalist Ben Fong-Torres, in which Woo comments briefly on his time amid the martial arts culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown, including his experiences with Lau Bun and TY Wong. Upon reading this, I instantly had a wealth of questions for Woo, and living up to my history seminar point-of-view, I contacted James and was down at his studio in Los Angeles four days later. Woo answered all of my questions, explaining the delicate relationship between TY Wong and Lau Bun, the culture of Chinatown’s little-known Ghee Yau Seah (“The Soft Arts Academy”), and the quiet resurgence of opium in the neighborhood throughout the 1940s. He also conveyed some incredible stories of how TY Wong was the Hop Sing Tong’s go-to enforcer for whenever U.S. servicemen on shore leave got too rowdy while carousing the neighborhood’s Forbidden City nightclubs.

Sadly, James Wing Woo passed away just a few months after I interviewed him. I hate to think how much more information went with him.

Martial artists, even retired ones, are fairly easy to find. They are almost always tied to a school in some capacity, and tracking them down isn’t that difficult. Someone will refer you to them  if you ask, and they love discussing their careers. This is not always the case with sources. Once while writing an article about the Zodiac Killer, I had to track down a former SFPD Homicide Inspector who retired on bad terms. No web site, no school or association, no interest in being found. That was difficult. Finding a martial artist is not.

Long Beach: “He just started trashing people.” A young Bruce Lee, bottom row second from left, standing with other presenters at Ed Parker’s inaugural Long Beach International Karate Tournament in the summer of 1964. J. Pat Burleson, Bruce Lee, Anthony Mirakian, Jhoon Rhee. Back Row, Left to Right: Allen Steen, George Mattson, Ed Parker, Tsutomu Ohshima, Robert Trias. Source: Photo courtesy of Darlene Parker.

Interview Off the Beaten Path

Here’s a quote you’ve probably never heard before: “People were practically lining up to fight Bruce Lee after his demonstration at Long Beach.”

That’s from Clarence Lee, a karate master who taught in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 50 years. He was a judge at Ed Parker’s inaugural Long Beach International Tournament in the summer of 1964, and he knew the martial arts culture of the era inside out. They don’t quite make ‘em like Clarence anymore. He is now in his late 80s, has luminous eyes, stark white hair, and curses like a drowning sailor. (When I asked him about the reasons for the Bruce Lee / Wong Jack Man fight, he quickly shot back – “Have you ever heard of macho fucking bullshit?”) I don’t doubt Clarence’s opinion on Long Beach, yet I feel like I’m the only person who has ever really asked him.

In this sense, I think that some of the best and most colorful details often come from the supporting cast, as much as the lead; from the batboy, as much as the All-Star shortstop.

Take Barney Scollan for instance, who was an 18 year-old competitor at Long Beach in ’64. Although Scollan had been disqualified early in the day (“for kicking a guy in the nuts”) he anxiously hung around to watch Bruce Lee, particularly after witnessing his dynamic demo the night before in the hotel. Bruce’s actual tournament demonstration had a far more critical tone from the evening prior, and it struck Scollan as a revelation. “He just started trashing people. He got up there and began to flawlessly imitate all these other styles,” Scollan explains, “and then one-by-one he began to dissect them and explain why they wouldn’t work. And the things he was saying made a lot of sense.”

This is all a bit different from what I had been reading for years on Bruce at Long Beach in 1964. The prevailing narrative has asserted that Bruce did a bunch of fancy stunts, and was so fast and so charismatic that everyone quickly fell in love with him. For some reason, I’ve never been told that Bruce challenged the merit of everyone’s approach, and then half the placed wanted to kick his ass afterwards. There were a lot of people at Long Beach in 1964, is it possible that we’ve been relying on the same few sources over and over, and as a result have failed to grasp the complete story?

Oddly enough, it was another unlikely source –  TY Wong’s student Joe Cervara – who summed this all up for me in a perfect sound bite, when he explained to me that his teacher was never fond of Bruce Lee, and considered him – “A Dissident with Bad Manners.” I’ve had never heard that quote before either.

Bruce Lee with Barney Scollan during impromptu demonstrations the night before the first Long Beach International Karate Tournament in 1964. Source: Photo courtesy of Darlene Parker.

Ask Outside the Box

So I’m sitting opposite Dan Inosanto in his office and my first question is simple enough: “Can you tell me about your early martial arts background?” To which he replies, “Yeah, so I first met Bruce in ’64, during the Long Beach….”

I interrupt, “I’m sorry, I wanted to know your background in the martial arts.”

He looks puzzled but a bit relieved, “Oh…ok. Well, my uncle came back from World War II and he started teaching me Okinawan te, they didn’t call it karate back then.”

I cringe to think how many times Dan Inosanto has been asked the same questions regarding Bruce Lee over and over and over. This predictable line of questioning is unfortunate because not only is Dan an encyclopedia of martial arts knowledge, but his CV is literally a who’s-who of early martial arts pioneers in America.

After talking about his earliest days training with his uncle, Inosanto explains his time in the service training with Sergeant Henry Slomanski, an early western karate champion who ran rough-and-tumble training sessions in the U.S. military. Slomanski is one of those often forgotten figures that played a key role in setting the stage for a thriving martial arts culture in America , and Dan Inosanto can talk at length about training with him.

We then move on to his time with kung fu master Ark Wong, and then Ed Parker. When I ask him about Wally Jay, he responds “Well, Wally Jay is sort of like my own personal hero,” before delving into the specifics of the jujitsu master’s exalted career. When I ask him about Leo Fong, he laughs and explains that by coincidence, Fong had actually been his family’s church minister back in Stockton. James Lee? Sure, he remembers James hardening his forearms by banging them against the telephone pole outside Ed Parker’s school in Pasadena. There’s a treasure trove of information here….and to think that I could have vaulted past all of this and just started with, “Tell me when you first met Bruce?”

I once read a piece by William S. Burroughs, written very late in his life, when he said that the questions asked of him by journalists and documentarians had gotten so predictable that he felt inclined to just refer them to other articles and documentaries that already contained the information. In this sense, researchers and journalists need to advance the line of inquiry beyond the obvious.

In Colma, when I arrived at Gilman Wong’s house he a had a variety of images and photo albums laid out on the living the room table, many of which I had seen before. I looked them over and asked, “Are the Arlene Francis photos in here?” He smiles, “No, but I think I have them in the garage.”

In 1955, TY Wong and his students from Kin Mon appeared on the Home show, a popular daytime “magazine program” hosted by Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs. A full decade before Americans were introduced to Kato on The Green Hornet, TY and his Kin Mon students had performed kung fu on NBC. Kin Mon’s appearance on Home is significant not only as a milestone in American martial arts (and broadcast) history, but as yet another prime example of TY evolving the culture beyond the old Tong code of not exhibiting the Chinese martial arts to the non-Chinese.

I don’t think Gilman had ever thought of digging up those particular photos, so it took an alternative line of inquiry to unearth them.

Images from TY Wong’s Kin Mon school performance on NBC’s Home show with Arlene Francis, top left, in 1955. Source: Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong.

The Myth of the Mundane

History isn’t boring. It only seems that way when we’re not looking hard enough.

Think about Colma, for instance. Most people outside of the San Francisco Bay Area have probably never heard of this quiet town two miles south of one of the more colorful cities in the world. Even still, it’s a super interesting place. Consider this: traffic problems in Colma are typically caused by funeral processions. In fact, residents receive text messages to warn them of particularly large ones.

Some of the most notable of Colma’s (deceased) residents include Joe Dimaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst.  Many of those who died prior to 1920 were originally buried in San Francisco, before they were (in all-too-modern fashion) priced out of the city’s real estate market, and then relocated to Colma during the middle part of the century.

The advantage of steady beat reporting is that it inevitably shakes the more fascinating details from hiding, even with topics that seem mundane on the surface. And while this can often require a journalist or researcher to take frequent trips back to a certain location, or numerous follow-up interviews with any given source, it seems to always render far more compelling material than first expected.

Together with Lau Bun, TY Wong would oversee the martial arts culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown for more than a quarter century. (Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong)

 
I leave Gilman Wong’s home with some photographs and several pages of notes. It’s all excellent material that has exceeded my expectations, from the Arlene Francis photos to the image of the 1940s street scene, to the subtle nuances of this history that Gilman has conveyed to me. In this regard, the beat has rendered some great results.

If I am in fact getting better at “hanging out,” it is due to some of these approaches that I have learned over time. And in case I lost you on all the graveyard talk (or, you just got caught up staring at TY’s butterfly swords), here is a recap. First and foremost, when it comes to sources, make a wish-list of who you would ideally like to speak with and then pursue each of them individually until they tell you – “no.” (And then politely pursue them a bit more.) The more primary sources the better. Next, look to speak with the fringe players as much as the principal characters, they will give your work unique details and nuance. Do your homework on what is already out there, and ask questions that advance the topic forward. If you need to cover well-tread material, find a new angle at approaching it. Finally, remember that even the most mundane topics can render fascinating details if you invest the time and look hard enough.

As the graveyards stream by on my right, I feel like TY Wong’s legacy is slowly ascending from obscurity. TY is buried out here. So is Lau Bun. I drive out of Colma fascinated with the people and places this history has presented to me. When it comes to the fine art of hanging out, this is easily one of the best beats I’ve had the good fortune to cover.

oOo

About the Author: Charles Russo is a journalist in San Francisco. He is the author of Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America (available July 1^st from the University of Nebraska Press). For more photographs and materials related to the book, see the Striking Distance Instagram account (@striking_distance) or the Facebook page.

oOo

Introduction

Welcome to the seventh entry in our series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.”  If you missed the first essay by D. S. Farrer (which provides a global overview of the subject), the second by Daniel Mroz (how to select a school or teacher for research purposes), the third by  Jared Miracle (learning new martial arts systems while immersed in a foreign culture), the fourth by Thomas Green (who is only in it for the stories), the fifth by Daniel Amos (who discusses some lies he has told about martial artists), or the sixth by Charles Russo (who has great advice on the fine art of hanging out) be sure to check them out!

Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly democratic flavor.  Many individuals are introduced to these systems while students at a college or university and are interested in seeing a more intellectually rigorous treatment of their interests.  And certain practitioners want to go beyond reading studies produced by other writers and undertake research based on their own time in the training hall.   The emphasis on ethnographic description, oral and local history, as well as the methodological focus on community based collaborative research within Martial Arts Studies (itself a radically interdisciplinary area), makes participation in such efforts both relatively accessible and highly valuable.

Today’s post will be a bit of a departure from previous entries in this semi-regular series.  Prof. Dale C. Spencer and Prof. Kyle Green were kind enough to give me permission to re-blog a podcast that they collaborated on in the Spring of 2015.  In this interview Spencer discusses both the value and challenges of observant participation in martial arts studies.  More specifically, he explores the process of writing his dissertation in which he explored the phenomenological experiences of becoming a mixed martial artist.

As such this methods discussion is aimed squarely at graduate students who are confronting these or similar issues in their own research.  But Prof. Spencer also has a rich personal to story to tell that will be of interest to the entire Kung Fu Tea community.  I highly encourage everyone to check his story out.

Graduate students and other researchers may also want to explore some of the other offerings that Prof. Green has brought together through his fascinating podcast (produced with Sarah Lageson) titled “Give Methods a Chance.”  There is a lot of good material in here, and apparently we may get an edited volume out of this project.  You can also follow them on Facebook.

Dale C. Spencer is an assistant professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.  He is the author of Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment: Violence, Gender and Mixed Martial Arts (Routledge, 2011).  Along with Raul Sanchez Garcia he edited Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports (Anthem Press, 2014).  Readers of Kung Fu Tea might also remember the article that contributed to the 2014 special edition of the JOMEC journal titled “From Many Masters to Many Students: YouTube, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and communities of practice.”

Kyle Green is an assistant professor at Utica College. He received his MA degree in geography and a PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota. His research interests center on culture, gender, research methods, sport, storytelling, and the body. Green’s recent publications include “Tales from the Mat: Narrating Men and Meaning Making in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2015) and “It hurts so it is real: sensing the seduction of mixed martial arts” (Social & Cultural Geography, 2011).

Click on this link, or the picture below, to explore: Observant Participation and the Process of Becoming a Mixed Martial Artist.

Prof. Dale C. Spencer

 
oOo

If you enjoyed this interview you might also want to see:  Five Moments that Transformed Kung Fu

oOo

Capoeira. Photo by Turismo Bahia. Source: Wikimedia.

Introduction

 
Greetings from the road!  I am currently undertaking some last minute preparations and then heading over to Cardiff University for the 2016 Martial Arts Studies Conference.  I am looking forward to getting together with old friends, making new ones and hearing some great papers.  I am also scheduled to deliver a keynote address on Wednesday morning,  which will be posted here sometime in the next couple of weeks.  In the mean time I am going to be pretty busy and will only have occasional internet access.  As such I will be sharing a number of articles by various authors in my absence.  If all goes well, Kung Fu Tea will return to its normal posting schedule during the last week of July, starting with a full conference report.

Our first “guest paper” is provided by Paul H. Mason.  He recently published an article in Martial Arts Studies titled “Fight-Dancing and the Festival: Tabuik in Pariaman, Indonesia and Iemanja in Salvado Da Bahia, Brazil” that is well worth careful reading and consideration.  This study, which looks at the public performance of martial arts at seaside festivals in Indonesia and Brazil, is one of the best examples of the comparative case study method which I have seen in our field.  Drawing on years of ethnographic field work, Mason manages to paint a lively picture of events in two countries while illustrating the theoretical power of his approach.  Graduate students take note.  I can still remember how excited I was when we first received a draft of at this article at Martial Arts Studies.  A wide range of readers will find something of interest in these pages.

Click here to read the article!

Abstract

Festivals bring people together in affirmations of community. This article looks at two festivals in coastal locations in Indonesia and Brazil with a close inspection of performances of fight-dancing included within both festivals. The improvisatory or choreographed organization of the fight-dancing performances echoes the manner in which the festivals themselves are assembled. As these festivals grow in popularity, the process of inventing tradition is heterogeneously co-constituted by those parties who actively invest in the symbolic capital of the events. Verbal and non-verbal forms of expression reinforce each other in the construction of a multivalent sense of regional traditions. The corporeal engagement of organisers and participants blurs the boundary between embodied remembering and narrative accounts. Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the interweaving of fight-dancing with the history, growth, and post-colonial expression of regional festivals.

About the Author

Paul H. Mason completed his PhD in cultural anthropology at Macquarie University (2012) under the supervision of Professors Greg Downey and John Sutton. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with arts communities in Indonesia and Brazil, religious minorities in India and Brazil, and tuberculosis patients in Australia and Vietnam. With support from Macquarie International, the National Department of Education in Indonesia, and the Australia Netherlands Research Collaboration, he has also conducted archival research in Australia, Brazil, Holland, and Indonesia. His research on martial arts has been published in Global Ethnographic, Cultures-Kairós, and Inside Indonesia, and he recently coedited The Fighting Art of Pencak Silat and its Music with Dr Uwe Paetzold (Robert Schumann University of Music, Düsseldorf), published as part of Brill’s Southeast Asian Library Series.

Ronda Rousey vs. Miesha Tate

Introduction

Greetings from the road!  I am currently wrapping up my trip to the 2016 Martial Arts Studies Conference at Cardiff University and am on my way back to the London.  Given my limited time and internet access we will be once again dipping into the pages of the latest issue of Martial Arts Studies.  Kung Fu Tea will resume its normal posting schedule during the fourth week of July.

In the mean time I am very happy to bring you Allyson Quinney’s article “Gender, Fighters and Framing on Twitter: The @UFC and Third Wave Feminism? Who Woulda Thought?”  This is a timely addition to an important area of the martial arts studies literature.  It is also a great example of the power of social media analysis to drill further into the social discourses that surround the modern martial arts.

Click here to read: “Gender, Fighters and Framing on Twitter”

Abstract

Most professional sports, such as hockey, tennis, and basketball, separate men’s and women’s sports leagues. In 2013, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) disrupted this pattern by showcasing its first women’s mixed martial arts (MMA) fight in a once male-only fight league. While the UFC’s inclusion of female fighters is a step forward for gender equality, the change does not come without issues. This essay focuses on the framing of female UFC fighters on Twitter over a four year period. Through an intersectional feminist analysis, it examines how Twitter users frame female fighters’ bodies in relation to gender, race, class, and sexuality. It argues that there is an imbalance in attention paid to female fighters in regards to gender, race, class, and sexuality, and this constructs contradictory messaging about feminism, female fighters’ bodies, and the UFC on Twitter.

About the Author

Allyson Quinney received her Masters in Journalism from the University of British Columbia and she begins her PhD at Florida State University in the fall of 2016.

Introduction

Greetings!  If all has gone according to plan I am now back in the United States, recovering from jet lag, reviewing my notes from the conference and preparing a report on the events of the last week to share with all of the readers of Kung Fu Tea.  In the mean time, please enjoy this article on the (re)invention of a Mesoamerican martial arts tradition by George Jennings.  It is a valuable reminder that the martial arts are a global, rather than simply an Asian, phenomenon and have been employed in the construction and maintenance of many identities in the modern era.

Follow the link to read: “Ancient Wisdom Modern Warriors: The (Re)Invention of a Mesoamerican Tradition in Xilam by George Jennings.”

Abstract

Xilam is a modern Mexican martial art that is inspired by pre-Hispanic warrior cultures of ancient Mesoamerica, namely the Aztecs (Mexica), Maya and Zapotec cultures. It provides a noteworthy case study of a Latin American fighting system that has been recently invented, but aspires to rescue, rediscover and relive the warrior philosophies that existed before the Spanish Conquest and subsequent movements beginning in 1521. Using the thought-provoking work of anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo, I aim to analyse the Xilam Martial Arts Association through the way that they represent themselves in their three main media outlets: the official webpage, the Facebook group and the YouTube channel. Overall, the data suggests that certain elements of Mesoamerican civilisation may be transmitted to young Mexicans through a mind-body discipline, which in turn acts as a form of physical (re)education. Overall, xilam is both an invented tradition (in a technical sense) and a re-invented tradition (in a cultural sense) that provides lessons on the timeless issues of transformation, transmission and transcendence.

About the Author

George Jennings is a qualitative sociologist interested in traditionalist physical cultures. His previous work has examined the traditionalist Chinese martial arts such as Wing Chun and Taijiquan, and he is currently investigating the dynamic relationships between martial arts, health and society. He is a researcher and editor at the Universidad YMCA, Mexico, and an associate researcher at the Health Advancement Research Team, University of Lincoln, UK.

A Killing Art. PHOTO COURTESY OF ECW PRESS

Introduction

One of the first books that I reviewed on this blog was A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do by Alex Gillis.   To this day it remains one of my favorite discoveries and a revised and expanded edition has just been released.  With a background in investigative journalism Gillis has produced one of the most engaging and fast-paced studies of a martial art to date.  Nor do you have to be a student of TKD to enjoy this book.  Luckily for us he recently had a chance to drop by KFT and answer some questions about his book, the current state of Tae Kwon Do, and the process of researching and writing martial arts history.  Enjoy!

oOo

Kung Fu Tea (KFT):   Can you tell us a little bit about your original inspiration for investigating the history of Tae Kwon Do?

Alex Gillis (AG): I was training at a martial arts gym in Toronto when one of the instructors there began telling me about the “founder” of Taekwon-Do, Choi Hong-Hi, who supposedly lived in Toronto, about a plot to assassinate the South Korean president, and other crazy stories. I was a journalist, jumping around in this busy gym with my friends, focusing on trying to stay in shape, but I had to look into the rumours. That’s how I began investigating. I wrote a few magazine features about the real history of Tae Kwon Do, and those turned into a book. I guess the big inspiration initially was a search for the truth.

(KFT): Why did you decide that now was a good time to go back and revisit your research in A Killing Art?

(AG): The book was seven or eight years old and needed updates. I also wanted to be bolder in some sections, naming more people, providing more insights and revealing a few more things. Also, the old book contained a few sections with too much information and a few errors and confusions, (including a stupid math mistake and an error about a Korean geisha house!), so I updated and corrected everything. In addition, I wrote a few new sections and chapters.

(KFT): Can you tell us about you background as a writer and the sorts of methods you used when researching this volume?

(AG): I’m an investigative journalist, so, first, I used my skills to find information, diving into classified FBI and CIA documents for example. That was a lot of library and online work! Afterwards, armed with facts, I interviewed key people, many of whom lived in Toronto, Canada, where I live. Luckily, I lived in the right place at the right time: a lot of traditional TKD in the early years was developed in Canada, especially after the South Korean dictatorship stole the name in 1972 to create a national martial art and, later, Olympic TKD. However, my most important methods revolved around telling great stories, with everything backed up by many sources. I wanted a book that was readable, so that the history would be as exciting as the martial art. I wrote A Killing Art so that it reads like a thriller. With all the espionage and intrigue in the history, that wasn’t too hard. The book also had to be believable; it had to be 100 per cent nonfiction, in spite of the unbelievable-sounding stories. It’s heavily referenced.

Gen. Choi Hong-Hi, with caption: General Choi blocks kicks from his son Choi Jung-Hwa (on the right) and Park Jung-Taek, my first instructor. PHOTO COURTESY OF GENERAL CHOI.

(KFT): Given the number of years you have dedicated to researching and writing about TKD, what words of advice would you have for individuals setting out to write the history of other martial arts?

(AG): My main advice would be: (1) do your homework so that interviewees and readers respect your work; (2) ask the tough questions (as well as the fun ones); (3) corroborate everything that you hear and read, because even the masters lie, deceive or mis-remember the past; and (4) don’t be boring, don’t get bogged down in details and don’t show off; (5) try to tell a great story using scenes and dramatic anecdotes, something that captures the spirit of what you’ve researched.

(KFT): In your opinion, does someone need to practice, or have a background in a martial art, to write about it?

(AG): This is a tough question, but I’ll have to say yes if the writing is a regular job or hobby. If you don’t have the background, then you should know the material inside and out, but, even then, it would be challenging to avoid clichés and basic errors. If someone wants to regularly write about something, then they should try to practice it.

(KFT): Looking at that last question from a slightly different perspective, the general advice we give to journalists and writers of non-fiction is to “owe your sources nothing.”  Is that really possible when writing about a community that you are part of?  How have you tried to negotiate those challenges in your own work?

(AG): I see what you mean. “Owe your sources nothing” could mean that you shouldn’t bend to sources’ influence, biases and propaganda. However, journalists often owe their sources quite a bit: (a) the commitment to listen and be fair in reporting and interviewing, (b) the responsibility to get the facts right, (c) the integrity to spend the time and energy to figure out the truths in a situation, and (4) the courage to corroborate everything. And those four are off the top of my head. Because I was in the Tae Kwon Do community, I knew who to track down for interviews, and I knew what to ask, and I could detect lies and deception from a mile away. That was a huge advantage.

For example, when I interviewed General Choi Hong-Hi, I knew that he was media savvy and that he could bamboozle and intimidate journalists. To prepare, I brought a grandmaster instructor with me (someone he respected), and I prepared extensively, knowing I needed only the best stories and facts from him. During the interview, I could see when he was bullshitting me and asked follow-up questions. So, when he told me the same old story about attacking a wrestler during a poker game in 1938 – a story he’d told to thousands of people — I asked if he’d apologized to that man, because Choi’s attack had been violent and unjust. Choi didn’t answer. He looked away, as I describe in my book.

That gesture said a lot about him. His arrogant non-reply showed that he didn’t follow his own tenets regarding courtesy, self-control and all the rest of it. He’d had sixty years to work out that poker-attack dilemma and to make amends with the fellow, but in fact, Choi considered him inferior and not even worthy of consideration. As a journalist, I had to include that anecdote in my book, even though I was part of that TKD community. Many people who revere Choi as a cult figure of sorts still criticize me for daring to show the darker sides of his life and personality, but such things are important when you’re trying to understand key players in history.

(KFT): What has changed in the word of Tae Kwon Do (or the Korean martial arts more generally) over the last ten years or so?

(AG): A few interviewers have asked me this question, so I’ll provide an answer similar to what I told them: One change is that the international and national organizations are far more sophisticated in their business deals. The corruption is very sophisticated now, with little transparency, in spite of the rhetoric that everything is more transparent and fair. Some groups are still run like crime syndicates. Also, it seems as if there’s still a lot of cheating in Olympic TKD matches. The leaders promised to clean it up, and I’m wondering if frustrated athletes will continue to kick TKD officials in the head because of bad calls and cheating in national and international bouts. Last, many organizations, internationally and nationally, still function like pseudo cults. I’m not sure how anyone can get around the cultish worship of founders and pioneers or all the unnecessary bowing before instructors, except maybe by reading A Killing Art, punching a bag really hard and training like your life depends on it. The best instructors don’t need to be treated like gods and goddesses.

In 1982, Park Chong-kyu (second from right) invited the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch (second from left), to a Korean geisha house. Samaranch, a former card- carrying Fascist but still an avid churchgoer, left after thirty minutes. In 1984, Park became a member of the IOC. He died of liver cancer at the age of fifty-eight, in 1985. PHOTO COURTESY OF JEONG SOON-CHEON.

(KFT): What impact, if any, did the rapid growth of the Mixed Martial Arts have on the development of Taekwondo, both in Korea and here in North America?

(AG): Many MMA fighters practice various kinds of Tae Kwon Do, Karate and stand-up fighting arts that are derivatives. From the little I’ve seen, the training has made them better fighters, but few are willing to admit it, because TKD has a bad name. TKD is known as an ineffective martial art because the Olympic style dominates and looks ridiculous as a fighting art. For instance, not fighting with your hands is ludicrous. Also, TKD is so popular that McDojos have become the norm, so martial artists with integrity don’t want to be associated with TKD. You could say that our martial art has a problem with its brand. On the other hand, many TKD gyms are adding grappling or MMA components to their curriculum. I always get queasy when I see that, because the grappling looks lame – a lot of hugging and rolling around for some reason – but I haven’t visited the great gyms who have merged the various systems, so I shouldn’t critique this trend.

(KFT): What was the most surprising development that you came across as you researched the revision of A Killing Art?

(AG): Incredibly, I was still surprised by how sophisticated the cheating and corruption is in Olympic Tae Kwon Do. The brazenness of the leadership is impressive, and they’re so powerful that few people in TKD can say much.

In 1975, the U.S. government began hearings about the Plan (or “Koreagate”), a South Korean mission to seduce and influence more than a hundred U.S. Congress members and to bribe, threaten, and kill Koreans who criticized the South Korean dictatorship. Martial artists were involved in the mission from top to bottom.

(KFT): The summer Olympic Games are now here.  Can you tell us a little bit about how Tae Kwon Do first came to be accepted as an Olympic sport and, in your view, how it has effected the development of the art? 

(AG): Well, in 1980, South Korea’s newest dictator received good news: the International Olympic Committee officially recognized the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) as part of its network. Both the IOC and WTF were run like crime syndicates at the time, and a merger was beneficial to both: the dictatorship would receive recognition and a cover for its corruption and murder; in return, IOC members received huge sums of money from South Korea. That history still affects Olympic Tae Kwon Do to this day, with allegations of corruption spilling into matches between competitors.

Here’s an excerpt that answers part of your question. The section is from the start of chapter 13: “Olympic Mania and North Korean Mayhem”

On September 18, 1981, Korean Airlines Flight 901, scheduled to fly to Frankfurt, West Germany, sat for thirty minutes on the runway of Gimpo Airport in Seoul, South Korea, as the crew waited for an important, last-minute passenger, Park Chong-kyu, also known as “Pistol Park” because he carried a pistol everywhere he went. South Korea’s dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had assigned him and his men to an important mission, Operation Thunderbird. Pistol Park was a martial artist who had helped organize South Korea’s military coup d’état in 1961, was lobbying to become a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and had steered secret- service agent Kim Un-yong to take over Tae Kwon Do in 1970. Now, Park and Kim were leading Operation Thunderbird, a mission to convince the most powerful people in international sports that South Korea should host the 1988 Summer Olympics and that Tae Kwon Do should be an Olympic sport in the process. Once again, sports, and Tae Kwon Do in particular, would hide human-rights atrocities and government-organized corruption in South Korea.

Wearing dark sunglasses, Park finally walked onto the plane. He and Kim had gathered a team of 107 elite Koreans from Tae Kwon Do, sports, business, government, and the secret service, including the Korean CIA’s deputy director. Flying from various countries, they were to meet in Baden-Baden, West Germany, for a crucial Olympic Congress, where the IOC would vote on which country would host the 1988 Games. Along the way, Operation Thunderbird would provide security against plots by Choi Hong-Hi and his North Korean friends. Choi had threatened to disrupt the Baden-Baden meeting, and his son was still plotting to assassinate the South Korean president.

Pistol Park and Kim had launched the top-secret Operation Thunderbird in June 1981, when South Korea had been in chaos. After the Kwangju Massacre, led by President Chun, the president had continued his predecessor’s policy of using martial artists to do some of the government’s dirty work, which consisted mainly of smashing unions. One-third of political prisoners were workers, and the rest of the workforce took turns going on strike and protesting. Martial arts experts and plainclothes police officers, called the White Skull (paekkol) strike-breakers, would pad themselves from head to foot and race on motorcycles to protests, where they would wade into crowds, breaking heads as they went.

The new regime concluded that the fastest and most effective way to diffuse conflict, unite Koreans, and improve the country’s image overseas was by hosting an Olympics. It was such a farfetched idea that few people inside or outside the tiny nation took it seriously, especially because Korea had no Olympic-sized facilities and, as Kim soberly acknowledged, did not even have colour television. But perhaps sports would redeem their nation and, in the process, cover up the massacres and corruption.

(KFT):  Thanks so much for dropping by and sharing some of your thoughts on both the state of Tae Kwon Do and the writing of martial arts history. I cannot wait to take a look at this new edition of your book.

oOo

Alex Gillis, author of A Killing Art

About our Guest: Alex Gillis is a journalist and martial artist in Toronto. He has trained in various styles of Tae Kwon Do and other martial arts for approximately 35 years. He first heard the incredible tales of the art from one of his instructors and entered the back rooms and high-stakes world of Choi Hong-Hi, Kim Un-yong, and other Tae Kwon Do leaders to find the truth about their art.

oOo

Prof. Kyle Green competing in a grappling tournament.  Source: Kyle Green.

Introduction

Welcome to the eighth entry in our series of guest posts titled “Doing Research.”  If you missed the first essay by D. S. Farrer (which provides a global overview of the subject), the second by Daniel Mroz (how to select a school or teacher for research purposes), the third by  Jared Miracle (learning new martial arts systems while immersed in a foreign culture), the fourth by Thomas Green (who is only in it for the stories), the fifth by Daniel Amos (who discusses some lies he has told about martial artists), the sixth by Charles Russo (who has great advice on the fine art of hanging out), or the seventh by Dale Spence (on ethnographic methods and dealing with radically unexpected events while in the field) be sure to check them out!

Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly democratic flavor.  Many individuals are introduced to these systems while students at a college or university and are interested in seeing a more intellectually rigorous treatment of their interests.  And certain practitioners want to go beyond reading studies produced by other writers and undertake research based on their own time in the training hall.   The emphasis on ethnographic description, oral and local history, as well as the methodological focus on community based collaborative research within Martial Arts Studies (itself a radically interdisciplinary area), makes participation in such efforts both relatively accessible and highly valuable.

In today’s post Prof. Kyle Green offers some important advice for new ethnographers seeking to become better observers.  While our personal experiences on the mats are important, its also critical to pay close attention to everything that surrounds and upholds these brief moments of intense interaction.  Embodied experience is never simply self-interpreting.

Kyle Green is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utica College. His research on pain and community in the mixed martial arts gym, the connection between storytelling and the embodied experience, representations of masculinity in Super Bowl commercials, the relationship between binge drinking and athletic participation, and how people discuss socially controversial issues has appeared in journals such as Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Social & Cultural Geography, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and International Review for the Sociology of Sport. Kyle co-produces and co-hosts the Give Methods a Chance podcast, and is co-authoring a text of the same name. Kyle is also currently working on a book on the allure of training in mixed martial arts. For more information on Prof. Green and his research visit www.kylegreen.org

Students talking after training. Photo courtesy of Daniel Velle.

Taking Seriously the Mundane

Training was done.

It had been a relatively unstructured and relaxed day. Pete, the instructor, had given the majority of his attention to Pat whose amateur mixed martial arts debut was now just a handful of days away. They were working through a few minor details of how Pat could more efficiently use the cage wall to get back to his feet while taking minimal damage. The rest of us were scattered haphazardly across the mats, chairs, and floor—the amount of sweat that had soaked through our respective shirts, and accumulated in puddles underneath us, provided a clear indicator of how much each participant had pushed themselves during a day with virtually no oversight. Some were removing gear—unstrapping head gear, taking off gloves, unwrapping hands, removing gis, pulling off drenched rash-guards—others gently stretched or were taking a moment to relax and recover.

Cris, a violin player for the orchestra was talking about his upcoming travel plans with Andrew, a patent lawyer, while they both did some light stretching. Andrew responded by sharing his dream trip to the jiu-jitsu schools (and “dangerous streets”) in Rio de Janeiro. Mark, a hip IT consultant and Ed, a custodial engineer, engaged in a loud exchange about whether or not people who ride fixed-gear bikes are “pussies” who were “blowing their trust funds.” Their conversation was punctuated by frequent laughter. Sam, a jazz guitarist and Marine vet, Stewart, an ex-bodybuilder and Army vet, and Steve, a young veterinary’s assistant, debated the ideal fighting body and the proper exercises and nutrition to get to that body. Ray, a cook, was telling Pat, a young mechanic, about fighting at parties and in basements back when MMA was really underground and how he would show up to work bruised-and-battered. Luke, a young, athletic bartender made his way over to the timer that indicated the beginning and end of the 5-minute rounds. His frustration with the device led to a rant about outdated technology that eventually transformed into a prediction about how phones would soon be able to hook into our nervous systems to allow better ease of use. George an accountant and professional golfer talked to me about a recent news story on bullying in grade school and whether it was a social crisis or just something boys had always experienced and would always have to deal with. And, Mark, a industrial welder, was using the small mat burn on his elbow as an excuse to admire his body in the mirror—twisting his body to look at his arm flexing his triceps, tightening his pectorals, and inspecting his increasingly defined stomach and recently tattooed chest.

The conversations continued as the men slowly prepared to head home. Groups mixed, others separated, and new ones formed. Talk ebbed and flowed as people showered, mixed protein drinks, finished stretching, packed their gear, trickled out of the gym, leaned against their vehicles, and finally drove away.

For my dissertation, and current book project, I trained alongside and engaged in conversation with the people who fill the mixed martial arts (MMA) gyms that dot the Twin Cities metropolitan region. For nearly six-years I tried to make sense of and theorize the allure of spending lunch hours and after work learning to punch, kick, choke, and joint-lock, and then trying out those techniques on fellow gym-members. Some had dreams of making money as professional cage-fighters, but the majority had no intention of ever testing the prizefighting waters. Instead this was a prime case of “deep play” – a turn of phrase coined by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by Clifford Geertz to describe the heavy investment in games and activities that have seemingly little utilitarian value.

Over time I learned that the seemingly meaningless moments of downtime before, in-between, and after the painful and violent exchanges were some of the most revealing. It is during these mundane moments that participants build on the shared physical experience by telling stories that shape their understanding of MMA, masculinity, and their daily pursuits. In this essay, I use my experience studying studying mixed martial arts to suggest that it is the boring and seemingly peripheral that is key to understanding the allure of MMA.

Recent scholars of martial arts, sport, and physical culture have a done an excellent job demonstrating the value of the ethnographic method for delving into the corporeal experience of training. Scholars inspired by Loïc Wacquant’s seminal work on boxing, Body & Soul, have treated the body as both a topic and a tool (see Fighting Scholars edited by Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer for excellent collection of works demonstrating this approach). As academics took to the mats and stepped into the ring, they offered insight into the sensory experience of entering a martial arts gym and submitting to the techniques that callous the body and transform it into a more effective combat tool. Much of this work is great. I myself still return regularly to my heavily creased and thoroughly underlined copy of Body & Soul for methodological and theoretical inspiration.

It isn’t surprising that ethnographers of martial arts ends up focusing heavily on the physical act itself. All the hours spent punching and kicking the air, pads, and each other is clearly what stands out about time spent in the gym. And, if I asked someone in an MMA gym what they do during training, their answer would certainly revolve around the physical skills they gain and the act of fighting. Much like the surfer who forgets the hours of driving, carrying gear along the beach, suiting up, and paddling out before catching the big wave, the gym member’s memory is dominated by the ten-minutes of sparring that left both participants bloodied and battered. So, of course the ethnographer of martial arts ends up spending a lot of time trying to better understand engagement in the physical and potentially violent practice through looking at the physical and potentially violent moments.

We should also not forget to consider the academic’s experience as they head out into the field. In leaving behind the social science tower and joining pro, amateur, and hobbyist fighters on the mats, I was stepping from a decidedly disembodied space to an explicitly embodied one. It is easy to get caught up and take pride in participating in a world where it is the body, and ability to use one’s body, that is capital. The chance to perform a type of masculinity not celebrated in academia can be particularly seductive. So, it is not surprising that stories of violent encounters are offered with vivid detail with the author front and center. Or, for that matter, as the ethnographer interacts with participants outside of the gym, perhaps it is not surprising when a night of drinking and debauchery makes it into the text rather than a few hours helping someone move furniture into a new apartment.

A group photo. Source: Kyle Green.

Lost in the focus on the physical experience of training and moments of peak excitement is all that other stuff that goes on. These encounters beyond the moment of physical exchange make up the majority of the time that people spend in the gym. For this reason, as researchers of martial arts, we are guilty of effectively only exploring the tip of the iceberg. It is worth noting that this is true outside of studies of martial arts—the more interesting story to me is what happens before and after the base-jump, or what happens the day before and the morning after an aggressive demonstration of masculinity and a night of substance filled risks?

From a pragmatic perspective, following my insight does not require a dramatic change for the ethnographer already interested in pursuing the “carnal approach”. The same path to entering the field, taking part in the practice of interest, and monitoring how you are both shaping and being shaped by the field holds. However, taking seriously the mundane does require an expansion of interest to all those other seemingly less exciting moments and treating them with the same reflexive awareness. For instance, much like describing how repeatedly kicking a Thai bag conditions the shin, the researcher can use their immersion into a field to uncover how repetitions of a particular narrative of why men need to fight shared while recovering from sparring shape the way they perceive the world. Or instead of explicating how working on a particular grappling movement programs the body, the researcher can use their experience in the gym to detail the feeling of openness and types of conversations that follows an intense sparring session in comparison to the more perfunctory exchanges as people arrive and get ready for class. For instance, on the drives home from the gym, I often found myself using my phone to record observations about what people were talking about while they watched people spar rather than the sparring itself.

Reflecting back on my research, two guiding questions helped me in extending my research to take seriously the mundane and often-ignored.

First, what does the practice enable? In other words, what does all that stuff that people like to focus on allow to happen? In this case, through spending time on the mats and in the changing room after hard sessions of training, I experienced how the exchange of pain forged a trust that allowed the men to share a level of vulnerability and honesty they would not have otherwise. Bill, a grizzled Navy vet who made his money in banking, liked to explain this intimacy with some variation of, “No reason to be fake or act tough after some old guy just had you trapped with his balls on your face.” Or, as the aforementioned Ray explains, “when you tap, and your opponent chooses to let go…your life was literally in his hands.” Time and time again, I witnessed men sharing intimate details about failed relationships, unhappiness with the path they have taken, or just trying to figure it all out with people they shared little in common with other than the recent sharing of sweat, blood, chokes, punches, and pain. Precisely because of the physical vulnerabilities and fears that are shared on the mat, the men are more at ease in abandoning the cold facade of masculinity that dominates much of their lives.

Second, how do people make sense of the practice. In other words, how do the participants discuss what just occurred to explain what they were doing and why there we doing it. As I wrote about in my article, Tales from the Mat: Narrating Men and Meaning Making in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym (2015), participants work in tandem to craft complicated stories of what led them to the MMA gym and what they learn from the experience. The stories invoke an array of topics including but not limited to necessity (“it is a violent world”), evolutionary biology and masculine urges, celebrating the exotic, spiritual teachings, alienation from a consumption-oriented society, and the body as a project. In the MMA gym, the bulk of the situating and explaining occurs in the marginalized moments rather than through the instilling of a set narrative from the instructor. It is through the rather ordinary act of simply talking that ensures a punch is never just a punch, and a choke is never just a choke.

While these two guiding questions are related, each takes advantage of different strength of ethnographic research. The former focuses on behavior; taking advantage of the researcher’s access to observe what actually happens rather than what people say happens. Because I was immersed in the scene I was able to witnesses and participate in the behaviors that simply get left out of most accounts and interviews. The latter focuses on the process through which meaning gets constructed. By being on the mat I am able to see how fragments of discourse get woven together to explain the shared experience that just happened and motivate continued participation. Taken together, the two questions help reveal how it is only through taking seriously the mundane and often marginalized that we can understand the exciting moments central to the practice and the larger allure of spending time in the MMA gym.

Prof. Kyle Green teaches in the Sociology department of Utica College.

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If you would like to further explore Prof. Green’s research see: “Tales from the Mat: Narrating Men and Meaning Making in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym.” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2015)

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“The Sturdy Citizen” – TY Wong performing Shaolin animal forms within his Kin Mon Physical Culture Studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown. TY was a local tong enforcer who had taught kung fu in San Francisco’s Chinatown for three decades. He likely spoke for many other practitioners in Chinatown at the time when he deemed young Bruce Lee to be merely “a dissident with bad manners.” (Photo courtesy of Gilman Wong)

By Charles Russo, author of Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

So it Begins

At some point in late 1961, James Lee stormed out of the Kin Mon Physical Culture Studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown, effectively breaking off his tutelage under Sil Lum master TY Wong.  Kin Mon, – or as the translation goes: “the Sturdy Citizen’s Club” – was located in a basement studio space on Waverly Place, directly across from the Hop Sing Tong, where TY was a longstanding member.  James Lee had been studying at Kin Mon for a few years at that point, and had established himself as one of TY’s most notable students. Recently, they had collaborated on a book showcasing TY’s system, titled, Chinese Karate Kung-Fu:  Original ‘Sil Lum’ System for Health & Self Defense.  The two shared the byline, and the book has the historical significance of being one of the first (if not the very first) English language martial arts book by a Chinese master.

However, James Lee eventually ascended the steps out of Kin Mon in anger, concluding his time there on bitter terms. He encountered recently-enrolled student Leo Fong at the street level entrance, and let him know he was leaving: “I’m finished with this place. You wanna come with me to train back in Oakland?”

A perennially eclectic martial artist whose skills were anchored around an early education in American boxing, Fong also defected from Kin Mon on the spot with James. Years later, Fong laughs the whole misunderstanding off as trivial: “Jimmy fell out with TY Wong over just $10. They got real upset with each other over that. Can you imagine?”

While seemingly just another martial arts feud predicated on mundane matters of ego or just poor communication, James Lee’s split with TY Wong would have a significant impact on the emerging popularity of the martial arts in America and the kung fu craze of the coming decade, most notably with its effects on the long-term trajectory of Bruce Lee’s career.

You’re not likely, however, to find TY Wong’s name within any biographical accounts of Bruce Lee. Despite Bruce’s maxim of discarding “what is useless,” fans are probably far more familiar with a peripheral figure like Ruby Chow (his landlord and boss at a menial job) than a pioneering martial arts master like TY Wong, who dismissed young Bruce as little more than “a dissident with bad manners.” In fact, few Bruce Lee fans realize that the TY Wong/James Lee feud exists within the pages of Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense; the only book that Bruce Lee published in his lifetime.

The fallout between TY and James also gives key context to understanding the persisting tensions that led to Bruce’s legendary showdown with Wong Jack Man, an incident that would greatly influence Lee’s long term martial arts worldview. There is a lot to be learned from this obscure but notable history within the trailblazing martial arts culture of the San Francisco Bay Area during the early 1960s.

A young Bruce Lee in Oakland circa 1965, just prior to his role on the Green Hornet. Although Bruce was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he was often at odds with members of the neighborhood’s martial arts culture. Bruce instead found a more like minded crowd across the Bay, in the city of Oakland. (Photo courtesy of Barney Scollan)

Enter the Dragon

Here’s an interesting question to consider: why did Bruce Lee relocate from Seattle to Oakland in the summer of 1964?

After all, things were going well for Bruce at that point in Seattle: he had a dedicated following of martial arts students and had finally found an actual location for his school. He was a popular student at the University of Washington, had just begun dating the woman he would eventually marry, and had defeated a rival martial artist in a challenge. During the summer of 1963, Bruce had traveled home to Hong Kong and greatly impressed his father with all that he had accomplished in Seattle. So why leave behind his business, his girlfriend and his education for a new situation in Oakland?

The immediate answer is James Lee. An Oakland native who was well-known for his younger exploits as a street fighter, James was already enacting the sort of martial arts future that Bruce was envisioning. He was publishing books, creating his own custom martial arts equipment, and conducting a modern training environment at his school. James was also putting a nuanced emphasis on body building, and perhaps most importantly, transforming his street experience into a gritty and realistic understanding of the true nature of fighting. Furthermore, James Lee had a unique network of experienced martial arts innovators within his orbit: Wally Jay, Ralph Castro, Al Novak, Leo Fong, and Ed Parker. As James Lee’s son Greglon characterized the appeal of this: “Bruce was smart. When he’s in his twenties he’s hanging out with guys in their forties, so he can gain their experience.”

James Lee’s fallout with TY Wong was a catalyst for Bruce Lee’s return to the San Francisco Bay Area. Upon meeting in 1962, Bruce Lee discovered that James was already enacting the sort of modern martial arts future that he was envisioning. Despite their difference in age, the two found themselves on a similar wavelength and quickly began collaborating. Bruce’s time with James in Oakland would have a significant impact on his career trajectory. (Photo courtesy of Greglon Lee)

Upon being introduced, Bruce and James had quickly found themselves upon a similar martial arts wavelength. And for a moment, James Lee considered moving his family up to Seattle to continue his collaborations with Bruce (they had already published Chinese Gung Fu… together in 1963). This idea was discarded for one main reason – the Bay Area had the most robust martial arts culture in America (with the possible exception of Hawaii, which James and most of his colleagues had ties to). In this sense, Oakland was a more logical place for their collaborations because it put Bruce close to the action. As kenpo master Al Tracy explained it: “The real significant early development of the martial arts in the United States was heavily based in the Bay Area. Many of the most important people came out of the Bay Area, not just for the Chinese but for so much of the martial arts.”

So by the summer of 1964, Bruce was operating out of Oakland, which was significant not just for his particular whereabouts, but for his commitment to his vision for the martial arts. Bruce was chasing something down. He could have easily stayed and thrived in his Seattle niche. Instead, the next step forward in his evolution was to be found in Oakland.

Amid their shared wavelength, Bruce and James at some point connected on their disdain for traditional approaches to the martial arts, and by extension – traditional masters.

Lau Bun (left) and TY Wong were enforcers for the Hop Sing Tong in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and oversaw the neighborhood’s martial arts culture for more than a quarter century. Having largely predated the modern era of martial arts media, their pioneering careers often go unnoticed. (Lau Bun photo courtesy of UC Berkeley, TY Wong courtesy of Gilman Wong)

Kung Fu in the Bay Area

To properly grasp the early martial arts culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown, it is necessary to understand the careers of the two practitioners that it was anchored around –  Lau Bun and TY Wong.  Both men were enforcers for the Hop Sing Tong, having been recruited for their martial abilities many years earlier upon arriving to town.  Their duties involved a wide range of hands-on enforcement around the neighborhood, which included curbing excessive drunken behavior around the local nightclub, the collection of gambling debts, training of Tong muscle, and mediating disputes within the neighborhood as a means of avoiding law enforcement.  Their schools emerged out of these roles, beginning with Lau Bun’s Hung Sing in the late 1930s (though originally known as Wah Kuen) and then TY’s Kin Mon a few years later in the early 1940s. Both practiced medicine, played music, and operated Lion Dance teams that were heavily involved in neighborhood festivals and holidays.

Lau Bun maintained a rigid order to the martial arts culture in Chinatown, never allowing it to devolve into the sort of daily fight culture that was happening among the Hong Kong youth upon the city rooftops throughout the 1950s. Even when Lau Bun’s relationship with other local martial arts teachers grew tense at times, order was still maintained.

The reality of Hong Kong’s challenge culture and the tenacious reputation of its Wing Chun practitioners had preceded Bruce Lee to San Francisco. During the summer of 1959, 18 year-old Bruce had a little-known incident in Hung Sung and was promptly thrown out by Lau Bun, sowing the seeds for future tensions within the neighborhood. (It is rumored that Bruce had a similarly confrontational incident with TY Wong in this period, which is certainly plausible considering the nature of his other interactions.) In the autumn of 1959, Bruce Lee left San Francisco for Seattle already on poor terms with the martial arts culture within the city of his birth.

Lau Bun (top center) with senior students in his Hung Sing School of Choy Li Fut in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the oldest martial arts schools in America. During the summer of 1959, 18-year-old Bruce Lee had a little-known run-in with Lau Bun and his senior students. (Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley)

It is important to point out that James Lee and TY Wong may have fallen out over more than just $10. Indeed, there is a compelling alternate theory to why James stormed out of Kin Mon in ‘61. In this version, James is practicing forms down in the studio when he notices TY Wong’s young son practicing a much more refined and meaningful version of the very same form. James, as the story goes, then realized he had been sold a water-down version of system, and promptly abandoned his enrollment. Although this version conflicts with the accounts of Leo Fong and the sons of both men, James himself would profess this version of events years later, writing in the intro to his 1972 Wing Chun Kung-Fu book: “I realized later that the whole repertoire was just a time-killing tactic to collect a monthly fee. In disgust, I quit practicing this particular sil lum style.” However, that was hardly the first insult to be put into print after his departure from Kin Mon, but was rather merely a postscript to an exchange of published put-downs a decade earlier.

Three of the earliest English language books on Kung Fu by Chinese authors published in North America.

In 1962, TY Wong responded to James Lee’s defection by publishing Kung-Fu: Original ‘Sil Lum’ System, which ran in similar instructional fashion to the first book. However, TY concluded this volume with an overt put-down of James Lee, ridiculing his Iron Palm abilities by running a picture of his eight-year-old son in the same breaking pose as James, under the headline: “See, I Can Break ‘Em Too!” TY distanced himself from what James had previously put forward on the topic by subsequently characterizing it all as gimmickry, and stating “Do not waste your time practicing this art.” James was well-known for his breaking skills, and his lively demonstrations were highly popular at local gatherings. TY’s vividly illustrated rejection of James’s abilities added a new layer of tension to their fallout.

In 1962, TY Wong published an image of his 8 year-old son breaking bricks beneath a patronizing headline. It was meant to parody the Iron Palm abilities of James Lee that were featured in the their first book (right).

Not long after, James Lee forges a new (and what will be a highly significant) partnership with young Bruce Lee, who begins regularly making the trip from Seattle to Oakland in support of a book project with James. The results of their collaboration –  Chinese Gung Fu: the Philosophical Art of Self-Defense – would itself become a highly significant volume of martial arts literature. Ironically though, it was fairly innocuous in tone. As Tommy Gong recently pointed out in Bruce Lee: The Evolution of a Martial Artist, the content within Chinese Gung Fu “illustrated a more basic, generalized approach and primer to the theories of gung fu, including much of the classical approach Bruce later criticized. While Bruce showed a glimmer of his eventual unconventional approach to the martial arts, he expressed himself in this book from a traditional approach.”

On the other hand, Bruce and James added to an already tense relationship with Chinatown by devoting a section of the book to “Difference in Gung Fu Styles.” Here, Bruce distinguishes between what he sees as “superior systems” (namely, his own) versus “half-cultivated systems” (that of TY Wong and other “more traditional” masters). The sequence that follows has James Lee wearing his old Kin Mon uniform and being dismantled by Bruce in a photo-by-photo dismissal of specific techniques featured in T.Y.’s previous book.

By early 1964, Chinese Gung Fu… was on sale within San Francisco’s Chinatown, and the insults weren’t lost on local practitioners. Over time however, as Bruce’s fame became a global phenomenon, this highly local subtext fell into obscurity, as did the notion of Bruce Lee being simply “a dissident with bad manners, ” an identity that would firmly take shape after his book was published.

In a later section of Chinese Gung Fu, Bruce and James give “examples of a slower system against the more effective Gung Fu technique.” This shows Bruce dismantling James as he attempts specific techniques from TY Wong’s first book.

Critiquing the Classical Mess
Moving into 1964, Bruce Lee doubled down on his unabashed criticisms of what he saw as “inferior” practitioners and systems. His demonstrations took a pointed tone, and increasingly came off as heavy-handed lectures featuring stinging rebukes towards “dry land swimming” and the “classical mess.”

Although his performance at Ed Parker’s inaugural Long Beach Tournament in August is often painted in glossy terms, Bruce had actually delivered a scathing lecture disparaging existing practices, even ridiculing common techniques such as the horse stance, before an international audience of martial arts masters and their students. “He just got up there and started trashing people,” explains Barney Scollan, an eighteen-year-old competitor that day.

A few weeks later at the Sun Sing Theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Bruce went as far as to disparage the likes of Lau Bun and TY Wong – in their own neighborhood – by declaring “these old tigers have no teeth.”  It was no small insult coming from a young out-of-town kid towards two heavily-involved and well-respected member of the community.

The sum total of all these events and tensions -from the published insults to the $10 argument– were likely to eventually culminate in a confrontation. That day arrived in late autumn when Wong Jack Man piled into a brown Pontiac Tempest with five other people to travel across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, and….as the saying almost goes – the rest is urban mythology.

Hong Kong starlet Diana Chang Chung-wen (“the Mandarin Marilyn Monroe”) photographed with Bruce Lee in late summer of 1964 during a promotional tour of the U.S. west coast in support of her latest film. This brought them to the Sun Sing Theater, in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown where Bruce’s martial arts demonstration (and critical lecture) nearly resulted in an on-stage brawl in front of a riotous audience. Weeks later, Bruce would face down Wong Jack Man in a legendary behind-closed-doors high noon showdown, based largely on comments he made from the stage of the Sun Sing Theater, as well as long list of incidents with other members Chinatown’s martial arts community. (Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley)

About the Author:

Charles Russo is a journalist in San Francisco. He is the author of Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). For more photographs and materials related to the book, see the Striking Distance Instagram account (@striking_distance) or the Facebook page.  Russo has previously been a guest author here at Kung Fu Tea.  If you are wondering whether to read his book check out this review.

By George Jennings (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK) and Anu Vaittinen (Newcastle University, UK)

Reference to conference presentation:

Jennings, G. & Vaittinen, A. (2016). Mediated transformation: Interconnections between embodied training and multimedia resources in Wing Chun. Paper presented at the 2^nd International Martial Arts Studies Conference, Cardiff University, UK, 19 July 2016.

We would like to thank Benjamin Judkins for his generous offer for us to write a summary of our conference paper for the excellent Kung Fu Tea blog, which is very timely, considering the relationships that our study has with such open-access, digital martial arts media for practitioners and scholars alike. Readers are very welcome to contact us directly if they have any questions, suggestions or other comments:

George Jennings        gbjennings@cardiffmet.ac.uk

Anu Vaittinen             anu.vaittinen@newcastle.ac.uk

Introduction

In their recent research on the history of Wing Chun Kung Fu, Ben Judkins and Jon Nielsen have  demonstrated that this martial art has been taught, learned, practised and understood in a myriad of ways, which have diversified since its humble beginnings in South East China. Today’s varied interpretations of Wing Chun are particularly evident in the Ip Man branch of the genealogical tree, where in a matter of two or three generations, there often appears to be very different fighting systems in terms of weight distribution, technique shapes, form sequences, omissions and additions of certain blocks and punching variations, and also foci in terms of the attention given to the empty hand forms, wooden dummy, weapons, theory, conditioning, fitness and, of course, how they are put together into self-defence and even sporting combat applications. Scholars in media and cultural studies have so far focused on the legendary exploits of Ip Man in the recent Hong Kong films (see, for example, here and here).  Yet to date, no research has detailed how forms of media like films/movies, documentaries, YouTube videos, images and blogs might shape (and be shaped by) the actual “hands-on”, solo and interactive physical training of the art of Wing Chun Kung Fu.

That is somewhat peculiar considering the global popularity of this Chinese martial art across cultures, generations, ethnicities and socioeconomic levels. This gap in the literature is precisely what we wish to address in this invited contribution to the Chinese Martial Arts Studies discussion. It is with this complex variety in mind that we begin to address the ways in which Wing Chun is currently learned from a sociological, phenomenological and pedagogical perspective. The small body of research on the training aspects of the art has touched upon topics such as body awareness (McFarlane, in his brief outline), how the unique methods employed in Wing Chun might hone fighting skills and whether they may even make the practitioner a better person (Scott Buckler’s taxonomy thesis).

Elsewhere, more sociologically-oriented ethnographic studies have discovered a core narrative and ethos of secular religion in a particular association, as well as ideas of the diversity of a cultivated martial habitus or scheme of dispositions. These publications provide a basis for the unification of an embodied, “carnal” sensitivity on Wing Chun with a contemporary sociological and educational vantage point. The fusion of all of these types of research may allow us to draw upon the recent studies on important topics including body lineage, digital technology and narrative from researchers in the field of martial arts studies.

Interestingly, this relative dearth of research on how participants’ corporeal practices intersect with digital, primarily visual media, as well as the active use of new media technologies, extends beyond Wing Chun and the martial arts, into studies of physical culture, media and visual culture more generally. Outside the context of formal physical education, what has received particularly limited attention is the perspective of the practitioners, and the role multi-mediated materials, new information economy and technologies play in their development of corporeal, and sensory know-how of combat sports. This lacuna is particularly intriguing, considering the ‘ocular-centrism’ of Western society, and way in which a range of sports (including martial arts) are transmitted to our living rooms, onto our PCs and smart phones at increasing intensity. Images play an increasing important role in our lives, experiences and concerns. Generally, sports media research has tended to focus on media texts, media institutions and audiences.  The research on new media technologies, on the other hand, has explored sports video games along with examinations of online platforms such as Wikipedia, as a vehicle for communication among sports fans.

For a more in depth-discussion of some of the existing field of research, see:

http://amodern.net/article/mixed-martial-arts/

In this project we seek to explore another avenue which, within the existing literature, remains relatively unexplored. The aim of our study is to offer fellow researchers, practitioners and instructors some insights into learning and teaching in Wing Chun using multimedia resources to support both teachers and students. We do this through two case studies of specific Wing Chun pedagogical approaches and social environments: 1) a series of private classes with individuals in different locations (private, public and commercial) in Mexico City, taught in English and Spanish; 2) an informal, small school run in the Northeast of England that is composed of more experienced practitioners. Our specific objective is to facilitate discussion on contemporary issues in Wing Chun under the working research question: In what ways can today’s practitioners use modern digital (and online) technology to support their learning before, during and after lessons and training sessions? Although restricted to one style of Kung Fu, this study might interest other martial arts scholars examining the links between media and embodied practice in a variety of styles and systems. It offers insight into how digital multimedia – accessed anywhere and anytime – can add to the multisensorial learning of the martial arts. This post is exploratory in nature, and raises far more questions than could be hoped to answer.

A publicity photo for a Wing Chun themed app titled “Kung Fu Grand Master.”

Methodological medley

Our collaboration is an unusual one, as we had never met until uniting at the second Martial Arts Studies Conference at Cardiff University in 2016. Both of us are associate researchers at the Health Advancement Research Team (HART) at the University of Lincoln, interested in entirely different topics: Thermoception and thermoregulation (see here). We are from England and Finland respectively, and were at the same time researching the Chinese art of Wing Chun in Mexico and England. This is another example of the increasingly international nature of martial arts studies: a new multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary field with international researchers who travel to other countries to study and discover fighting systems developed from a range of cultures and civilisations, and who engage with a plethora of languages and native technical terms, and later teach and research in various global contexts.

This study – still very early in its development – is an opportunistic offshoot from our phenomenological work with Jacquelyn Allen Collinson and Helen Owton.  It is more methodological than theoretical in nature. We began our first article together with an important reflexive note on our own positioning, which combined to provide a more rounded approach to studying Wing Chun than would have been possible alone. Reflexivity is now common practice to outline new qualitative studies of martial arts due to the fact that the researchers are often practitioners themselves. Confessional, reflexive and auto-ethnographical work has been shared by authors such as: Channon, introducing his martial arts and fighting experience prior to studying mixed-sex martial arts; Delamont and Stephen’s early reflections on their joint fieldwork in a Capoeira school as a complete observer and immersed participant respectively, and Martinez’s autoethnography of her pursuit of Karate in a male-dominated dojo. Our own work follows this important representational turn, with George’s vignettes on the embodied nature of interviewing, and how physical training can lead to spontaneous and flexible interviews, along with other forms of data collection.

In her recent work, Anu has examined the importance of reflexivity in relation to gender, and the embodied labour of the researcher in participatory fieldwork (Forthcoming, 2016). This paper illustrates the advantages and challenges of insider research, but equally interrogates the gendered positionality which the research embodies concurrently with their insider status, and its impact on the research process and data.

Despite being the same age (32) and both having academic background in the sociology of sport and physical culture, our different training experiences have shaped the way we learn, practise and teach Wing Chun. George has tended to focus on non-sporting martial arts after brief periods in Taekwondo, Judo and Kendo. He has practised Wing Chun since 1999, first as a student, later as an assistant instructor, and most recently as a nomadic “ronin” instructor and independent researcher in Scotland and Mexico. He retains a research interest in Wing Chun pedagogy and training methodology, but has since switched his academic attention to the new martial arts of Mexico, such as Xilam whilst teaching Wing Chun privately and in a small group at the Universidad YMCA, where students, staff and the general publish were welcome.  George’s small group of Wing Chun novices were not well versed in chi sau (the sensitivity game also known as sticking hands), so he opted to look at the role of theory and specific Wing Chun fitness and conditioning exercises to provide them with a firm foundation for more technical aspects of the art. The students were aged 14-72 (two female, three male), and mainly learned through private tuition or in pairs. George tried to maintain a very tactile approach, and did not rely on videos or images during training. However, some students requested recordings of him performing the first form before the Christmas holidays.  This event sparked his interest in the relationships between seemingly timeless digital media and the phenomenological issues of training in more specific space.

Although she has been involved in a range of competitive and recreational sports since an early age, Anu was a relative latecomer to martial arts and combat sports. After arriving in the United Kingdom from Finland in 2005, she had the opportunity to try kickboxing in her early 20s, and subsequently got involved in Mixed Martial Arts and Wing Chun. She trains with a small, informal group of practitioners led by her Sifu in the Northeast of England. This involvement shaped her research interests.  Her doctoral dissertation examined ways of embodied knowing in mixed martial arts through an ethnographic study which utilised a phenomenologically-guided, interdisciplinary analytical frame.

In her previous work on mixed martial arts, Anu found that practitioners actively utilised multimedia (in particular visual) materials to accompany physical training and as part of the learning process.  They also documented their own practice through new media technologies including smart phones. This sparked questions as to whether practitioners of more traditional martial arts (such as Wing Chun) utilized technology in similar ways.

Anu suffered a severe knee injury in 2014 during the course of her MMA training when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament.  Following her recovery from surgery her involvement in Wing Chun training intensified, although she is still a relative novice. The small, but committed group of practitioners she trains with focus on the Wing Chun forms, accompanying technical and conditioning drills as well as Chi Sau. However, their training is not completely restricted to traditional Wing Chun.  Her Sifu’s very eclectic background in a range of combat sports and martial arts ensures that the group’s training also incorporates elements from Western boxing, Bruce Lee’s Jun Fan, kickboxing and grappling. There are usually three to five participants (aged 33-65; one female, the rest male) attending training sessions.  Some only attend once a week whereas the three core members of the group, including Anu, gather to train more frequently.  She also participates in private tuition in addition to the group classes.

In summary, we are working together to examine novel approaches to Wing Chun pedagogy. Our different personal, professional and martial arts biographies, dispositions and intuition have led us to delve into material on different topics. This is of course due to our position in our respective groups, and their stages of development (beginning and established). The novelty in this article is in the use of digital technology between instructors, students and other Wing Chun devotees, who all form the global Wing Chun community. We both used the same methods and forms of analysis, and shared our data via email, and later via Facebook and the Messenger mobile phone application to verify our analysis and core argument. Our open-ended research design moved from what began as a phenomenological consideration of time, space, the senses and the body through autophenomenology (Allen Collinson) to a methodological bricolage including field notes and observations, one-on-one focused interviews, email interviews and dialogue, online media analysis and autobiographical reflections which came together at different stages of the six-month study.

We followed Newcastle University’s official guidelines for conducting qualitative research through informed consent. All names have been changed to protect the practitioners’ identities, although the original media that we and the practitioners have used remain overt for the readers’ visual reference and for better clarity in the description of movements and concepts that can easily be mistaken with the written word. Furthermore, we remain in contact with our participants as future collaborators, who are informed of the study from the beginning to the dissemination process.

Discussion: Using multimedia before, during and after classes and training sessions

The discussion of the qualitative data that we have gathered has been divided into three parts by adopting a temporal or ideal typical approach to understanding both official Wing Chun classes and seminars alongside informal training between Kung Fu brethren and solitary home training. The first section deals with the use of media before training sessions, and even before some of the participants became involved in the formal study of Wing Chun. The second part briefly explores how Wing Chun media might be used as a training and teaching aid at the same time that the practitioner is working on specific skills and exercises. The last part provides an insight into how online information can solidify into embodied knowledge directly (or shortly) after the training session or class in question as a means of analysis and circumspection.

A diagram from the Black Flag Wing Chun system discovered online that George found helpful.

Before training

The Ip Man films noted in the literature review are well known in both English and Mexican society. George was pleasantly surprised when a university student, Raul, knocked on the door of the studio he used as a kwoon:

Thanks to the Ip Man trilogy and related films, many people recognize the characteristic movements in Wing Chun. I was finishing the second and third section of Siu Lim Tao when a young student appeared in the doorway.

“Is that Wing Chun?” He asked in a confident manner, as if he knew the answer already.

“Yes, that’s right – it’s Wing Chun.” I replied.

“I thought so. I recognize that movement from Ip Man!” He remarked, as he demonstrated the quintessential chain punch.

Mario, my devoted student in his 70s, turned round and smiled with great joy at the mention of Ip Man. He was normally austere and distant with visitors, but not on this occasion.

This recognition of the triple punch combination led Raul to join the class, and combine it with his Japanese martial arts training. George found it imperative to install a solid understanding of Wing Chun theory in a “scientific” way, especially for the sport science students at the university, who were studying topics such as biomechanics and anatomy. Having explored numerous websites and old books, he found Google Images to be an invaluable resource to help him explain the founding principles of Wing Chun, as seen in one diagram:

I was instantly attracted to a coloured diagram depicting five different lines within three zones (heaven, man and earth). It drew me to an article by the leader of the mysterious Black Flag Wing Chun lineage. Some people claim this is the original style, while others refute this branch as a recent invention and marketing gimmick. Regardless of these often politically motivated debates, the diagram could serve Wing Chun practitioners from all schools and styles. It would help them understand the correct position of techniques and the six gates according to the three Dantiens. Pak Sau, for example, is not a centerline technique; instead, it works within the inner shoulderline, just outside the head.

Personally, George has used videos of hard training sessions with accompanying music to motivate him to train alone, and has sought out rare Wing Chun conditioning drills for the hands, forearms and problematic areas in order to offset potential postural difficulties. Regardless of style, association or “body lineage”, there were useful multimedia resources from veteran Sifus, relatively unknown instructors and even intermediate students sharing fitness tips.

Different multi-mediated materials also provided an initial entry point to members of the English training group, helping to spark their interest in Wing Chun.  This led to exploration of further resources and the search for a place to practice. Senior students like Jack (who is in is mid-forties) initially sought out information through a range of sources which inspired him before he took up training in Wing Chun:

 

“So before I started training in Wing Chun, I had an awareness I suppose from popular films and television. So it would have been Bruce Lee films and generally representation of Kung Fu on television, Jackie Chan, but also magazines like Martial Arts Illustrated and so on, which I would read — Because before I had only seen what he had done in his films, so pretty superficial until I learnt a bit more by reading magazine articles, so people who know knew more about him and about his past and I thought well if you went down that path then maybe it’s worth at least having a look at ” (Jack, May 2016).

Older students also described seeking out a range of material in their interviews. Yet such information was not as widely available or as easily accessible prior to the Internet. Our Sifu recalled the challenges of seeking out resources on Wing Chun (and Kung Fu more generally) in the ‘old days’ and when written sources such books and magazines were harder to get a hold of. For the younger members of the group, including myself and fellow student Alex (35), the online sources provided the primary material utilized in our search for information about the art.  Yet in neither case was this the sole source of information.  Rather, our interest in Wing Chun was preceded by participation in other arts [for Alex, Tae Kwon Do and Aikido; for myself, kickboxing, Thai boxing and MMA].

In terms of the use of these materials, prior to actual physical training sessions, practitioners tended to seek out online materials – primarily YouTube videos – on different technical drills and chi sau.  They were employed as aide-memoires which helped them to review elements of Wing Chun that they would be practicing during the upcoming session. New media technologies such as smartphones facilitated access to these materials.  Alex (35), for example, often watched videos on his mobile phone prior to sessions and when he had free time during his job as a taxi driver:

“I generally watch videos on You Tube on a daily basics usually while waiting for jobs, or when waiting to start a class, etc.” (Alex, March 2016).

Anu also utilised these online visual materials in a similar fashion.  She sought out drills and techniques which she had found challenging during the previous session. The videos offered useful visual reference points that intersected with the corporeal reference points acquired through experience during the group and one-to-one sessions.

During movement

Pre-designed diagrams and figures are an obvious resource when teaching Wing Chun theory, and some podcasts, videos and images can also be used to teach students. Meanwhile, videos and photographs can be an effective way to help students realize their mistakes, as George found when he learned the art in England, in the days before smart phones.

The deployment of such technology can be helpful in avoiding confusion, often overwhelming to beginners, over the various ways to execute techniques and forms. During an interview, one of George’s students, Saul, actually suggested using his cell phone to record the technique:

“I was going to suggest that in the last five minutes of class that perhaps I could record with my cell phone some of the things that I could do at home. They’re not always easy to remember. I’m at home, and I go like, “Was it like this that I was supposed to practise? Do I go like this, or like this?” So, if I could record some of the techniques to bring home, I could record them on my cell phone and it would be easier to remember.”

Although smart phones were employed by Anu, Alex and Jack to study videos prior to sessions, none of them had utilised this technology to record their own training during practice. However, an observational field-note and the subsequent reflection illustrate how connections to multi-mediated materials were regularly made with the bodily and sensuous training sessions:

The online videos available on YouTube are sometimes referred to during practice in relation to different aspects and discussions of efficiency and form, and during last evenings’ training session our Sifu mentioned particular videos that illustrated the form, and the drills that are utilised to practice the different elements of attack and defence particularly well. Within our small group, these references made during practice provide guidance in searching information and videos online, within the wealth of information that is now available and accessible, simply with a click of a button. (Field notes, May 2016)

Senior student Jack reflected on the idea of recording videos of his own practice and the possibility of it being useful for learning, along with limitations for the use of such materials for himself and also from the instructors’ perspective:

“But it would feel quite strange to see it from the outside, when you have experienced it internally from your own perspective, but to see it externally would be quite interesting and say for instance from the instructors’ perspective.  Obviously without the experience you don’t have the tactility that is central there, so you wouldn’t have all the information that you could actually access practicing it for real.  But it’s, VR and things like video playback, that could be…”

A screengrab from the arm conditioning video found on YouTube discussed below.

After practice

Video material is by far the most used form of media by most practitioners we have encountered, especially the younger participants. Whereas some older practitioners complained about the decline in the quality and quantity of martial arts print media, youngsters took to the use of video quite naturally. Mariana (14) videoed George demonstrating the first form, but eventually ran out of memory on her phone due to other videos she had recorded in the week.  George recalled:

 I felt strange being filmed – I imaged other Wing Chun practitioners scrutinizing my positions and even a piece of rare archive footage from my students to come in future decades. Setting aside these thoughts, I tried to perform the form without thinking, until I realised that I was slanting slightly in order to face Valentina’s camera phone.

“We could also film the form from the side”, I suggested, moving my body to the profile view in order to emphasize this. “It would be good in order to see the elbow line.” I said, demonstrating the movement from the profile view. This was another thought that popped into my head during the form: That the vast majority of Siu Lim Tao videos show the form from the front, but never from the side, which can lead to confusions concerning the fixed elbow position, the elbow line and posture in general.

It was exciting to realize that some newcomers to Wing Chun were actively creating new forms of media that could go online, or could be reserved for personal reflection and “old-fashioned” note taking. Regarding the so-called “old school” approach, George came across a challenging exercise for the neck, shoulders and arms that utilised Wing Chun hand positions:

Searching various YouTube videos, I came across an arm exercise demonstration by a seasoned Sifu in my own lineage who claimed it was an “old school exercise” from “thirty years ago.” He told the viewers to hold each position for thirty seconds, and individual movements one hundred times, “or as many times as you can. Basically, do this exercise until you can’t do it anymore.”

This Sifu was a practitioner somewhere between his mid-fifties and mid-sixties, but seemed to be in excellent physical condition. I felt honoured to be able to receive this one-man drill from a veteran practitioner and was surprised that I had never performed it in seven years within the exact same body lineage to which he belongs.

George first trained this exercise at home, and later prescribed it to students after several weeks of supervised repetition, before adding his own “twist” to the exercise through the use of two further – and rather awkward – hand positions (fak sau and ding sau).

Likewise in the second group of practitioners, both participants and the instructor would also review online materials following training sessions, primarily during leisure time and address questions raised during the subsequent gatherings:

“It’s probably normally during leisure time, rather than immediately afterwards, because I probably use the opportunity at that time to ask the questions or I’ll try and recall one for the next session and ask my questions then. Also, I’ll discuss the things I’ve seen so if there’s been a variance or differences between what I perceive on the video or lack of understanding of what’s actually going on, then I will ask my instructor.” (Jack)

Due to the explosion in the volume of videos and other online materials, filtering the information was important:

 

“I mean, I suppose one of the key things is to filter the information that is out there, that is very much about narrowing it down a bit. But not exclusively, but narrowing down perhaps an initial search to for example, to the lineage holders, so Ip Chun and Ip Ching, so you know you’re kind of getting the same sort of forms that I currently practice anyway. But also having maybe a look at some people who have different takes on it, you know to get at something that is not too narrow to get some wider exposure.”

The way in which the students and the Sifu used these materials was pragmatic and directly related to their own practices and experiences. In addition to online materials Anu often enjoyed studying books, particularly the scientific approach to the structure of Wing Chun by Sifu Shaun Radcliffe which also includes diagrammatic representations of the art, similar to those that George had explored online.

Multimedia resources can be accessed from mobile phones, tablets, computers and can even be saved through cloud technology in ways that do not occupy physical space.  Nevertheless, from the perspective of embodied training this complex consumption of media can best be broken down into three times: before, during and after physical practice. There remains a lot of work to be done in terms of how other forms of digital and online multimedia are being used, and can be used, in a pragmatic and safe manner.  We touch on these issues in our tentative conclusion.

A single moment from Ip Man’s teaching career immortalized on YouTube.

Concluding comments: A call for further research and reflection

This small-scale study remains in its infancy.  Yet we hope that it makes a small contribution to the pedagogical and social scientific work on Wing Chun, traditionalist Chinese martial arts and martial arts and combat sports in general. Other researchers and exponents of the art may wish to explore how the constantly expanding and flexible body of digital media offered on YouTube, Vimeo, private and open Facebook groups, specialist (and often commercial) websites, and blogs such as this one, can combine to influence learners and teachers of Wing Chun. Likewise, researchers could (and perhaps should) examine how practitioners themselves are shaping the knowledge of the art – and how this knowledge is transmitted – to new generations of Wing Chun learners and potential students in years to come.

Due to the almost infinite and “immortal” nature of digital information, it will be interesting to chart the development of this knowledge.  What can be inspiring for some is frustrating and confusing for others unable to discern skill levels, quality of technique and nuances of lineage. Issues of credibility, authenticity and authority may intrigue scholars as training exercises, history, technical explanations and “secret” applications move from tightly-knit groups and federations to Wing Chun practitioners anywhere in the world at any time, at the click of the button. This is just as Spencer mentions in the aptly titled “From Many Masters to Many Students,” which ties together ideas of transnational identities, real and imagined movements in the martial arts, such as in the case of Capoeira in Canada.

We join calls from martial arts scholars such as Paul Bowman to disrupt seemingly established disciplinary boundaries in order to join forces to explore this challenging and stimulating topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives, and with their correlating methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Our own approach was limited to a more sociological standpoint that overrode our previous inclination towards phenomenology.  It may yet provide room for other investigations looking at the historical development of martial arts instructional media, the ethical issues accompanying them, the cultural sensitivities when dealing with the politics and traditions of knowledge and its possession, and issues of regulation and legal control of potentially damaging material that could lead to bad or unhealthy practice. Phenomenology may afford purchase on investigations which explore the role of the senses within pedagogic and enskillment practices involved in embodied transmission of Wing Chun knowledge. An example of such avenue in another combat sports context is a chapter examining the role of the sense in pedagogies of MMA coaches by Anu, in a forthcoming book on the senses in physical culture.

Pedagogy in its broadest sense, like our backgrounds in sport and exercise sciences, is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary. Martial arts studies can work closely with these similarly disrupted disciplines to explore complex themes such as the one we have selected here. And so we finish this short article with a question that remains to be fully explored: How can we understand the connections between multimedia and embodied knowledge in Wing Chun and other TCMA from a multisensorial, timeless and global approach?

About the Authors

George Jennings is a lecturer in sport sociology/physical culture at the Cardiff School of Sport, Cardiff Metropolitan University. His current work examines the relationships between martial arts, health and society. Previously, George has conducted ethnographic and case studies of Wing Chun and Taijiquan, as well as an examination of the newly crated martial arts in Mexico, such as Xilam.

Anu Vaittinen is a qualitative sociologist and a health researcher based at the Institute of Health & Society at Newcastle University, interested in sociological phenomenology and development of socially situated, sensuous embodied ways of knowing within physical cultures and health. Anu is a recreational MMA and Wing Chun practitioner and novice triathlete.

Taijiquan practitioners by M. Louis. Source: Wikimedia.

***Over the last couple of years a discussion has emerged within the literature on how scholars should define and classify the martial arts, and whether such efforts are even a good idea.  Alex Channon, a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education and Sports Studies at the University of Brighton, has generously agreed to contribute to this ongoing conversation in the following guest post.  I was thrilled to receive this as I have been trying to get Alex to visit Kung Fu Tea for a couple of years.  When we got together at the Martial Arts Studies conference in Cardiff he mentioned that he had an idea for an essay on this topic, and I was only too happy to take him up on the offer.  Enjoy!***

“How (not) to categorise martial arts: A discussion and example from gender studies.”

By Alex Channon

Introduction

A topic that has quickly become a central point of discussion within martial arts studies is that concerned with defining or clarifying what ‘martial arts’ actually are, and thereby what it is (and perhaps, is not) that we are studying when we claim to be doing ‘martial arts studies’.  As the central focus of blog posts, journal articles, and conference presentations associated with our emerging field, and appearing within most introductory (or other) chapters of books and edited volumes on the topic, it is clear that this question animates scholars and will likely continue to do so for some time.

My purposes in this post are to make a small contribution to this discussion by pointing to a manner in which we might approach constructing typological models of ways of engaging in martial arts.  I want to suggest that typologies of martial arts are an important element of our pursuit of the study of these phenomena, but the manner in which we undertake this work must be reflexively and openly configured around the specific intentions that we have for doing so.  Ultimately, we must be mindful of, and work in close relation to, the tension that exists between the need to clarify definitional criteria used in our research, with the tendency for universalising categories to break down under scrutiny across the widest possible field of their application.

To elaborate on this, there are two initial points to make.  Firstly, differentiations between martial arts should not be tied to discreet, self-identified ‘styles’ or ‘disciplines’ (e.g., boxing, capoeira, karate), such that any typological system we build should avoid falsely reifying the assumed homogeneity of styles.  And secondly, the specific purposes for which any given typology is imagined must be held in plain view when reflecting on the way in which it is constructed, and thereby its particular value and limitations for understanding martial arts made clear.

The heterogeneity of ‘styles’

Following Wetzler’s critique of the scholarly tendency to adopt the object-language of martial arts/martial artists themselves, typologies of martial arts are doomed to fail if they are based principally on grouping together extant ‘styles’ (i.e., boxing, judo, karate).  This is because any given martial discipline is constituted by dynamic social processes which vary across time and place, with the assumed objective characteristics belonging to each art being little more than “lexical illusions” (Wetzler 2015, p.25) circulating among a given group of practitioners or observers at any one point in time.  In short, the different styles of martial arts do not exist in the static and homogenous way in which they are often assumed to, throwing efforts at categorising them on such bases into disarray.

While some martial artists may argue that theirs is a strictly ‘non-competitive’ discipline, others training within them may still hold or enter tournaments. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Timothy Moore). Source: Wikimedia.

If we take for example the apparent divergence between, for argument’s sake, fighting arts with an emphasis on some form of ‘spiritual’ component, and those constituted primarily around competitive sporting purposes, then we might be tempted to suggest that the various styles of tai chi categorically fall into the former and boxing, the latter.  Yet, one person’s tai chi practice might in fact be largely sports-oriented – they may aspire to win national championships and train expressly for this purpose, disregarding or de-emphasising other training goals.  Meanwhile, the other’s boxing might involve no competition at all, and could very well be practiced in a manner tied to transcendental, ‘spiritual’ goals; for instance, it is not uncommon for powerful narratives of self-transformation to be attached to boxing classes employed within violence survivor programmes.  In this way there is little to be gained from categorically associating an entire martial discipline with one or another archetype (e.g., spiritual art vs. competitive sport), since in practice any system could conceivably be configured in ways which meet the criteria of multiple categories.

Previously, in a paper co-authored with George Jennings, I made use of a simplified approach to understanding variation among martial arts that rests on a commonly-assumed division between ‘traditionalist’, ‘sporting’ and ‘self-defence’ orientations, employed as a means of indicating the breadth of the scope of activities we were interested in discussing within that specific piece.  Judkins and Wetzler have both critiqued this approach, each quoting the same passage of this particular paper to do so, for the risk it poses in glossing over the internal diversity of styles of martial arts.  However, in the same paragraph as our twice-quoted passage, Jennings and I did also note that “complicating efforts at neatly defining or categorising these disparate arts is the recognition that, in individual practice, any given style may blur the conceptual boundaries upon which such typologies are based” (p.774).  While we might’ve been clearer on this point in the original piece, it wasn’t our intention to fall into such a trap while recognising that modes of practice of martial arts differ in notable ways.

Indeed, there are certainly differences in how and why people practice martial arts – it would be difficult to argue that there is no important distinction between competition-based and self-defence training practices for instance – and as scholars we need to be cognisant of such divergences and ask what impact they have on phenomena including the lived experience of training, the technical methods and knowledge involved, modes of popular media representation, etc.  Various forms of martial arts practice are likely to bear differing significance in many such dimensions, as will be returned to below.  Yet these differences should not be assumed to map neatly onto discrete styles of martial arts; individual disciplines are too open to variation in actual practice for such an effort to be of any use.

The specific analytical purposes of categories

Categories of martial arts might therefore be better established on bases other than descriptive conformity with the self-expressed differences existing between supposedly unique styles (or groupings of styles).  In this sense, typological differentiation might be more worthwhile if it is expressly built around analytical criteria; that is, rather than starting with the reference points established by and within particular martial arts themselves, such an exercise begins with the conceptual work that the martial arts studies scholar is hoping to undertake by doing the differentiation.

Such a choice makes clear the underlying theoretical frameworks otherwise being implicitly adopted, helping avoid the temptation to take up the assumptions circulating within particular martial arts subcultures.  It also requires scholars to make explicit the specific contexts within which their attempts at defining ‘martial arts’ might be used, thus avoiding the trap of universalism that often scuppers such attempts.  After all, what is analytically useful in one context may hold little value for understanding martial arts in another.

Moreover, this approach carries added importance if we accept that definitional efforts are very often accompanied by some form of hierarchal ordering.  To return to the flimsy dichotomy noted above – ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘sporting’ approaches – it is often the case that a hierarchal framework is subtly imposed on martial disciplines and their adherents, which may be inflected with specific forms of prejudice, when applying this sort of distinction in practice.

Read it here!

In one of my earlier papers on gender and martial arts training, I noted that British men who practiced so-called ‘Asian’ martial arts explicitly constructed themselves as morally superior to men involved in ‘sports’, including sportised fighting disciplines such as boxing and MMA, specifically because they eschewed a particular vision of masculinity associated with sport along with the over-competitiveness and violence this was assumed to entail.  I have consistently run up against similar discourses in subsequent research and teaching on martial arts.  A particularly fitting, recent example came when a young karateka in one of my undergraduate physical education theory classes refused to call MMA ‘martial arts’ because ‘it lacks a spiritual element’ and ‘is practiced by violent people’ – a position admittedly derived from her sensei’s teachings.

The purposes behind any given martial arts teacher’s discursive construction of their discipline as somehow ‘more spiritual’ or ‘less violent’ than another might be directed towards a particular pedagogical aim according to specific interpretations of their art.  It is conceivable that the aesthetics or other objective features of these activities might be leveraged towards a lesson in non-violence, or to highlight the perceived importance of self-cultivation over competitiveness, for instance.  But when such characteristics of practice are then taken to stand in for categorical differences between martial arts/artists in a wider sense, yet remain tied to an implicit moral framework of ‘the right and wrong ways to train’, the moralising conceptual prime-mover of this particular distinction slips unnoticed into a worldview that encourages unsubstantiated and prejudicial readings of others’ practices.

Furthermore, it is not difficult to see how far the construction of ‘morally superior, cosmopolitan, enlightened Asian martial arts practitioner’ vs. ‘violent, thuggish, ignorant boxer/cage fighter’ may feed both class-based prejudices and orientalist romanticism (at least, in Western contexts).  Although it would be unfair to assume that any application of this sort of distinction is always built around prejudicial stereotyping, it represents a problem inherent in universalising definitional meanings of martial arts which were built for a specific purpose.  When left un-interrogated in their wider applications, the analytical aims of such attempts at differentiation stand to cloud judgement in ways which are both conceptually misleading, and possibly constitutive of unhelpful and unwarranted status hierarchies (other examples of this problem might include categorisations of martial arts in terms of their perceived ‘authenticity’, or ‘effectiveness’, and so on, whereby the respective ‘lesser’ arts are implicitly subordinated/denigrated).

To this end, I argue that making the purposes of our differentiations clear from the outset is an important step in ensuring an openness that avoids this potentially harmful outcome.  We should ask ourselves why we are seeking to define or differentiate between martial arts in this or that way, making clear that any such method is likely going to be of only limited usefulness in contexts that lie beyond those connected to our immediate analytical goals.

An example from gender studies

As an example of an explicitly analysis-led effort at producing a typology of martial arts, I turn now to the model constructed in mine and Christopher R Matthews’ recent book, Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  Within the introductory chapter of this book, we posited a five-point typology specifically constructed around the implications of women’s participation in various combat sport activities for the theoretical study of gender.  We built the typology in two ways – firstly by way of interrogating how such practices might relate to a handful of key conceptual issues, and secondly by drawing on extant empirical research to help substantiate and refine the emergent categorical types.  The five categories we created were:

1. ‘Combat’ workouts
2. Purposive self-defence
3. Competitive fighting
4. Performative combat
5. ‘Recreational’ martial arts

Although it is tempting to digress into a full discussion of these categories, I will refrain from doing so here in the interests of space.  Instead, I will focus on the rationale underpinning this model and point the reader to the original source, free to access here (pp.8-15), for further reading.

Our purpose for building this typology was to understand how women’s engagement in combat sports and related activities might hold out the possibility to challenge long-standing hierarchal constructions of gender within Western societies.  We were not trying to exhaustively define martial arts, or create a rigid, universally-applicable structure for categorising fighting activities, but instead map out a series of practical distinctions within this field that bore special relevance for our analytical objective.

‘Padded attacker’ self-defence training clearly differs from kata drills or competitive fighting, but which differences we focus on will be a reflection of our analytical aims as researchers. Source: Wikimedia.

Specifically, it was our hope that the differences we highlighted would be useful in furthering feminist analyses of the value of combat sports participation for challenging gender inequity, and on that basis we shaped the typology around a set of questions which we deemed to be of central importance in this effort.  These involved:

1. To what ends are fighting techniques being studied by women?
2. How do practitioners (physically) interact with one-another?
3. What meanings are ascribed to the capabilities of their bodies, and to the physical and/or cultural space(s) their bodies occupy?
4. In what manner are men present in the activity, if at all?
5. And ultimately, how do these considerations map onto the gender norms and sexual hierarchies operating within the wider cultural spaces the activity occupies? (p.14, as above)

These questions were developed on the basis of our theoretical background in the sociology of gender, and also our engagement with the literature on women, sport and gender derived from the sociology of sport and sport psychology fields.  In this sense, the focus of our analysis was narrowed further, addressing concerns that hold particular (although not necessarily exclusive) relevance for the debates occurring among feminist sports scholars.  Indeed, these foundational questions were intended to address various issues identified by scholars as most pertinent to women’s engagement in sport and physical activity, and its media representation.

In turn, these concerns included: the long-standing association between fighting, sports, masculinity, and symbolic constructions of male power; the passivity and deferential interactional strategies embedded in traditional modes of feminine gender performance, learned through lifelong socialisation processes and mirrored historically by (mediated) idealisations of femininity; the restrictive and objectifying, often sexualised, male-centred relationship that many women are encouraged to have with their own bodies; the oppressive spatial regulation of women’s bodies and their continual surveillance by others; the assumed inevitable leadership, authority and superiority of men within cultural spheres historically defined as ‘masculine’; the pervasive, ubiquitous nature of gender as an organising principle in contemporary social life; and the potential for women’s engagement in (particularly) vigorous, combative physical training, along with the mediated representation of doing so, to disrupt, subvert or otherwise challenge many of these phenomena.

Each of these problems have been identified in previous theoretical and empirical literature as important for understanding how, why, and to what ends women engage in physical activity, and have been central concerns throughout much of the extant sociological research on women’s sport in general and martial arts in particular.  Thus, we took them as fitting problems around which to articulate a system of differentiation for grasping the social significance of these activities, relative to the politicised theoretical ambitions of figuring out how they might best be utilised to challenge the inequity of modern gender structures.

Uses and limitations of the model

Evidently, given their analytical specificity to our particular area of interest, these are not the same questions that other scholars have asked of martial arts in similar definitional efforts.  However, it is notable that they do bear some similarity to the ‘classes of phenomena’ underpinning Wetzler’s recently articulated ‘five dimensions of meaning’.  In this respect, our model falls in line with the approach Wetzler advocates, and which Judkins describes as “strongly (encouraging) focused comparative analysis”, as it builds a contextually-relevant means of defining and understanding martial arts relevant to a specific analytic objective.  The comparisons that Wetzler’s approach encourage carry resonance across fields of practice within which martial arts might be understood as bearing differing significance towards a particular theoretical focus, and are thus potentially generative of more directly theorised case-studies than generalised attempts at differentiation offer.

The approach taken in building our typology thereby foregrounds salient elements of martial arts and related activities which are explicitly determined by our analytical goals surrounding gender and sport.  It did not depend at all on the (claimed) characteristics of specific martial disciplines, so avoids the homogenisation of styles outlined above.  Here, we were careful with the terminology used in describing the practices associated with each category, using words like ‘usually’, ‘often’, ‘might’, etc., in place of more fixed, definitive language, because we did not want the model to be tied to specific objective practices but rather to the meanings any such practices might be seen to carry.  Meanwhile, being clearly articulated around specific theoretical conceptualisations helped tie the model to a finite area of analysis, avoiding any implied universalism and the obfuscation wrought by unclear theoretical frameworks.  In other words, we were forthright about the limits of the model’s usefulness, making no claims to wider applicability.

Fitness classes using fighting techniques may not be very ‘martial’, but can still be worth considering as part of the wider field of interest for martial arts studies scholars. Source: Wikimedia.

In addition, the analysis-driven focus also provided the ability to take note of activities which fall outside of more conventional definitions of ‘martial arts’, such as those subsumed within the first category, ‘combat’ workouts.  There is little involved in boxercise classes, for instance, that could be considered either ‘martial’ or ‘combative’, but this does not mean that these activities don’t or shouldn’t figure as important phenomena when analysing women’s engagement within the wider field.  Indeed, such practices are a common feature in many female martial artists’ narratives of participation, and are closely linked with the manner in which other aspects of women’s sport are structured by discourses of gender, yet would be rendered invisible here if insisting on a more generic definition of martial arts/combat sports.  Thus, while the model is inherently restrictive with respect to its theoretical utility, it is intended to be all the more inclusive within this area because of it.

The typology is, of course, far from perfect.  We took care to ‘book-end’ the section of the chapter that introduced it with disclaimers as to its incompleteness and cultural partiality, built as it is around the perspectives of two white, Western, male scholars deriving their knowledge from (mostly) Anglophone academic literature and engagement within Western(ised) cultural practices.  Additionally, many practicing martial artists may point out that their own engagement in the field straddles multiple categories.  Of course this is both possible and highly likely, and while it does not invalidate the observation that each type of practice bears differing relevance for gender analysis, it does reduce the model’s utility for understanding individuals’ specific, complex patterns of engagement in martial arts.

In terms of its actual content, the fifth category in particular (‘recreational’ martial arts) is likely to be frustrating to some scholars given its diffuseness, which was driven by what we considered to be a lack of definitive differences regarding our central thematic problem rather than any similarities between the modes of practice described within it.  This left the final category as more of a collection of miscellany than a meaningful, single ‘type’, even if its inclusion did give us reason to encourage reflection, criticality, and the extension of our analysis by others.  Indeed, it is likely that others’ perspectives on such practices, filtered through theorisations of gender, might’ve expanded this category in a more meaningful way than we managed.

Elsewhere, we omitted discussion of martial arts trained in by women within the security or military forces – an unfortunate oversight on our part of a very timely phenomenon.  This perhaps ought to figure as a separate category of its own in any future re-working of this model, given that such formations of practice clearly bear relevance for gender analyses even if they have precious little to do with ‘combat sport’, as such.  Empirical research into these practices among women serving in various armed forces would likely yield intriguing insight and make for fruitful comparisons against the wide body of work existing on women’s civilian self-defence training, for instance.

Conclusion

To conclude this post, I would like to invite readers to critically respond both to the overall proposition made here – that typological classifications of martial arts might be particularly useful when tied to specific, finite analytical objectives – as well as the model proposed as an example of this exercise.  As is clearly represented within more extensive, recent discussions over how and why we should define our object of analysis, there is yet little consensus among martial arts studies scholars on this vital issue.  If the proposition forwarded here is accepted, it is likely that a multitude of models for categorising martial arts will proliferate, each with its own specific sphere of application and unique theoretical utility.  Whether or not this is something that the martial arts studies community would find helpful remains to be seen.

Alex Channon

About the Author

Alex Channon is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Education and Sports Studies at the University of Brighton.  Along with Christopher R. Matthews, he is the editor of Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors around the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  Alex’s research interests include sex integration in martial arts, the mediated representation of combat sport athletes, and the value of martial arts as forms of physical education.

Wrestlers in Tainjin, 1930. Source: http://fightland.vice.com/blog/shuai-jiao-chinas-indigenous-wrestling-style

Greetings from Germany!

I am current attending the 5th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Sport Science’s Martial Arts Commission at the Sports University of Cologne.  I will soon be delivering my keynote address (titled “Creating Wing Chun: Towards a Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts.”)  This paper discusses my approach to writing social history, explores why scholars should pay attention to this area of martial arts studies, and finally make an argument as to how this sort of research might be relevant to non-academic instructors and practitioners.    I plan to post all of that, as well as a full report on the conference, after my return to the United States next week.

In the mean time I thought that I would share with you the text of Paul Bowman’s keynote which he has been kind enough to post on his blog.   I don’t have a schedule in front of me, but I believe that Paul’s address comes a bit before mine in the batting order.  As astute readers may have already gathered from his title, this paper constitutes an intervention into the ongoing discussion of how to define and conceptualize the martial arts.  Rather than wading into the details of those conversations, it instead argues that such efforts may be premature at best, and misguided at worst.  One concern is that such exercises are too frequently put at the service of a sort of “naive empiricism.”  Paul goes on to argue that what is necessary at this point in the development of the field is a more sustained engagement with the basic insights of Critical Theory.

The paper that I will be presenting tends towards the historical and empirical, where as Paul’s is deeply engaged with post-structural and post-Marxist problems.  Yet when sitting down to look at each others essays, we were surprised to see that they touched on a number of shared themes and concerns.  One can even find some of these (albeit in a more empirical mode) in my recent post engaging with (and critiquing) Jeff Dykhuizen’s work on the culturally mediated nature of experience in the global Aikido community.  Hopefully I will have more to say on this after returning from the conference.  But until then, click the link to get a head start on the conversation!

What Can a Martial Body Do For Society? – Or, Theory Before Definition in Martial Arts Studies

Taijiquan being demonstrated at the famous Wudang Temple, spiritual home of the Daoist arts. Source: Wikimedia.

Greetings from an Airport Somewhere in Europe!

I am currently in transit, returning from my recent visit with the 5th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Sport Science’s Martial Arts Commission at the Sports University of Cologne.  I hope to post a full report on the conference, as well as the text of my paper, sometime next week.  In the mean time I thought that I would share one of the Keynotes that was delivers at the Martial Arts Studies Conference held this July at Cardiff University.  Best of all, you can now watch this (and most of the other keynotes) on the Martial Arts Studies youtube channel.  Just click the link below.

In this paper Daniel Mroz attempts to tackle some of the fundamental questions that underlie the ubiquitous, but still mysterious, practice of Taolu (or set forms) within the Chinese martial arts.  One suspects that the framework that he advances here might also be helpful in thinking about a range of other Asian martial practices.  Enjoy!

Taolu: Credibility and Decipherablility in the Practice of Chinese Martial Movement

Illustration from Meyer’s Longsword.

Greetings!

If all has gone according to plan, I am now back in the United States and recovering after my recent trip to Germany.  As such, I would like to share with you another keynote addresses from this summer’s Martial Arts Studies conference in Cardiff as I work on on my report for next week.

This was an interesting talk for a number of reasons.  To begin with, Daniel gave it while wearing armor, which is something that one does not see every day.  Secondly, I have been hoping to get some discussion of the Historical European Martial Arts movement (HEMA) onto Kung Fu Tea for some time now.

In this paper Daniel asks whether it is possible to reconstruct a lost fighting system from existing books.  The answer seems to be that this sort of exercise is much more difficult than we often assume.  And while this talk is specifically discussing the reconstruction of Western fight books, I suspect that many of these issues might also be applicable to those thinking about Chinese or Japanese manuals.  As such, this paper may be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in the historical martial arts.

As Daniel is a younger scholar who we have not discussed before, a few words of introduction are in order.  He is a medievalist with a background in literary studies as well as the history of science and the material culture of the early modern period.  He received a PhD from the University of Geneva in 2013, is the co-editor of the Acta-Periodica Duellatorum (which you should definitely check out) and he just co-edited a new volume on Western fight books.  Lastly, if you are curious as to what he can actually do in that armor, be sure to check out this clip!

Lost Embodied Knowledge: Experimenting with Historical European Martial Arts out of Books

The Design Wing of the Corning Museum of Glass.

 
***Today we have a fascinating guest post by Paul Bowman.   It has been reblogged from Martial Arts Studies.  This essay outlines a new research project looking at questions of sanity and insanity within the practice of martial arts.  It is one of the most thought provoking things that I have read in a while.  The questions raised here are deeply connected to the various ways that we read (and misread) the history of the martial arts.  Needless to say, the “real world” consequences of these perceptions can be profound.  Those looking for more background on this discussion are advised to begin by checking out the recent essay by Oleg Benesch titled ‘Reconsidering Zen, Samurai and the Martial Arts.‘***

The Arts of Martial Minds

by Paul Bowman

I have long been interested in the underlying psychological theories or beliefs that inform or even underpin different martial arts. Different styles, systems, regions and periods often manifest different discourses, theories or ideologies of what we might call martial arts psychology. By martial arts psychology, what I am evoking might be referred to as the martial artist’s outlook, mindset, psyche, or subjective stance or attitude. What I am suggesting is that such outlooks or attitudes might be linked to the ethos of the training environment.

Of course, sometimes – as in many discourses around boxing or MMA – the dominant idea has often been that ‘being a fighter’ is something innate – something you are ‘born with’ (Wacquant 2004; Spencer 2011). This seems to be a very common claim among competitive fighters and those involved in some way with what we might call street fighting (i.e., people with some kind of connection to non-rule-bound fighting and violence, such as bouncers, for example).

But my sense is that in most martial arts, being – or, more precisely, becoming – a fighter is conceived of in terms of some kind of notion of ‘fighting spirit’, and that such a ‘spirit’ is something that is cultivated, through what Foucault would term ‘the means of correct training’ (Foucault 1978). My sense is also that different martial arts – or even the ‘same’ martial art at different times – seek to cultivate very different ‘kinds’ of martial arts subject.

In my own life, I have experienced very different kinds of training ethos. Some seemed saturated with a vague sense of the inherent value of ‘toughening up’ (Green 2011; Downey 2007; Spencer 2011). Others focused more on having fun, competition and competitive play. Still others involved put the importance of a certain psychological attitude front and centre – whether that be cultivating the dispassionate calm responsive sensitivity of taijiquan in push-hands, an explicit ‘predator awareness’ self-defence mindset, or an insistence on a kind of all-out aggression, such as that which is termed ‘forward thinking’ in escrima concepts (Bowman 2014; Bowman 2015; Miller 2008; Miller 2015). Some were informed by mysticism, others by hierarchy, authority and deference, and still others by camaraderie and a sense of being involved in a shared research project, and so on.

Informed by this diversity of experience as well as other forms of research, I have argued before that martial arts can very often be regarded as intimately imbricated within different kinds of ideology (Bowman 2016b; Bowman 2016a). However, what I am proposing here is something slightly different. I am now less focused on the matter of the ideologies that ‘go into’ the discourse of a martial art, and now more interested in the question of the types of subjects that ‘come out’ – that are produced in and by martial arts training, the type of subjective attitude, mindset, sense of identity and orientation towards the world.

Obviously, this is a two-way street – or even an incredibly complex junction. But a recent article by Oleg Benesch highlights what I am interested in here, in very stark terms. Benesch begins ‘Reconsidering Zen, Samurai and the Martial Arts‘ (Benesch 2016) with a consideration of the case of Anders Berhing Breivik, who, ‘On July 22, 2011 … committed one of the most devastating acts of mass murder by an individual in history (1). Benesch writes:

Over the course of one day, he killed 77 people in and around Oslo, Norway, through a combination of a car bomb and shootings. The latter took place on the island of Utøya, where 69 people died, most of them teenagers attending an event sponsored by the Workers’ Youth League. During his subsequent trial, Breivik remained outwardly unemotional as he clearly recounted the events of the day, including the dozens of methodical execution-style shootings on the island. His calmness both on the day of the murders and during the trial, shocked many observers. It was also an important factor in an attempt to declare Breivik insane, a move that he successfully resisted. Breivik himself addressed this subject at some length, crediting his supposed ability to suppress anxiety and the fear of death through concentrated practice of what he called “bushido meditation.” He claimed to have begun this practice in 2006 to “de-emotionalize” himself in preparation for a suicide attack. According to Breivik, his meditation was based on a combination of “Christian prayer” and the “bushido warrior codex.” Bushido, or “the way of the warrior,” is often portrayed as an ancient moral code followed by the Japanese samurai, although the historical evidence shows that it is largely a twentieth-century construct. (1)

Javier Pérez (Spanish, b. 1968), Carroña (Carrion), Murano, Italy, 2011. Blown glass chandelier, assembled, broken, taxidermied crows. The Corning Museum of Glass.

Benesch’s own interests in this matter relate to addressing the matter of many misunderstandings of the history of notions like ‘samurai spirit’, and the supposed connection of this spirit with Zen. As the above passage suggests, he is animated by the fact that what is ‘largely a twentieth-century construct’ has functioned ideologically. Benesch’s project, here and elsewhere, is to set out the ways that such factually incorrect discourses have emerged and to clarify the ways that they have functioned ideologically. However, as noted, my own interests at this point are chiefly related to what we might call the various types of psychology or pseudo-psychologies of violence and training for combat that are attendant to different kinds of martial arts pedagogy and philosophy.

But Benesch’s article is extremely helpful for me here because it sets out clearly the relations between a number of elements that I will argue it is important to realise are interconnected. Specifically, this is the connection between a training ethos and its theory of psychology – or, indeed, its theory of the subject – and the extent to which neither of these are ‘innate’ or ‘necessary’, but rather entirely ‘cultural’. This is not ‘cultural’ in the sense that we often too easily use the term – as when we say ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’, or ‘American’ or ‘European’, and so on. Rather, this is cultural in the sense of engendered, cultivated, fostered, stimulated, managed, produced, even policed, through techniques of discipline, and always informed by ideology.[1]

Indeed, the implications of Benesch’s opening reflection on the case of Breivik’s ‘psychology’ go further than many studies of the relations between ideology and psychology might otherwise tend to go. For instance, in a very rich and suggestive passage, Benesch notes:

The extent to which the methodical nature of Breivik’s terror attack could be ascribed to his meditation techniques, “bushido” or otherwise, has been called into question by those who see it as another manifestation of serious mental disturbance. On the other hand, Breivik’s statements regarding “bushido meditation” have parallels with the “Warrior Mind Training” program implemented by the US military during the Iraq War. This program claims to have its roots in “the ancient samurai code of self-discipline,” and is described as a meditation method for dealing with a host of mental issues related to combat. Both Anders Breivik and Warrior Mind Training reflect a persistent popular perception of the samurai as fighting machines who were able to suppress any fear of death through the practice of meditation techniques based in Zen Buddhism. Zen has also been linked with the Special Attack Forces (or “Kamikaze”) of the Second World War, who supposedly used meditation methods ascribed to Zen to prepare for their suicide missions.

Here, not only does Benesch reinforce my contentions about the ‘cultural’ dimensions of all of this, but he actually raises the stakes of my own argument by introducing the question not just of mindset but also of sanity and insanity.

Hopefully, none of us are anything like Breivik. But Breivik claims to have believed himself to have trained for his acts of unimaginably callous mass murder by following a self-styled but not entirely alien or unusual type of ‘martial art’ psychological training. Which raises the question: are such martial arts ideologies themselves to be regarded as sane or insane?

Such a question, posed outside of any context or any specific case study, will hardly permit a univocal response. Such a question is based on an unacceptable generalisation at both ends. It is, to borrow a phrase from Freud, an equation between two unknowns. What is a martial arts ideology? What is sanity? Clearly, there is a lot more work to be done here before we can even formulate our question adequately.

Nonetheless, I am reminded of the time a few years ago when a student of mine walked out of a film screening. The film I was showing was Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jarmusch 1999), in which the eponymous Ghost Dog (Forrest Whittaker) is a late twentieth century black urban character who so identifies with the samurai ideology advocated in the putative samurai manual, Hagakure, that he has crafted himself as the retainer of an old mafia gangster who once saved his life. Ghost Dog lives alone, trains martial arts, and undertakes assassinations whenever his ‘master’ requires.

The film has always raised interesting questions for me about identity construction, cross-cultural interests and historical communication, and so on (Bowman 2008). But when I asked the student why she walked out of the screening she replied: because Ghost Dog was insane.

Until then, I had not actually stepped outside of the fictional world of the film properly, to ask myself the question of Ghost Dog’s sanity. The film presents him as an assassin with a fixation on samurai ideology. What does that make him? Mad? Eccentric? Further reflection on the trial of Breivik might cast some interesting conceptual light on these questions.

But, of course, Ghost Dog is a fiction film. Breivik is a mass murderer. You and I are neither of these things. But what is actually taking place when you or I read the Hagakure and find it compelling or ‘inspiring’, or when we identify with an image (any image – think of the images that have animated you) of what ‘being’ a good or proper or the best possible martial artist might mean?

What Ghost Dog, Anders Breivik, and the US military all share in common here seems to boil down to what Benesch calls ‘warrior mind training’. My claim is that ‘warrior mind training’ can be discerned in all manner of martial arts training, from the most mystical to the most military. Benesch has identified one undoubtedly significant (and surprising) linkage in the form of the surely somewhat surprising matter of meditation. But my interest expands to encompass the entire field of possibilities, from the most shocking (Breivik, Ghost Dog) to the most supposedly serene (taijiquan), via the well-worn paths of questions of the production and performance of gender identities, sports subjectivities, and so on. My hypothesis is that, although there may well be infinite and inevitable infinitesimal variation in martial arts training practices, these may distil down to a very finite collection of different types of regularly recurring discourse, and although there may be vast differences in nuances of martial arts ideologies, these too may involve the regular recurrence of different psycho-subjective stances or attitudes.

 My hope is, over the coming weeks and months, to find some time to start exploring some of these matters, via a range of different kinds of cases and studies. If anyone has any suggestions for where to look or what to look at – the more stark the example the better, I think – please do let me know. Email is best. I’m at the end of this one: BowmanP@cardiff.ac.uk. Thanks.

oOo

[1] In a study of language, argumentation, the establishment of truth and ideology, Jean François Lyotard once argued that ‘to link is necessary, but how to link is contingent’ (Lyotard 1988). My contention here is that both training methods and ideological outlooks are contingent, as is the manner of their linkage. The different forms that the various connections, combinations and relations take will always produce very different things.

Corning Museum of Glass Contemporary Art + Design Wing. Source: Architecture Magazine.

References

Benesch, Oleg. 2016. ‘Reconsidering Zen, Samurai, and the Martial Arts’. The Asia-Pacific Journal 14 (17): 1–23. http://apjjf.org/2016/17/Benesch.html.

Bowman, Paul. 2008. Deconstructing Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2014. ‘Instituting Reality in Martial Arts Practice’. JOMEC Journal, 1–24.

———. 2015. Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries. London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

———. 2016a. ‘Making Martial Arts History Matter’. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 1–19. doi:10.1080/09523367.2016.1212842.

———. 2016b. Mythologies of Martial Arts. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Downey, Greg. 2007. ‘Producing Pain: Techniques and Technologies in No-Holds-Barred Fighting’. Social Studies of Science 2007 37: 201 37 (2): 201–26.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Green, Kyle. 2011. ‘It Hurts So It Must Be Real: Sensing the Seduction of Mixed Martial Arts’. Social & Cultural Geography 12 (4): 377–96.

Jarmusch, Jim. 1999. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Artisan Entertainment.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Miller, Rory. 2008. Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence. Illustrated edition edition. Boston, MA: Ymaa Publication Center.

———. 2015. Conflict Communication (ConCom): A New Paradigm in Conscious Communication. Ymaa Publication Center.

Spencer, Dale. 2011. Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment: Violence, Gender and Mixed Martial Arts. London and New York: Routledge.

Wacquant, Löic J. D. 2004. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

A Community Cantonese Opera Performance in San Francisco, circa 1900.

***Happy Thanksgiving!  This is a day when we commemorate the initial act of European immigration to North America.  From that point onward the flow of people and ideas across our borders has never really stopped.  As such, it is impossible to appreciate the global spread of the traditional Asian martial arts without studying the history of immigration.  During the late 19th and early 20th century this was a topic that dominated national discussions, much as it does today.  Those debates culminated in the passage of landmark pieces of legislation that essentially cut off all legal immigration from large parts of the world (including China, Japan and the Philippines).  Yet it was immigrants from around the world that laid the foundation of the traditional martial arts in North America.  Joseph Svinth has kindly agreed to share an essay (found in a slightly different form here) which provides a broad overview of many of these issues. His guest post is also the first in a short occasional series examining the immigrant experience within the martial arts community.***

Asian Martial Arts in the United States and Canada

Asians began immigrating to the North American mainland soon after the discovery of gold in California in January 1848, and they began settling in what was then the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1885. These immigrants brought both traditional and modern martial arts and combative sports with them.

Between 1848 and 1923, these immigrants came in waves based on ethnicity. In succession, these were Chinese, then Japanese, South Asians, and Filipinos. By the 1920s, series of discriminatory laws stopped Asian immigration into North America, but by then, large numbers of Asian children were being born in North America and the Territory of Hawaii. Consequently, by the 1940s, civil rights became an issue for native-born people of Asian ancestry, and by the mid-1960s, the legal basis for direct discrimination had ended in the USA and Canada.

From 1848 to 1968, the Asian martial arts taught and practiced in the USA and Canada generally fit into one of the following categories. 1. Professional activities. This includes working in circuses, working as professional boxers or wrestlers, doing stunt work in film, and so on. 2. Cultural nationalism/Festival arts. These are arts presented during events designed to promote a specific ethnicity or culture: e.g., lion dancing during a Chinese New Year festival, or kendo exhibitions during a Bon festival. 3. Group cohesion. Cultural nationalism and festival also built group cohesion, but in the group cohesion category, the association was not necessarily ethnic, and the occasion was not necessarily festive. For instance, labor unions organized wrestling matches, while community newspapers organized sumo and judo tournaments. The purpose of the former was sometimes to promote work slowdowns, and the purpose of the latter was always to sell newspapers and advertising. 4. Building character in youth. Venues varied, but an example would be teaching at a YMCA or church. Teachers did not get paid much, but they enjoyed working with young people. 5. Prowess and social recognition. In the bachelor subculture of the early days, young men went out back to fight, thereby determining status or settling grudges. In the subsequent family subculture, this same urge was sublimated using refereed sports such as judo and boxing.

Although all the foregoing motivations are still seen in the martial arts done in the USA and Canada, additional motivations began developing after 1900. These new motivations were not driven from within the existing Asian martial art community. Instead, they were driven by external players – governments, businesses (to include the publishing and film industries), and so on. 1. Preparation for future military service. From the early 1900s until the early 1970s, the US government encouraged teenaged youths to participate in martial arts and combative sports in preparation for future military service. Since the end of the draft in 1973, this emphasis has declined. 2. Feminism. Few North American women undertook systematic training in unarmed martial arts before World War II. Thus, in June 1937, it made national news when two European American women from Los Angeles (Grace B. Logan, 1886-1974, and Annabel Pritchett, 1899- ?), went to Japan, specifically to learn judo. Then, during World War II, the US military began providing rudimentary judo training to female soldiers, and afterwards, martial art training came to be seen as useful for nurses, college coeds, and female factory workers. 3. International sport. Judo became a permanent Olympic sport in 1972 and taekwondo became a permanent Olympic sport in 2000. Making this happen resulted in enormous changes in the pedagogy, practice, and, in some cases, rituals of both judo and taekwondo. It also led to some bitter fighting (and the loss of many friendships) over issues such as who got to authorize promotions and sanction tournaments. 4. Commodification of leisure. During the late 1950s, storefront martial art clubs sprang up across North America. To give an example, Jerome Mackey’s Judo, Inc., incorporated in New York in 1958. Soon, this was the largest storefront chain in New York Metro. One paid for classes in advance; according an advertisement in the Village Voice (January 28, 1971, column 2, 40), the cost was $625 for 273 lessons. In 1973, Judo, Inc. folded, due to stock fraud (543 F2d 1042 United States v. E Corr III, 1976). In storefront martial art clubs, books, uniforms, rank, photos, pride – everything had a price. 5. New Age Spirituality. Mysticism, the occult, and the array of practices known as New Age were popular in North America during the late twentieth century, and sometimes, yoga, theosophy, meditation, and Asian martial arts ran together. As “non-violent” martial arts, taijiquan and aikido were especially susceptible to this tendency. 6. Mass marketing, often using lurid advertising. To this day, relatively few traditional martial art clubs in the USA and Canada advertise much. In commercial clubs, hardly anyone is so reticent, and the martial art club advertisements seen in twentieth century North American comic books were especially colorful — in one classic series, Chicago’s Count Dante (born John Keehan, 1939-1975) advertised himself as the deadliest man alive. After the 1950s, television and print ads for non-martial businesses frequently featured martial art scenes. Sumo was used to advertise banks and computer giants; karate was used to advertise sales at department stores; kendo was used to advertise Canadian whisky. This commercial usage was hardly unique to North America. Japanese merchants were using woodblock prints of martial art scenes to hawk wares during the eighteenth century, and cigarette cards featuring martial art techniques appeared in China during the early twentieth century. But again, this was not something driven from within the Asian martial art community within the United States and Canada.

From the mid-1960s on, the commoditized martial arts hit North America in waves; as the popularity of one art waned, a new art was found to replace it.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Asian martial art one was most likely to find in the USA and Canada was judo, usually taught by a Japanese American or a former serviceman. Then, in 1959, singer Elvis Presley (1935-1977) began doing karate while serving in the US Army in Germany. Within a year, Presley was awarded a black belt, and suddenly karate was the rage.

In 1964, Presley’s kenpo karate teacher Ed Parker (1931-1990) introduced Bruce Lee (Li Zhenfan, 1940-1973) to Parker’s friends in Hollywood, and after that, Lee and his Jeet Kune Do took off: Green Hornet (ABC, 1966-1967), Longstreet (ABC, 1971-1972), The Big Boss (Golden Harvest, 1971).

In 1971, Billy Jack (Warner Brothers, 1971) brought the Korean martial art of hapkido to the forefront. Several years later, in Kentucky Fried Movie (independent production, 1977), Bong Soo Han (Han Pong-su, 1933-2007), said, on screen, in Korean: “Oh, the many pathetic things I have to endure to make movies in America! Not just once or twice, either. Please excuse me, Korean fans” (Chung, 2006, 55-56). Korean-speaking audiences howled, but in English, no one was listening.

In 1973, the television show Kung Fu (ABC, 1972-1975) popularized Shaolin boxing, at least as imagined by Hollywood, and after the movie Enter the Dragon (Golden Harvest, 1973) appeared, Bruce Lee was on the cover of all the martial art magazines. Carlos “Chuck” Norris (1940- ) and Bill “Superfoot” Wallace (1945- ) were popular, too. Norris started training in judo and tangsudo while serving in the US Air Force. Afterwards, he operated a chain of karate schools and acted in movies and television. Wallace also started training in judo and karate while serving in the US Air Force. Following his discharge, he became a professional kickboxer. He was acquainted with Elvis Presley, and was an on-air commentator for the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993.

If karate, Jeet Kune Do, hapkido, and Shaolin were too violent for the buyer’s tastes, there was always aikido or taijiquan. Political activist Joan Baez (1941- ) once told syndicated columnist Mary McGrory (Toledo Blade, July 2, 1979, 12) that she, Baez, could “handle the hostility coming at her from all sides because she’s studying aikido, the Japanese non-violent martial art.”

During the late 1960s, Hatsumi Masaaki (1931- ) organized the Bujinkan ninpo organization in Japan, and by the late 1970s, foreign students such as Stephen K. Hayes (1949- ) had brought Bujinkan budo taijutsu (martial way body techniques) to North America. Most of these North American instructors were technically proficient and well-intentioned. Then, in 1980, fantasy writer Eric van Lustbader (1946- ) began publishing novels about ninjas. In 1984, the first comic book featuring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appeared. This was followed by comic books, action figures, two animated television series, a live television series, twenty separate video games, and four Hollywood movies. Meanwhile, the pseudonymous Ashida Kim published Ninja, Hands of Death (1985). North American ninpo would take decades to recover.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu and capoeira; Filipino arnis; Indonesian silat: wave after wave of “new” crashed into North America. The advertising moved beyond death touch; now all it took to develop secret powers was watching a video or DVD. “Fear no man!” screamed the internet advertisement for Captain Chris’s Close Combat Training, adding: “WARNING: Do No Read This If You Have Moral, Ethical Or Religious Reasons Against Hurting (Or Even Killing) Someone Who Violently Attacks You, Your Wife, Or Your Kids” (http://www.closecombattraining.com/cctraining/start.php?gclid=CMmpi8Sor5wCFSYoawodR1iUjw, downloaded August 19, 2009).

The developments of the years 1953 to present are discussed in detail elsewhere. Consequently, they do not need to be discussed in detail here. Instead, the following is intended to provide readers with a brief introduction to the history and development of Asian martial arts in North America before Hollywood got hold of them.

Kendo Club at the Brigham City Mine, UT. Photo was taken 1916.

Immigrants, 1848-1924

Asian immigration to North America started during 1848-1849, following the discovery of gold in California. Most of the early immigrants were young men from Guangdong Province and Hong Kong. Until the 1910s, most of these men lived a male bachelor subculture, meaning communities in which men “measured manliness by skill at wenching, drinking, gambling, and fighting”; they shared jokes and drinks, and made “temporary acquaintanceships but not necessarily life-long friendships” (Riess, 1991, 23). Large-scale Chinese immigration into North America ended with the enactment of the USA’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1885.

North America’s second wave of Asian immigration came from the Empire of Japan. This wave lasted from 1885 to 1907. From a cultural standpoint, immigrants from the Empire of Japan included Japanese, Koreans, and Okinawans. Like other Asian pioneers, Imperial Japanese immigrants originally lived in a bachelor subculture.

North America’s third wave of Asian immigration came from the Punjab, in the northwest corner of British India. Most of these British Indian immigrants were Urdu-speaking Jatts, and from a religious standpoint, many of them were Sikh. Nonetheless, they were almost universally known in the US and Canada as “Hindoos”. Jatt immigration into North America lasted from 1897 to 1915. Although a few Jatt men circumvented miscegenation laws by living with Mexican or African American women, most Jatt immigrants lived in a bachelor subculture.

The final wave of Asian immigration came from the Philippines. Filipino immigration started shortly after the US victory in the Filipino-American War of 1898-1902, and ended in 1934 with the enactment of a law (the Tydings-Mcduffie Act) that effectively stopped Filipino immigration into the USA. Filipino immigrants also had a bachelor subculture.

During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the Japanese martial arts received extensive mainstream exposure. In 1904-1905, H. Irving Hancock (1868-1922) published books on judo that were reviewed in New York Times, and US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) trained in Kodokan judo at the White House. In British Columbia, the Vancouver Daily Province of January 4, 1905 mentioned a sumo tournament staged in the park in front of City Hall; its grand champion, Matty Matsuda (Matsuda Manjiro, 1887-1929), went on to become a well-known American professional wrestler. And, in New York, during the winter of 1905-1906, industrialist E.H. Harriman (1848-1909) organized a gala visit by top judo and kendo experts; this was all part of a war bond tour that Harriman’s banks were underwriting for the Japanese government.

From the 1860s to the 1930s, jujutsu, sumo, and kendo were featured in circus and vaudeville acts. The following describes a show staged at Madison Square Garden in August 1902. For the price of 50 cents, visitors were promised to see geisha girls, Japanese street scenes, and “fencers and jujitsu wrestlers” (“Broadway Theatres,” 1902). Barnum and Bailey’s circus visited Atlanta, Georgia in October 1913. Said the Atlanta Constitution (October 26, 1913, 32): “The mikado’s jiu jitsu experts will show how even a frail woman trained in the art of Japanese scientific defense may easily overcome an assailant and slap-bang wrestling combats will be indulged in by the bulky wrestlers (shuma [sumo] men) who compose a part of the troupe.” In Syracuse, New York, the Syracuse Herald noted (November 3, 1922, 14): “Prof. Kitose Nakae [Nakae Kiyose, 1883-1962], champion jiu jitsu artist of Japan appearing at Keith’s [vaudeville theater] this week, exhibited his skill before the entire squad of [Syracuse] policemen… Using an unloaded revolver, several of the policemen attempted to pull the trigger of the gun before [Nakae] could either twist it so that the bullet would be sent in an opposite direction or to wrest the gun from their hands.”

There were Asian professional wrestlers and boxers, too. The professional wrestlers were usually Japanese. For example, Sorakichi Matsuda (Matsuda Kojiro, ca. 1858-1891) came to the USA in 1883. He was originally a circus performer, but he decided to take up professional wrestling instead. Matsuda’s promoter was William Muldoon (1852-1933), who also trained boxer John L. Sullivan (1858-1918), and his opponents ranged from the reigning champion Evan “Strangler” Lewis (1860-1919) to Lulu, the “the piney and pork fed female Samson from Georgia” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1884, 2). Other notable Japanese American wrestlers of the early days include Tokugoro Ito (Ito Tokugoro, 1880-1939), Taro Miyake (Miyake Taruji, ca. 1881-1935), and Matty Matsuda (Matsuda Manjiro, 1887-1929).

Chinese Americans were more likely to be boxers than wrestlers. On February 27, 1890, Ah Giang and Foo Jung had a four-round fight with feet and fists in Mott Street, in New York City. From the American perspective (“Chinese Sluggers, 1890), “The idea on the part of the contestants seemed to be to avoid as much as possible hitting each other. Every once in a while they would forget themselves and land a slap on the other fellow’s face or neck or body.” Ah Giang worked as an actor (a female impersonator, actually) for the Soen Tien Lok theatrical company. Ah Wing (died 1917) boxed bantamweight in California and Oregon during the early 1900s.

During the early 1900s, sumo, kushti (Indian wrestling), and comparable ethnic arts were often seen during labor holidays. Wrestling during labor holidays was not unique to Asians, of course; Finns, Swedes, and Germans also wrestled during labor holidays. In most cases, this was essentially recreational competition. For instance, during 1913, “Hindoo” (actually, in this case, Sikh) wrestlers were active in Oregon. These men worked at an Astoria lumber mill, and were reportedly very good at real (as opposed to show) wrestling. Other times, the wrestling was directly related to union activities. During May 1904, Sen Katayama (Yabuki Sugataro, 1859-1933) gave a judo demonstration during an American Socialist Party convention in Chicago, and during 1909, labor organizers on Oahu organized sumo tournaments to coincide with planned sugar plantation strikes.

Rafu Dojo team at the Southern California Judo Tournament, April 1940. Collection of Yukio Nakamura. Source: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2014/5/2/more-than-a-game-2

Raised in North America, 1924-1941

The second period starts with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 (43 Statutes-at-Large 153). This US law entirely excluded immigration of Asians, and placed severe limitations on the immigration of Jews. This law was backed by trade unionists, who viewed new immigrants as unfair competition. Canada had similar laws. Draconian as these laws were, it was too little, too late. During the preceding two decades, mail-order wives (“picture brides”) had caused the decline of the bachelor subculture in all Asian American and Canadian communities except the Jatt. “Picture brides” describes arranged marriages – the bride and groom exchanged photos, and agreed to be married. Arranged marriages were hardly unique to Asians in America; many other immigrants did this, too. In any case, the arrival of young Asian wives soon led to the establishment of community-based athletic clubs catering to the interests of native-born youth. Most early athletic clubs were organized along ethnic lines, but there were a few interracial examples. The Nuuanu YMCA, which opened in Honolulu in April 1918, is an example of an early interracial athletic club.

During World War I, judo and jujutsu were taught in some US Army camps. The instructors included European, Canadian, and American men who had trained in Japan, and been graded in judo and jujutsu. In these programs, the traditional arts were extensively modified to meet wartime needs. After the war ended in 1918, these modified martial arts also passed into police training programs, where they were further modified. For more on these developments and modifications, see “Military Unarmed Fighting Systems in the United States” and “Police Defensive Tactics Training in the United States,” elsewhere in this volume.

During the 1920s and 1930s, circus and professional wrestling acts remained as popular (and nationalistic) as ever. In those days, Japanese American professional wrestlers were rarely presented as treacherous villains (heels). Instead, they were billed as clean-living, skilled wrestlers (babyfaces) who were too small to beat big, mean American heavyweights like Man Mountain Dean (Frank Leavitt, 1891-1953). Japanese American wrestlers who fit this stereotype included Rubberman Higami (Higami Tsutao, 1896-1972), Kaimon Kudo (1906-1993), and Don Sugai (1913-1952). American and Canadian wrestlers in turn donned jackets and learned judo tricks. A popular North American wrestler of the 1930s and 1940s was the Canadian, Judo Jack Terry (Charles Van Audenarde, 1914-1978).

There were still some Hindoo wrestlers, and in 1937, Prince Bhu Pinder (Ranjit Singh, 1912- ) participated in some of the first mud wrestling contests in the USA. The promoter, Paul Boesch (1912-1989), had used too much water to settle the dirt used to cover the ring for a Hindoo match, and the crowds loved it.

Chinese American youths of the 1920s and 1930s continued to box rather than wrestle. The chief reason was that boxing promoters paid five dollars for three rounds, a sum that represented a day’s wage for a skilled laborer during the 1930s. The best of these Chinese American boxers, David Kui Kong Young (1916- ), was world-class.

As a group, Filipino American men loved boxing. Americans introduced professional boxing into Manila around 1909, and in 1923, Francisco Guilledo (1901-1925), a Filipino who fought under the name Pancho Villa became the world flyweight champion. Other famous Filipino American boxers of the 1920s and 1930s include Small Montana (Benjamin Gan, 1913-1976, US flyweight champion in 1935) and Ceferino Garcia (1912-1981, world middleweight champion in 1939).

There were a handful of second generation boxers of Korean American descent, and at least one professional wrestler of Okinawan descent. These men were mostly from the Territory of Hawaii. Examples of Korean American professional boxers include Walter Cho (1911-1985) and Philip “Wildcat” Kim (1926-1958). Examples of professional wrestlers of Okinawan descent include Oki Shikina (1904-1983).

During the 1930s, sumo developed into a popular spectator sport in the Territory of Hawaii and parts of California. By this time, non-Japanese sometimes did sumo, too. For example, the winners of a sumo tournament held in Seattle in 1930 included the starting center of the University of Washington football team. For participatory sports, Japanese parents generally preferred that their children learn judo or kendo. By 1940, there were dozens of judo and kendo clubs in the Territory of Hawaii, the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Utah, and the province of British Columbia. Here, the word “children” is intentional. Schoolgirls in the Territory of Hawaii received training in Danzan Ryu jujutsu during the 1920s, and between 1936 and 1941, some Japanese American schoolgirls living in British Columbia and the western United States trained in kendo.

Community-based karate clubs began appearing in the Territory of Hawaii during the late 1920s and early 1930s. By this time, Hawaiian martial art classes were about as multi-ethnic as the organization that hosted the club. In this context, it is worth noting that many of the post-WWII pioneers of Danzan Ryu jujutsu, to include Raymond Law (1899-1969), Richard Rickerts (1906-1998), and Siegfried “Sig” Kufferath (1911-1999), trained in Honolulu under Seishiro Henry Okazaki (1890-1951). During the 1930s, Los Angeles had two racially integrated clubs (Seinan [Southwestern] and Uyemachi [Uptown]). There were also Kodokan judo clubs in Chicago, New York City, and Charleston, West Virginia, and at Harvard University. These integrated clubs remained open during World War II, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Harvard club did change its name from “Judo Club” to “Liberty Scientific Self-Defense Association” (“Work,” 1941).

There were not as many community-based clubs providing Chinese martial art instruction. Partly this was because Chinese American parents tended to associate Chinese martial arts with Chinese gamblers, gang violence, and protection rackets (what the press called tong wars), and mostly it was because there were few qualified instructors of traditional Chinese martial arts in North America. When qualified instructors who were not gamblers or thugs offered classes, then parents would reconsider. For instance, in 1922, Ark Yuey Wong (Wong Ark-Yuey, 1901-1987) started teaching southern Shaolin in California, and within a few years, Wong’s students were giving public exhibitions during local cultural festivals. The Hon Hsing Athletic Club of Vancouver, British Columbia, started offering instruction in a Shaolin style in 1940, and in 1941, Choy Hak-Peng began teaching Yang-style taijiquan in a Chinese neighborhood of New York City. In the wider community, Chinese students attending universities sometimes offered demonstrations or classes. For example, the University of Illinois Daily Illini of January 11, 1917 (column 1, 3) remarked that a group of Chinese exchange students planned to give “an exhibition of Oriental boxing which is quite different from the American [boxing] and from the Japanese Jiujitsu.”

Bruce Lee’s first apearance (of many) on the cover of Black Belt Magazine. October, 1967.

World War II, Desegregation, and Civil Rights, 1941-1968

The third period starts with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Within hours, the US military put the Territory of Hawaii under martial law, and on the mainland, it began taking steps toward forcibly relocating 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps and relocation centers. The Canadians enacted similar policies, and during 1942, about 21,000 Japanese Canadians were relocated or interned. Judo was widely practiced in these wartime relocation centers and internment camps, and at the relocation center at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, there were even judo classes for high school girls. Sumo and kendo were also done in the relocation centers, but not as universally as judo.

After World War II ended in August 1945, 145,000 people of Japanese ancestry wanted to return home, and Hawaiians of all races were unhappy about having been kept under martial law for nearly three years. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans and Canadians of Asian ancestry waged a long series of court battles. They won more significant decisions than they lost, and by 1959, Hawaii was a state and on the mainland, Americans and Canadians of Asian ancestry had achieved the right to vote, move, own property, and marry as they liked.

In 1948, separate political exigencies led to the desegregation of the US military. This is relevant to the history of Asian martial arts in North America because from 1949 to 1968, the US military was a major patron of judo, karate, and taekwondo, and, to a lesser extent, it also patronized Tomiki aikido and hapkido. To give an idea how multicultural this draft-era military patronage was, note that the four-man US Olympic judo team of 1964 included a Japanese American, an African American, a Cheyenne Indian, and a Jew — and three of those four men had served in the US Air Force. As for how important the US military patronage was, consider this. In 1954, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) organized a judo society that was recognized by the Kodokan. Other Air Force commands wanted to participate in SAC training, tournaments, and promotions, so in 1959, the SAC Judo Society became the Air Force Judo Association. Other branches of the service had judo teams, too, so in 1962, the Air Force Judo Association became the Armed Forces Judo Association. In 1968, the Armed Forces Judo Association reorganized to become the United States Judo Association (USJA). In 1969, USJA reorganized yet again, and today, USJA is one of three national level judo sanctioning bodies in the USA. (The other two are US Judo Federation, which was historically associated with Japanese American leadership, and USA Judo, which is the only US judo association recognized by the International Olympic Committee.)

During the 1950s, Japanese American wrestlers such as Harold Sakata (1920-1982) and Robert “Kinji” Shibuya (1922- ) became notorious heels: sneak attacks were their specialty. During the same decade, Sakata helped pioneer pro wrestling in Japan, and during the 1960s and 1970s, both Sakata and Shibuya appeared in films and television series: Sakata was Oddjob in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (Eon Productions, 1964), while Shibuya played assorted villains in the ABC television series Kung Fu. The Japanese American Citizens League was outraged, saying that the wrestlers’ portrayals were insulting, but the wrestlers made money and had fun.

Although arnis is the martial art that non-Filipinos today associate with Filipinos, Filipino American men are more likely to view boxing as the Filipino American combative sport (Bacho, 1997). Mid-century Filipino American boxing heroes include the brothers Bernard (1927-2009) and Max (1928- ) Docusen. The Docusens were from New Orleans, Louisiana. They had a Filipino father and a Creole mother, and they were among the best middleweight boxers of the late 1940s. As “colored” fighters, Louisiana law prohibited them from engaging in professional boxing contests with white men. To get around this, a Louisiana judge simply changed the Docusens’ legal status to “half-white” (Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1949, B2, Part 4).

Finally, during the late 1950s, non-Asian practitioners such as Donn Draeger (1922-1982) and Robert W. Smith (1926- ) began the daunting task of explaining traditional Asian martial arts to North American readers. That task remains unfinished.

References

Bacho, Peter. 1997. Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

British Pathe. 1937. Wrestling in the Mud in San Francisco (video), BritishPathe.com, October 18, Cannister ID 37/83, Film ID: 939.49.

“Broadway Theatres are Ready for New Season.” 1902. New York Times, August 24, 9.

Brousse, Michel and David Matsumoto. 2005. Judo in the U.S.: A Century of Dedication. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books/US Judo Federation.

“Chinese Sluggers.” 1890. Salt Lake Tribune, March 1, 1.

Corcoran, John and Emil Farkas. 1988. Martial Arts: Traditions: History, People. New York: Gallery Books.

Chung, Hye Seung. 2006. Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Draeger, Donn and Robert W. Smith. 1969. Asian Fighting Arts. Tokyo: Kodansha International.

Gillis, Alex. 2008. A Killing Art: The Untold Story of Tae Kwon Do. Toronto: ECW Press.

Goodin, Charles. 2008. “Hawaii Karate Seinenkai,” http://seinenkai.com, downloaded June 29, 2008.

Hewitt, Mark S. 2005. Catch Wrestling: A Wild and Wooly Look at the Early Days of Pro Wrestling in America. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press.

Leyshon, Glynn A. 1998. Judoka: The History of Judo in Canada. Gloucester, Ontario: Judo Canada.

Niiya, Brian, editor. 2000. More than a Game: Sport in the Japanese American Community Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum.

Paciotti, Brian. 2005. “Homicide in Seattle’s Chinatown, 1900-1940: Evaluating the Influence of Social Organizations,” Homicide Studies 9:3, 229-255.

Paterson, Shane. 1995. “Elvis and the Martial Arts,” http://members.tripod.com/beyondthereef__1/tigerman.html, downloaded August 17, 2009.

Riess, Steven A. 1991. City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports. Urbana: University of Illinois.

Sibia, T.S. 2009. “Pioneer Asian Indian Immigration to the Pacific Coast,” http://www.sikhpioneers.org/chrono.html, downloaded August 15, 2009.

Svinth, Joseph R. 2002. “A Celebration of Tradition and Community: Sumo in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1943,” Journal of Combative Sport, http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_svinth_0202.htm, downloaded June 29, 2008.

Svinth, Joseph R. 2003.  Getting a Grip: Judo in the Nikkei Communities of the Pacific Northwest 1900-1950. Guelph, Ontario: EJMAS.

Svinth, Joseph R. 2003. “Kendo in North America, 1885-1955,” in Martial Arts in the Modern World, edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, 149-166. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Svinth, Joseph R. 2003. “Western Boxing in Hawaii: The Bootleg Era,” Journal of Combative Sport, http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_svinthetal_0303.htm, downloaded June 29, 2008.

Uchima, Ansho Mas and Kobayashi, Larry Akira. 2006. Fighting Spirit: Judo in Southern California, 1930-1941. Pasadena, CA: Midori Books.

“Work of Judo Club to Continue Rest of Year,” Harvard Crimson, December 18, 1941, http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=196663, downloaded October 4, 2009.

A Daoist Priest in Modern Beijing. Source: Wikimedia.

***Paul Bowman recently wrote an essay dealing with attempts to both define the martial arts and to think about the development of martial arts studies as a distinct field.  Given the importance of the points that he raises, and the amount of interest that they are likely to generate among readers of Kung Fu Tea, I am re-blogging it here.  I should also note that Paul has a forthcoming article in the (quickly approaching) Winter 2016 edition of the journal Martial Arts Studies.  This shorter essay is a good way to prepare for the more substantial piece to follow.  Enjoy!***

Why do you draw the line? More on Definition in Martial Arts Studies
by Paul Bowman

I know I keep saying that we need to move on from the question of ‘defining martial arts’ in martial arts studies, and I know that I then keep returning to the topic, but I feel it important to clarify why I think that that ‘how to define martial arts’ is not only a pseudo-problem but also regressive and potentially damaging for martial arts studies.

Consider it this way. The question of definition (in martial arts studies and elsewhere) involves asking and exploring the question of where to draw the line. When we ask ‘what is or are martial arts?’, we are asking a specifically focused version of ‘where do we draw the line?’

Once asked, ‘what is or are martial arts’ is a question that people get stuck on, or stuck in. So, to avoid this quicksand, in what follows, I want to walk around the trap, reflecting less on ‘where do we draw the line?’ and more on ‘why draw the line?’ and, indeed, ‘how – or in what ways – should anyone draw the line?’

What is the line, anyway? What is a definition? Stated bluntly, the line that people believe needs to be drawn is a line between ‘martial arts’ (on one side – the inside) and ‘not martial arts’ (on the other side – outside). The line, the definition, is the border between an inside and an outside. On one side of the line (on the inside), there will be martial arts (proper). On the other side of the line is the outside, which is everything else, and which is not proper to martial arts.

So, this is one way to depict the ideal tidy, well defined situation: on one side of the line, the inside, the proper object of martial arts studies. On the other side of the line, the outside, all the stuff that is not the object of martial arts studies. Simple.

Or not. It does not take too much time to realise that ‘martial arts’ could not actually be disentangled, disambiguated or extricated from many of the things that any definition will try to say is not proper to them. The definition will be an abstraction. More: a ‘representation’ of something that does not actually exist anywhere. For there are always supplements, images, ideas, practices, products, fantasies, realia, phantasmagoria, simulacra, prosthesis, grafts, add-ons, extras, and ‘related’, that cannot and will not be removed.

The dawning realisation of this ineradicable proliferation and constitutive multiplicity accounts for why people move from the singular to the plural. People realise that there is no simple unity, but they nonetheless still want to erect a definition. So, realising that the category ‘martial arts’ is constitutively imprecise, people try to return us to precision by adding categories. So, we get more categories. Refinements. Differentiations. Martial arts and/or combat sports, self-defence, military martial arts, combatives, weapons-based combat systems, religious practices, cultural traditions, calisthenics taught in schools, traditional, non-traditional, deracinated, de- and re-territorialized, etc. Then entities that are called hybrids. And so on, with each addition seeking to introduce a level of clarity and precision whilst nonetheless inexorably introducing even more grey area, imprecision and further grounds for disagreement.

This occurs because the perceived need to introduce more and more terms and concepts in order to try to clarify things is a paradoxical drive that comes in response to a fundamental lack of precision and clarity. This can never actually be eradicated by trying to mop it up by throwing more categories at it. The addition of ever more categories, gradations and combinations does not actually produce clarity or reduce unclarity. Rather, it principally produces metalanguages and language games.

Metalanguages and language games are not somehow simply or necessarily universally true. They are themselves locally-produced cauldrons of terminological soup. When they sound scientific, they may be impressive. But they are, at root, just variable attempts to solve the problem of how to conceptualise and communicate with clarity and precision.

How we make pasta sauce in our house may be very different from how they make pasta sauce next door. How people steeped in anthropological approaches may have long been inclined to conceptualise and demarcate ‘martial arts’ may differ hugely from how people working in sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, religious studies, dance or theatre studies may have done so. Each approach involves a language game, the production of a metalanguage, and each of these is almost certainly going to be different.

This is what academic (and other) discourses do. They do not simply strip away and reveal bare or naked essentials. They construct and fabricate lenses through which to see differently. They produce alternatives. They challenge each other. They generate more.

In the field of martial arts studies, discussions often circulate around different conceptualisations of the object ‘martial arts’. It is clear that different people draw the line around their conceptualisation of their object of attention differently. It is my hope that over time it should become more and more clear that the definitional act of drawing a line is inherently problematic.

Zheng Manqing, the Master of Five Excellences, painting a different sort of line.

 
This is not to say that it is not going to be done. Everyone needs to find ways to be able to refer, or to say ‘I am talking about this, and not that’. Every academic study needs to draw the line between the inside (what it is about) and the outside (what it is not, cannot or will not be about or even look at). As I regularly say to my PhD students, there are two questions that every examiner will ask you in one way or another. First, why did you draw the line here and not there? And second, why did you approach it in this way and not another?

Both of these questions must be answered. You need to know that you could have drawn your line elsewhere and differently, and that this would inevitably have changed things. You also need to know that you could have approached it differently, and that this would have produced very different kinds of insight, perspective, result, outcome or conclusion.

In other words, what academic works need more than some inevitably failed definition is a critical reflection on the necessary act of drawing a line – any and every ‘I am talking about this (and not that) in this way (and not another way)’. Indeed, doing so enables us to see that there are more important matters than where to draw the line. These involve thinking about how and why a line has been drawn.

In conversation with a colleague who works in performance studies, for instance, my colleague voiced reluctance to work under the heading of ‘martial arts studies’ at all. This is because the act of drawing a line around such practices seemed not only somewhat arbitrary, stifling and artificial, in terms of his own interests, but also ethically problematic.

As someone interested in performance, why would he separate martial arts from other kinds of physical practice? And anyway, how and why could or would anyone really draw convincing lines between martial arts practices and dance or theatre or ritual or religion, or indeed athletics, somatics, or therapeutics, and so on?

On thinking about this, I became inclined to expand the problem further and wider. Maybe my colleague is actually still too limited – too steeped in thinking about embodied practices. For, what about media and technology? Can we separate martial arts, or the study thereof, from practices and studies of film, drama, gaming, literature, or heritage? What about philosophy?

Nonetheless, the ethical dimension of my colleague’s reluctance seemed particularly thought-provoking. What does it mean to cast a net that only looks for and at martial, combative, fighting, defensive or offensive practices? What does it mean to insist on identifying all of the practices out there that seem to fit the bill in terms of their ‘martial’ dimensions? Is this not in and of itself a violent contortion, and a bending of the world to the will or the mind’s eye of the observer? Maybe my escrima practice seems fairly obviously martially orientated. But what about my tai chi? Just because I search in my tai chi practice for combative dimensions and applications, must I insist on reducing tai chi to this dimension for everyone, and enshrining it in academic discourse in this particular contingent and motivated way?

Conceptualising and chopping up the conceptual spectrum in such a way as to enable the claim that ‘martial arts’ is an obvious and necessary field, fit for an academic discipline to congregate around it, may actually seem like a fairly contorted and contorting act, when viewed from a broader perspective. Privileging ‘martial’ over ‘art’ may also amount to doing a kind of violence to the very objects that fall within its purview.

How can such a tendentious act be justified? Should, indeed, martial arts studies really be a subset of other fields, such as performance studies, for instance? The answer could be yes. As long as it can also be agreed that it should also be a subset of religious studies, and a subset of film studies, as well as a subset of subcultural studies, ethnic studies, area studies, sports studies, history, and so on.

The point is: none of these subsets exist on a fixed or immutable map. There is no Venn diagram or flow chart that could adequately depict some real or permanent relation of inclusivity or exclusivity. There is no essential or necessary ‘proper place’ for this or any other field. Its ‘proper place’ is always a consequence not of fit but of performative elaboration. This is because ‘martial arts’, like anything else (‘literature’, ‘religion’, ‘science’) is a contingent discursive establishment (a construct) rather than an essential referential category (a datum).

To evoke a Kantian distinction, ‘martial arts’ is synthetic rather than analytic. It is not an object proper to scientific study, and nor does it need to be. The study of something like this is not really scientific because – to borrow an insight that Rodowick once made about ‘film studies’ – it is something we simply know about, that we experience in different ways at different times and in different places, something that changes, that changes us, that we can change, and so on. We can’t really ‘do’ martial arts studies as some kind of science. It doesn’t lend itself to that kind of treatment at all. Rather, it presents itself as a range of phenomena for reflection, philosophy, theory, rumination. Martial arts, however conceived or however instantiated, seem or seems to beg questions – questions about ‘what it is’ and about ‘other things’. Life. Value. Health. Gender. Nation. Strength. Honour. Fun. Commerce. Ethnicity. Culture. Identity. Whatever.

To choose martial arts studies as a category – to attempt to institute it as a field – is to accept or at least trade in an inheritance. We have the term ‘martial arts’. It is a discursive category, even if it is not properly referential, indeed even if it is barely able to evoke its own content. Nonetheless, the world has given it to us. People are likely to ‘kind of just know’ what you mean when you say it, even if their understandings are hugely different, even utterly incompatible, and even though any attempt to specify the content of the field cannot but produce contradictory objects and practices.

This is one reason I have avoided the so-called problem of definition for so long. One need not define. Definition is a pseudo-problem, and the effect of a certain orientation in the face of what it means to study or do academic work.

Of course, one always has to negotiate competing injunctions. Definitions and categories do emerge. But they often fall down when pressed or pushed. Such definitions need to be pressed or pushed and pulled, because they can come to seem stifling. And they can come to be stifling – because of the effects that they can have on our orientations.

This is why, in martial arts studies, as elsewhere, the question should not simply be ‘where do you draw the line?’ The equally – perhaps more – important questions to engage with are ‘why draw a line?’ and indeed ‘how are we able to draw a line?’

If one feels compelled to draw a line around a field or object, and to map it out in a certain way, this is a compulsion one might expect to be matched with an equal compulsion when it comes to policing the territory that has been marked out. In other words, those scholars who seem merely to be exercising an honest and innocent drive to speak clearly and precisely and to define coherently may yet turn out to be the most diligent border guards, hostile to any non-legitimate travelers.

Gayatri Spivak once argued that making any distinction, making any discrimination, specifying, erecting or using any conceptual categories, is irreducibly and inescapably political in some sense. This is because producing differentials erects binaries, and binaries are inevitably hierarchical. The inside is the proper, the outside is the improper, the other. The question thus becomes, how hospitable are we to be to impropriety, to alterity? How is difference to be treated? This is both the ethico-political and conceptual-orientation problem of all disciplinary discourse. For martial arts studies, it suggests that what needs to be asked is: how do we define the hospitality of martial arts studies to that which requests admittance but seems improper?

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: Reforming the Chinese Martial Arts in the 1920s-1930s: The Role of Rapid Urbanization.

oOo

Chin Woo crouching tiger quarterstaff stance, Singapore, 2007.

Introduction

We are fortunate to be able to share the following guest post as part of our ongoing series on fieldwork in martial arts studies.  This essay, by D. S. Farrer, outlines a number of issues and pitfalls that young ethnographers should consider as they embark on their projects.

Readers may recall that Farrer also contributed the first post for this occasional series, which provided a global overview of issues associated with ethnographic studies of the martial arts. The essay that he is sharing with us today offers a more personal take on some of these same questions, drawn from reflections on his own work.  His introductory discussion of “performance ethnography” alone is worth the price of admission.  Click the link to read more!

The Perils and Pitfalls of Performance Ethnography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Douglas Farrer is Head of Anthropology at the University of Guam. His research interests include martial arts, the anthropology of performance, visual anthropology, the anthropology of the ocean, digital anthropology, and the sociology of religion. On Guam he is researching Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Pilot research on Yap, Micronesia, 2013.

Source: Adam Jones. Creative Commons License.

“Taoism in Bits.” A guest post by Paul Bowman [1]

***Xīnnián hǎo.  We are fortunate to have a special guest post this week in honor of the Chinese New Year.  This essay, by Prof. Paul Bowman, will help us to think more systematically about the process by which elements of Chinese culture (specifically Daoism and the practice of the martial arts) have entered Western culture and the sorts of transformations that they have been subject to.  Obviously this is a topic of great importance to the sorts of conversations that we have here at Kung Fu Tea. Jínián jíxiáng!***

A Bit of Orientation

I am not an expert on Chinese thought, culture or philosophy. I am not really an expert on anything. At best I am a scholar of cultural studies, popular culture and ideology with a lifelong interest in martial arts. In fact, everything I have learned about Chinese thought, culture or philosophy I have learned through and in relation to martial arts and popular culture. So what could I possibly have to say to anyone about Taoism?

The main clues here relate to my interests in ideology and popular culture. But there are two further specific bits of information relevant for understanding my orientation in the following presentation – two specific propositions.

First (or on the one hand), that it is widely understood that Taoism is Chinese. Second (or on the other hand), that there was a veritable explosion of interest in Taoism in Western popular culture in the wake of (and arguably in response to) some of the big wars of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War (Watts 1990).

In particular, different kinds of Western interest in Taoism can be seen in the interests and orientations of the Beat Generation, the counterculture and, of course, hippies everywhere. It is often said that these interests had much to do with different kinds of rejection or protest against the institutions that carried out the wars. In other words, Western institutions and their ideologies were regarded by the Beats, the counterculture and the hippies in particular as inhuman, or driven by a machine-like rationality, involving industrial-scale, exploitative instrumentality, and so on (Clarke 1997; Heath 2006).

Taoism always seemed very different: a philosophy of the moment, the present, the experience, the natural, the ecological, and the ethical relation to the other. So, among other Eastern worldviews and philosophies, Taoism was received as offering a genuine alternative to the outlooks driving the dominant status quo.

As for Taoism itself, there are many things to say about it. But these first two points – on the one hand, that Taoism is from China, and on the other hand, the Western interest in it, will structure much of what follows. In fact, I will chiefly be dealing with the question of the interest in Taoism in the West. But this will referred back and related to the subject of Taoism in China.

A Bit of Taoism

Because of this large perspective, my coordinates will be the highly problematic notions of the supposed East and the supposed West (Hall and Gieben 1991). Worse than that: Sometimes I am going to talk about China; sometimes East Asia. Sometimes I am going to talk about Europe; sometimes America; and other times some nebulous monster called Euro-America. The reasons for using such shifting and mostly unsatisfactory and imprecise coordinates boil down to familiarity, convenience and the effort to produce an effect of clarity, even at the cost of a huge lack of specificity.

Given that I’m using such problematic and shape-shifting mirages as my East/West coordinates, you may reasonably hope for more precision regarding the object of attention itself, namely ‘Taoism’. However, the problem here is that I have already implied a distinction between ‘Taoism in China’ and ‘Taoism in the West’. So we may already have two different things, with one name.

In fact, there may be many more. There may be considerably more than one understanding of ‘Taoism’. As my distinction already suggests, there may be at least one Eastern one and at least one Western one. And these may not be the same.

Such an idea is going to lead quite a few of us to leap to a predictable conclusion, with two faces. First, some will immediately presume that it must be the case that the Chinese Taoism has to be regarded as the original and therefore authentic and therefore superior or true Taoism. And second, that the Western one must necessarily be secondary, derived, inauthentic, ersatz or inferior.

However, this is not the way I want us to think, at all. This type of thinking is saturated with all sorts of problems, and it introduces all sorts of prejudices (Chow 1995; Bowman 2010a). So I want to avoid it.

Accordingly, for safety’s sake, let me just ask you to bear in mind the possibility that, instead of thinking that there is a Chinese Taoism versus a Western one, let’s remember that there are inevitably going be multiple (even myriad) different understandings and interpretations of Taoism in both East and West, including many which totally undercut, eradicate or dissolve the supposed border between East and West.

In other words, this is not going to be a talk about a true Taoism of China versus a false Taoism of the West. I want you to remember that there will be intricately sophisticated, nuanced and effectively authentic incarnations of Taoism in the West. And, at the same time, there will be multiple modulations of Taoism in China, some of which may well have been made up yesterday, or the day before yesterday.

Source: Jan. Creative Commons License.

Taoism’s Travels

I say all of this because I want to head off at the pass certain types of thinking. I want to dispense with the idea of ‘authenticity’ in particular (Heath 2006), and replace the search for authenticity with the question of what happens when something like Taoism travels.

Can it travel? Can it travel intact? What conditions are required for the smooth transition of something like Taoism from one place to another, one time to another, one linguistic and cultural context to another, without it falling to pieces, breaking up, becoming something else altogether?

All of this requires me to address the question of what Taoism ‘is’. Given what I’ve just been saying, this might be tricky to nail in one go. Nonetheless, as with so many things, it is actually quite easy to come up with a stab at an answer to this question. For, as with anything else (as long as you are not in the PRC itself), you can start by Googling it.

The first page that came up in my Google search results was the Wikipedia entry. For those who worry about the reliability of the information provided by Wikipedia, let me reassure you that I cross-referenced everything thoroughly – to my second search result, which was the BBC pages on Taoism. So my research was rigorous. But let’s not be scared of Wikipedia – even if the entry on Taoism cannot be checked, edited, or even read by any Taoists or Taoism experts based in the PRC itself.

In any case, the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on Taoism reads as follows:

 

Taoism (/ˈdaʊɪzəm/), also known as Daoism, is a religious or philosophical tradition of Chinese origin which emphasizes living in harmony with the Tao (道, literally “Way”, also romanized as Dao). The Tao is a fundamental idea in most Chinese philosophical schools; in Taoism, however, it denotes the principle that is both the source, pattern and substance of everything that exists. Taoism differs from Confucianism by not emphasizing rigid rituals and social order. Taoist ethics vary depending on the particular school, but in general tend to emphasize wu wei (effortless action), “naturalness”, simplicity, spontaneity, and the Three Treasures: jing (sperm/ovary energy, or the essence of the physical body), qi (“matter-energy” or “life force”, including the thoughts and emotions), and shén (spirit or generative power).

Typically, academics might lay into such accessible definitions. But – and as unreliable as Wikipedia may sometimes be – I’m pleased to report that this entry squares with the BBC pages and also with much that I have read on Taoism before.

Like other things that I have read on the subject, the Wikipedia entry concurs that: Taoism feeds from and back into lots of different kinds of Chinese intellectual and spiritual traditions; that it doesn’t quite fit into Western categories, yet it is not utterly alien to them; that in Western terms it straddles or flows between familiar Western conceptual categories like religion and philosophy; that it has specific theories, specific ideas and specific principles; but that there are different interpretations, different rituals and different obligations in terms of ethics, norms, mores and injunctions, in different approaches to Taoism, even within and across China.

If such a definition refers heavily to China, let’s flip perspective now, and whizz to Europe or America, as if we were playing on Google Earth. What does Taoism look like here.

If Taoism has a range of different incarnations in China, it seems fair to say that in the West it is mostly present only in bits. There is not much explicit or highly visible Taoism in the West. Of course, there is some. But as the BBC website notes, the ritualistic and religious dimensions of much Chinese Taoism are almost unheard of in the West.

Yet, at the same time, a central symbol of Taoism, the yin-yang (or taijitu), is not at all uncommon. It is all over the place.

Of course, when yin-yangs occur in the West, their status is unclear. Yin-yangs most commonly occur in what I will call subcultural contexts, or in the form of tattoos, or on children’s stickers, or in posters for tai chi lessons at the local community or sports centre.

Books, pictures and paraphernalia can be found on sale in hippy shops, head shops, and alternative lifestyle shops. But Taoism rarely appears in the West as part of a fully formed institutional existence. Words and phrases involving the yin-yang occur frequently in explanations of how martial arts like tai chi or bagua ‘work’ (sometimes also Japanese arts like aikido or even judo), and in relation to the practices of different kinds of qigong. But the Taoism of the West seems to manifest principally in or as bits of Taoism.

Indeed, to many, Taoism may still seem exotic or unusual. But it is far from new to the West. There are several centuries long traditions of Western intellectual engagements with Chinese and other East Asian philosophies and cosmologies (Clarke 1997; Said 1995; Sedgwick 2003). Many Western philosophers, theologians, theorists and thinkers have had many kinds of interest in many of the texts, traditions and practices of Taoism, along with other notable East Asian ‘things’, like Zen or Chan and other forms of Buddhism, as well as many less well known shamanic practices, and so on.

The Circulation of Yin-Yangs

So, what is the status of Taoism in the West? As mentioned, in some ways, Taoism – or at least the trappings of Taoism – or at least bits of it – have become familiar in the West. The yin-yang symbol certainly has, even if an understanding of the logic, argument, principles or cosmology it implies is often absent. The yin-yang is all over the place – but it has mostly found its niche in the West on the bodies and clothes and décor of certain ‘types’: hippies, alternatives, crusties, teens, martial artists, New Agers and so on.[2]

Further empirical cultural or sociological analysis of the contexts in which the images, trappings, paraphernalia and ideas of Taoism have been grafted into the Western world would be rewarding. But my hypothesis is that if we were to do a visual cultural analysis, and to look to see where we could find visual evidence of the signs and symbols of Taoism in the West, the study would reveal that the signs and signifiers of Taoism are most frequently grafted onto or into contexts that present themselves (or are regarded) as alternative, non-mainstream, often possibly oppositional or quasi-oppositional, frequently martial artsy, as well as New Age and orientalist. In other words: marginal (Bowman 2017).

Of course, any such visual or material cultural study could not tell us everything about the status of Taoism in the West. For instance, it would remain blind to the reach, scope, and influence of Taoism in books – books of Taoism and books about Taoism. Nowadays, a lot of this kind of communication and discourse has moved onto blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. And while there might be ways to measure the scale of online discourse about Taoism, it would still ultimately be impossible to ascertain its status, reach, influence or place in any kind of convincing way.

Now, I have neither carried out nor really looked for any extensive or expansive visual or material analysis of the signs and signifiers of Taoism in the West. (At least, not yet.) But my hypothesis about its discursive or cultural status in popular culture is that it arrived in a bit of a jumble, a bit garbled and tangled up with many other often nebulous ideas and associations.

What I mean by this might be illustrated by a brief consideration of an example: the character of Caine (played by David Carradine), the lead protagonist in the early 1970s TV series, Kung Fu.

Although the actor who played him was white, Caine was meant to be from China, ethnically half Chinese, a martial arts graduate monk of the Shaolin Temple, and subsequently a wanderer in the American wild west. It is a TV series that maps onto and encapsulates the peak of what is known as the ‘kung fu craze’ that swept the US, Europe and much of the rest of the world in the 1970s (Brown 1997; Prashad 2002; Prashad 2003; Kato 2012; Bowman 2010b; Bowman 2013). And I actually think it also illustrates the form of one of the most significant recent bursts of Western interest in Eastern philosophy (Bowman 2010b).

For, Caine is not only invincible, he is also stoic, wise, modest, humble, good (see also Nitta 2010; Iwamura 2005). He is a mishmash of the Confucian gent, the Taoist sage and – as certain commentators have noted – the Californian West Coast hippy (Preston 2007). Some of the most critical commentators have argued that the supposed Eastern wisdom embodied and mouthed by Caine has much more to do with Californian ideologies of the hippy era than with anything Chinese (Miller 2000).

This raises at least two interesting questions. First, if a major US TV series (along with Hollywood film companies) produce shows that champion Taoist philosophy, might this suggest that Taoism has (or had, or almost had) a larger, less marginal and more mainstream status in the West than we might otherwise have thought?

But second, if the brand of Taoism disseminated by this hugely popular and enduring TV series seems to hail more from California than a mythic Wudang Mountain, does this suggest that Western versions of Taoism will always be warped by or transformed into something else?

There are other questions raised by Kung Fu, of course (Chong 2012; Bowman 2013; Bowman 2015). But these are the two that I would like to look at today. [2]

A Taijiquan class at Wellesley College.

Eurotaoism

Interestingly, philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek have proposed that, far from being alternative or obscure, what they call ‘Western Taoism’ and ‘Western Buddhism’ are actually the hegemonic ideology of (or at least ideal ideological fit for) postmodern Western liberal consumer society (Žižek 2001).

Žižek’s argument is that in situations of deregulated capital in a consumerist society, the ideological imperative becomes one of not clinging and not getting too hung up on things. The first argument here is that things like consumerism and feng shui can be brought into alignment quite easily, via ideas like de-cluttering, deep-cleaning, updating, going ‘out with the old, in with the new’, and refreshing and reinvigorating by buying new stuff.

Indeed, Žižek proposes that a hybrid of ersatz Taoist, Buddhist and yogic ideas often blossom wherever what used to be called yuppie conditions apply. For example, he argues that a chaotic life of stock market speculation or financial trading almost cries out for the calm of feng shui décor, early morning yoga, qigong or ‘mindfulness meditation’, and things like regular retreats (whether ‘glamping’ or in health spas).

Most importantly in such situations, Žižek argues, the yoga, tai chi, qigong or ‘mindfulness’ practices enable the practitioner to console themselves with the belief that their meditative time is where they get in touch with the ‘truth’ of themselves, so that they don’t have to face up to the fact that their working life is their ‘real’ life.

So, for Žižek, Taoism is a kind of ‘spontaneous ideology’ – not imposed from above, but arising organically in response to the real conditions of economic life.

By the same token (but on the other hand), the uncertainty, chaos and instability generated by deregulated capital is a prime breeding ground for the ethos of ‘not clinging’, of ‘keeping moving’, ‘not stagnating’, ‘moving on’, ‘going with the flow’, and so on. As Žižek puts it, the erosion of traditional rights and erstwhile certainties (such as fixed jobs and guaranteed pensions, etc.) is repackaged not as loss but as opportunity. A lost job is represented as an opportunity to retrain. Having no guarantee of a pension is an opportunity to invest. And so on.

Ultimately, Žižek argues (in an almost Taoist move), the very victory of the Western economic global system has produced the emergence of what he calls the West’s ideological opposite. Sloterdijk calls it “Eurotaoism”.

Now, I am not at all sure that ‘Western Buddhism’ or ‘Western Taoism’ could be regarded as ‘hegemonic’ in any empirically verifiable sense, but I think the argument is interesting. It is possible to see how it might apply, where it might apply, and why it might apply.

But whether, where, when, and to what extent it has been so is another matter altogether. Just because kung fu, yin-yangs, tai chi, qigong and feng shui have been popular at different times and in different places, this does not somehow prove that Taoism or Buddhism are hegemonic ideologies.

Of course, establishing the facts of any matter has never stopped Žižek from making a sweeping statement or dramatic argument.

And then there is the question of whether we are supposed to regard this kind of Western Taoism as a good thing or a bad thing. The implication in the Žižekian argument is that, as an ideology arising within and because of changes in capitalism, this kind of Western Taoism must be a bad thing. But would it?

We could discuss this matter as long as we liked, but it might ultimately have the status of the exercises in which Mediaeval Christian theologians would reputedly debate how many angels could stand on the end of a pin. So, instead of arguing for or against Taoism, let us turn to our second question: the question of whether Western Taoism could ever be the same as Eastern Taoism.

A famous statue of Laozi in Fujian. Source: Wikimedia.

A bit of East is East and West is West

On this matter, answers might be divided into two camps. One camp regards the transmission of ideas from East Asian philosophy and thought into the West to be entirely possible. The other regards it as not possible.

One great example of a writer who believed the transmission of ideas from East to West to be difficult but possible is Alan Watts. Watts rose to prominence in the decades after the Second World War with writings that tried to explain the spirit of Zen, Buddhism and Taoism to readers in English. Although not everyone has read Watts, one can often find traces of his accounts of East Asian ideas in the words of others.

For instance, one of my own first encounters with the notion of the Tao came via the writings of the late great martial arts innovator, Bruce Lee, particularly his posthumous book, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. It was only much later that I read Watts.

As an ethnically Chinese martial artist, Bruce Lee was often called upon, when interacting with his Western students and other audiences, to play the role of the Taoist or Confucian sage. In fact, playing the wise man was a role that he often evidently relished, at least in his daily life (Preston 2007). In terms of his professional life, however, he often complained bitterly about being ethnically stereotyped and typecast in TV and film. But in books like his Tao of Jeet Kune Do, we find Lee using his most ‘oriental wise man’ tone of voice and mode of address. (Ironically, this is so even though what he advocates in that book is actually a totally iconoclastic, non-traditional, deracinated and revolutionary approach to martial arts.)

But, given that Lee was ethnically Chinese and his first language was Cantonese, we might assume his Eastern philosophy to be authentic, right? The irony here is that recent scholarship and archival work in Lee’s own personal library has shown is that he lifted most of his ancient Eastern wisdom straight from the pages of writers like Watts, along with other Western interlocutors (Bishop 2004). Famously, his favourite expression was the very Buddhist or Taoist sounding ‘walk on’. But this was a phrase that he picked up from an early twentieth century English language book on Buddhism, called Walk On, and written by the wonderfully named writer Christmas Humphreys (Humphreys 1947; Bowman 2013).

I mention all of this here to give an indication of the complexity of ideas like ‘transmission’, and also, of course, ‘authenticity’. I am not saying that Bruce Lee only read Western authored English language works on Chinese philosophy. But he certainly also did, and these informed his own discourse on Chinese philosophy.

Whether such texts are right or wrong is a complex matter. There are famous cases of radical misunderstandings of Chinese and Japanese history, society and culture – misunderstandings that have made their way into European consciousness as facts and truths. There have been controversies around the interpretations present in works such as Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery, for instance, and in the supposedly authoritative and certainly enormous body of work on history, culture and civilization in China produced by sinologist Joseph Needham (Needham and Wang 1954; Needham and Wang 1956; Needham and Wang 1959; Needham, Wang, and Lu 1971; Needham and Tsien, n.d.; Needham and Bray 1984; Needham, Harbsmeier, and Robinson 1998; Needham, Robinson, and Huang 2004).

Martial arts historian Stanley Henning, for instance, points out that at points Needham regards all Chinese martial arts as associated with Taoist health exercises. Hence – argues Henning – Needham radically misinterprets the complexity of the places of different martial arts in China in different places and different times. The effects of this misclassification of all martial arts as essentially being Taoist, Henning argues, leads Needham to fundamentally misunderstand some key aspects of Chinese culture and society (Henning 1999; Bowman 2015).

So, there are risks in the face of interpreting across cultures, and across times and places. And this leads us to the second camp: the people who do not believe that transparent translation across distant cultures is possible.

One interesting representative of this camp would be the infamous German philosopher Martin Heidegger (Heidegger 1971). Heidegger was very interested in Taoism. Some have even gone so far as to argue that Heidegger’s own trailblazing ‘Continental’ proto-deconstructive philosophy was explicitly indebted to Taoism and other kinds of East Asian philosophy (May 1996). Heidegger even reputedly harboured dreams of producing his own translation of the key text of Taoism, the Tao te Ching, or Dao de Jing. (This work is sometimes known as the Lao-Tzu, after the name of its attributed author – an author who almost certainly did not write it.)

What is perhaps most interesting about Heidegger’s interest in Taoism is that he is said to have abandoned his dream of translating the Lao-Tzu/Tao because – even though this work is said to be one of the most frequently translated and re-translated texts in the world – some have even claimed that it is the most translated text in the world – Heidegger regarded the task of translating it as being too difficult. In fact, in the end, despite all of his interests in Taoism and what he often referred to as ‘East Asian thought’ (or indeed the ‘East Asian lifeworld’ in toto), Heidegger came to regard the East and the West as fundamentally, constitutively alien to each other. He came to conclude that, on a fundamental and unsurpassable level, ‘East is East and West is West and ne’er the twain shall meet’ (Heidegger 1971; Sandford 2003).

Zheng Manqing, the teacher of William Chen, with sword, possibly on the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

A Bit of Difference

Because of this ambivalent relation, what we might see in the case of Heidegger is interesting. In fact, what might be learned from Heidegger’s relationship with Taoism is quite possibly exemplary of the matrix of possible relationships that Westerners have had with Taoism. Not just Taoism, of course. What I’m saying about Taoism could stand for Western engagements with a wide range of aspects or essences of Chinese and East Asian thought.

Many have been interested in all of this, and heavily involved in it, precisely because it all seems so different. But, if it is all so profoundly different, then perhaps (as Heidegger thought), it may be just too different, meaning that Westerners may never really ‘get it’.

To many of us today, this is a familiar but problematic idea, which sometimes sounds romantic but which often smells a bit too much of essentialism.

Essentialism is one of the dirtiest of dirty academic words, even though essentialism in academia is not unusual. It is possible to find it all over the place, whether just below the surface or luxuriating in plain sight. There are still, for instance, academic studies being published that first propose and then explore the idea of the alleged fundamental difference or uniqueness of ‘the Chinese mind’.

However, for the rest of us, to propose an essential difference between ethnicities (or ethnonationalities), and to reify or dignify such a proposition through any kind of consideration is deeply problematic. It just smacks too much of colonialist (or indeed apartheid) anthropology and psychology, approaches that were premised on the belief not only of racial difference but also (‘therefore’) of racial hierarchy.

To those of us who work in or around cultural studies – with all of the refined (or mandatory) sensitivity to issues of identity that this entails (particularly in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality) – the proposition of an essential difference (between East and West, or Europe and China) may appear crass to the point of being offensive. It is certainly not an idea we expect to find in our academic field. Here, scholars are more interested in cultural ‘crossovers’, ‘encounters’, ‘communications’ and ‘relations’ than they are in ideas of ‘absolute essences’ and ‘unbridgeable differences’. Just like food, music, fashion, flu viruses, factories, or films, Taoism should surely be regarded as able to travel.

The question is: can it, and if it moves will it stay the same? What would any change signify? If Taoism is taken to be a specific example of otherness (or, at least a bit of a larger field of otherness), then the question is whether Westerners can really truly ‘get’ it. Heidegger thought not. He thought it was all just too different.

I’m dwelling on this for a moment because it points to a wider problem. To paraphrase a question once posed by Stuart Hall, the problem is this: if we are dealing with difference, if we are interested in difference, in respecting difference, trading in difference, and so on, the question is: what do we think difference ‘is’? Does difference refer to something actually different, or are differences merely garnish to something essentially similar? Do we think cultural or ethnic others are actually significantly different from us, or do we think that we are all actually the same ‘deep down’? Does difference mean different, or does difference mean same? What does difference mean? What does difference do?

Many – including many in cultural studies – solve this by imputing a universal value to ‘being human’, whilst adding that what produces cultural difference is different cultural contexts. But, whether difference is essential or entirely contextual, what does it imply for any ‘encounter’, ‘crossover’ and ‘relation’?

Heidegger thought that there were absolute and unbridgeable differences between what he called the East Asian lifeworld and the Euro-American one. As mentioned, this may sound very bad to our contemporary anti-essentialist ears. In this case, it seems all the worse, since many people know that Heidegger was notoriously a fully paid up member of the Nazi party, and that he never renounced or even really reflected on this matter publicly after the war.

But if we bracket off everything we don’t like about Heidegger for the moment, it is possible to reformulate his position in apparently much more palatable ways. For instance, in cultural theory it is not uncommon to hear the idea that all translations from one context to another ought to be regarded as mistranslations, or partial and biased and incomplete translations; that all crossovers should be regarded as transformations, and that all encounters are in some sense asymptotic. And so on.

To poststructuralist ears, formulations like this don’t sound at all essentialist or fundamentalist. Rather, they sound quite subtle and complex – thoroughly deconstructive, even. It is a tenet of deconstruction that all translation is mistranslation. Similarly, Walter Benjamin argued that the best translations are transformations. And the influential psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan often seemed to regard all of the main kinds of encounters in life as being asymptotic.

There is a lot more that could be said about all of this.[1] I have myself just cut loads of words and pasted them into a footnote at this point. These many words barely scratch the surface of some of the matters that arise here. But for now suffice it to say that the idea that we may be barred access to ‘the truth’ or ‘the reality’ of something is very familiar in contemporary cultural theory. And, most importantly, is not an idea that is reserved for application to texts and phenomena from ‘other cultures’. It is an idea that has been applied to texts and phenomena from all cultures, including – especially perhaps – those of our own.

Taiji practice at Chen Village. Source: Shanghai Daily.

Getting it, a Bit

I tend to accept the idea that there is no simple or unmediated access to the supposed truth of a text, and that interpretations of texts and phenomena are contextual, conditional, changeable, and revisable. [3] But this does not mean that anything can just be anything. Interpretations are fought over, fought for, and often strongly policed. Just think about the violence that has ensued when different sects have emerged within and around Christianity by interpreting key texts, like the Gospels, differently.

So I tend to accept the notion that no one has direct or unmediated access to the truth of anything. But the question is whether certain Western interpretations of Taoism are obliterations of it, or a transformation or warping away from some kind of essence. Is the true essence of Taoism simply foreclosed or barred from access by Westerners?

I can accept the idea that I have been raised in a culture in which I have not on a daily basis been exposed to Taoist figures, rituals, sensibilities, words, phrases, legends, allusions, quotations, architectures, objects, practices and practitioners. So, in this sense of context, habitus, texture of life, structure of feeling, history and cultural literacy, the claim that I’m ‘never going to get it’ is fine.

But what about the supposed messages of Taoism – the lessons to be learned of or from Taoism? (In semiotic terms, the signified content or the final signifiers of Taoism.) Can these not be ‘got’?

If the lessons of Taoism are simply or entirely conceptual or communicated in language, and if they are only to be accessed via the texts of Taoism, then arguably all of the complications and caveats and problems and aporias of cross-cultural translation that some call the ‘hermeneutic circle’ will arise here. So we will definitely face some serious obstacles. Cross cultural translation across vast distances of place and time is fraught with hurdles, barriers, mirages, dead ends, wrong trees, halls of mirrors and red herrings. This is because we always interpret from where we are and from what we know; so a Western discourse about Eastern things may always boil down to an internal monologue about a totally invented non-entity.

But the Tao te Ching seems absolutely clear on one or two key points. The first is that the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao. The second (possibly related point) is that spoken or written language is neither the medium of transmission nor of knowing either the Tao or Taoism. Perhaps the most famous words in the Tao te Ching are ‘he who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know’.

As Alan Watts himself once noted at the start of one of his early books on the subject, many people have taken these words to mean that the effort of communication is pointless, or ultimately doomed to failure. Watts disagreed with this interpretation and thought that it was worth the effort to try.

This is not least because it is possible to talk about something without falling into the trap of believing that you are thereby doing it, living it, experiencing it, or conjuring it up, in reality. Indeed, perhaps discussing, listening, or even just ‘thinking about’ may be a precondition of experiencing or doing. Or at least a supplement.

It certainly seems that Taoism involves a communicable philosophy or a principled stance in relation to the matter of doing. Western authors have tried to express it through all manner of poetic renderings of different topics, subjects and themes: from archery to fighting to flower arranging, to motorcycle maintenance, and so on.

My own encounter with a practice that conveyed some kind of understanding (through both doing and feeling) of Taoist principles was taijiquan.

My own sense over time came to be that the inevitable and necessary lessons to be learned in taiji practice – especially via the interactive partner-work of push-hands practice – offered me a crystal clear kind of education in Taoism.

This is not to say that taijiquan offered me everything. It did not make me an expert on Taoism. But the interaction of hard and soft, positive and negative, fullness and emptiness, the logic of non-clinging, non-ego, non-striving, yielding, and the constant apperception of change and transition all led me to think that after years of taiji practice I really did ‘get’ the principles of Taoism – at least a bit. At least that bit.

But further reflection reminds me that I have also rejected other bits. For instance, supplementary parts of the practice of taijiquan involve various standing, breathing, concentration, relaxation and awareness practices, referred to as a number of things, such as qigong, nei-gong, zhang zhuang, and so on. Some of these I have always accepted fully – the stretching-and-relaxing breathing and postural exercises called ba duan jin [pa tuan chin], for example. I have never had any problem with these. Standing post qigong [zhang zhuang] too – I am fine with that.

But the exercises that allegedly circulate qi internally through meridians in the body… I have always found within myself a profound resistance to these. Whenever I do them, I do them somewhat cynically. And, to be honest, I have all but abandoned even thinking about doing them. They just seem to rely on a kind of belief that is just too much like religious faith for my liking.

But like someone who has renounced their religion, I still often worry. I worry that if I have rejected this bit, what does it do to the rest? For I know that I only dabble in bits of the entire possible taiji world. I do the solo form, partner-work, any kind of sparring, some stretching exercises and some standing qigong. But I know I have abandoned another huge bit.

So even within the confines of my own limited experience of one syllabus of a more or less Taoist and more or less (once) Chinese practice, I know I don’t have it all. And, what is more, I also know that, besides the ‘all’ that I am aware I do not know, there is a whole lot more out there – many more ‘alls’ and ‘everythings’ – much more that I have ever even imagined.

I console myself by telling myself (sometimes in the manner of an old Chinese sage) that this is true of all things. For could we really ever have it all, or know it all, or get it all? Is the ‘all’, the totality, even a real thing? Or is it not, in fact, just an effect, either of language or of our experience of a certain state of play?

The state of play as we perceive it is always determined by the circulation of ideas and practices, which themselves derive from different kinds of institutions and investments. Institutions and interpretations are variable and contingent, and produce different effects.

Just as I began with reference to such vague and shifting supposed entities as ‘East’ and ‘West’, so we should be aware of the shifting and drifting apparent referents of our focus, their different meanings in different times and places, the genetic mutations and quantum leaps that occur in ‘cultural translation’ from one time to another, one place to another, one language to another, even one utterance or instance to the next, and the rather frustrating fact that, despite our eternal desire to see unity and simplicity, cultures and practices are always ‘in bits’, always in process, incompletion, dispute and contestation. As I read it, the one always gives birth to the ten thousand things and you can never therefore pin down the one. So this means both that no one’s ever going to get it but also that anyone can get it – but really only a bit.

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Notes

[1] Dress rehearsal: JOMEC, Cardiff University, 25^th January 2017.

Public talk: Cardiff University 2^nd February 2017.

Accompanying Prezi at: https://prezi.com/l9ncw9g-zv8t/taoism-in-bits/

[2] I have made similar arguments about the status of martial arts in all but their sporting variants in the West (see Bowman 2017).

[3] Derrida himself was always careful to distance himself from any kind of Heideggerian position vis-à-vis difference as absolute or essential. Indeed, for Derrida, the obligation of the critical thinker was precisely to avoid collapsing difference into opposition. All differences are contextual, contingent effects or institutions. There is no opposition between East and West because these terms and clusters of concepts, notions and ideas are principally the effects of particular ways of thinking more than anything else. So, rather than any kind of retreat from difference, one can find in the work of this father of poststructuralism a principled openness to alterity, difference, encounter and change.

Nonetheless, in one of his earliest and arguably most important works, Of Grammatology, Derrida effectively inaugurates deconstruction by drawing a line. This is a line between the kinds of languages that he will deal with and speak about (European languages), on the one hand, and on the other, the kinds of language that he will not (surprise, surprise: Chinese). Derrida draws this line because, he proposes, the written Chinese language is just too different to be dealt with in the same kind of way that he is going to deal with European speech and writing.

Much has been written about this undeconstructive inauguration of deconstruction, in which Derrida smoothly slices out a distinction between Europe and China, and in which ‘China’ stands for that which he cannot and will not try to think, as the outside of the limits of Europe. I mention it here merely to illustrate the ways that even an avowed openness to the ideas of alterity, difference, encounter, crossover, translation, relation, and so on, can be premised on or can flip over into their supposed opposite.

I will get to Taoism in a minute – I promise. But first I want to emphasise that I have started from such philosophers not out of ignorance or contempt for other kinds of Western engagements – or non-engagements – with either ‘Chinese thought’ in general or ‘Taoism’ specifically; but rather to indicate the complexity of the question of a Western interest in Taoism. Put bluntly: if this kind of thing messes with the heads of both the daddy and the granddaddy of poststructuralism, then what other kinds of mess might we expect?

I’ll mention some of these messes. But before we leave Heidegger, I want to note the mess as he perceived it. Although he believed in an essential Europe (the pinnacle being, of course, German language philosophy), and although be believed in an ‘East Asian lifeworld’ that was essentially inaccessible to Westerners, he also believed that Westernisation was ultimately destroying East Asian alterity.

The effect of Western technology – Heidegger singles out the film camera – was to draw the world into what he called a Europeanised or Americanised ‘objectness’. With this, he refers to the growth and spread and effects of Western conceptuality, ways of thinking, ways of relating technically to the world, ways of capturing and manipulating the world, and so on.

Again, this might sound deeply problematic and Eurocentric. It may romanticise the other, as something essentially vanishing. But this kind of argument is not a world away from some of the strongest impulses in postcolonial theory, which regard Euro-American cultural and ideological hegemony as being carried not just by gunboats and unequal trade deals, but by everything from film and media to language itself and even – or especially – the most subtle and subterranean aspects of the spread of an originally European educational structure and syllabus. (Along with the obvious examples of the effects of the spread of Western medicine and Western science, Dipesh Chakrabarty famously points to the matter of the teaching of history. Along with the nation, history is a Euro-American concept, Chakrabarty argues. The idea that every nation must be a nation with a history ultimately means that Europe is always shown to be the origin and the destination. History always becomes the history of Europe. Emerging nations follow Europe.)

In this kind of perspective the West arguably always obliterates or transforms that which it encounters. So, in any encounter with Taoism, Taoism is obliterated, or transformed, and hence lost. This is because it must be translated into an alien conceptual universe.

Thus, in the West, Taoism has been regarded as alternative or even subtly oppositional to Judeo-Christian and even Islamic traditions, in that it is not a ‘religion of the book’. It has been interpreted as a kind of pantheism, or as a kind of stoic atheism – a kind of religion without religion. It has been regarded as a kind of environmentalism, a kind of green ethos or ideology. It has been regarded as the quintessence of ancient Chinese wisdom. It has also been regarded as a kind of anti-Confucian and hence anti-establishment Chinese philosophy. It has been regarded as involving mystical mumbo-jumbo and bizarre rituals. It has also been regarded as an entirely rational and reasonable laissez-faire individualism, organised by the idea of following the path of least resistance.

About the Author: Paul Bowman, Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, is author of ten books, including Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (2015). He is founder and director of the AHRC-funded Martial Arts Studies Research Network and co- editor of the journal Martial Arts Studies. His most recent book is Mythologies of Martial Arts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). And if there is anything you ever wanted to know about the cultural impact of Bruce Lee, he is the guy to read.