Introduction

Welcome to the tenth 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), the seventh by Dale Spence (on ethnographic methods and dealing with radically unexpected events while in the field), the eighth by Kyle Green (why a choke is never just a choke), or the ninth by D. S. Farrer (who argues we should think a bit harder about the perils of performance ethnography), 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.  It is our hope that this series will provide new students or researchers a few tips as they put together projects of their own.

In this post we will hear from Prof. Paul Bowman (Cardiff University), who has been closely following this series from its inception.  Yet rather than focusing on what scholars do once they enter the field (or the library), Bowman asks us to think more deeply about a prior stage in the research process.  Specifically, can we develop a personal method for formulating better research questions?  After all, the value of our data will never exceed the rigor of the questions we ask.  How do prolific writers and researchers find novel questions that will have a good chance of generating non-trivial findings while remaining tethered to a strong theoretical foundation?  Or to put it in slightly simpler terms, how do we avoid becoming the sort of author who rewrites the same paper year after year?  Can adopting a personal method, or intellectual discipline, force us to explore more of what the field has to offer?

Author’s Preface

What is my ‘method’? Do I even have one? I normally analyse and reflect on media texts and discourses, but how, and why? I wrote what follows when I realised that I was doing again something I had once done once before: applying a particular – perhaps unique – technique to structure and guide a piece of analysis. I wondered whether this might be a unique ‘method’ that others might try. So, what follows is an account of it. I currently refer to it as ‘trying to think inside the box’.

Two Conferences, one box

In 2013 I wanted to support a colleague’s conference, so I offered to give a paper. The conference title was ‘The Meaning of Migration’, and I thought it would be easy to come up with something on the ‘migration’ of martial arts around the world.

However, from the outset, I was clear on two things:

• The first was that I wanted to argue for the powerful role played by media representations in the spread of martial arts. (I thought this was an important argument to make, because not enough people seemed to be aware of it.)
• The second was that I did not want to offer an overview of the specific career of one or more martial artist migrant. (I thought such studies were all too common, and that they didn’t think hard enough about how culture and history ‘work’.)

So I decided to place a strict limitation on my paper: I would block out all reference to actual martial artists, and only discuss media fictions and the general movement of notions of ‘martial arts’ in Western/Anglophone film, TV and popular culture.

This exercise in imposing a deliberate and strategic limitation on the enquiry helped to generate new insights for me, and I have anecdotal evidence that it helped at least some people to think about martial arts history in a more sophisticated way than before.

In any case, the final version of this reflection appeared under the subheading ‘eclipsing the human’ in chapter two of my 2015 book, Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries.

I recall all of this now because a similar situation has recently occurred, and a lot about it has given me pause for thought. Some elements are the same, but some are different.

In the current situation, once again, I wanted to support a colleague’s conference by giving a paper. However, to do so obliged me to work out a way to wrench the conference topic and my own interests into some kind of relationship. And once again, the solution I found took the form of imposing a deliberate limitation.

However, what strikes me as significant about this is that the ‘artificial’ limit I have found for my study now seems strategically valuable in that it may generate significant insight.

In the current situation, the conference in question is called “You talkin’ to me?” Dialogue and Communication in Film, which takes place in Cardiff on 5-6 June 2017.

Knowing that the organiser was specifically interested in papers that focus on film dialogue – i.e., studies of spoken/verbal communication in film – I initially speculated that maybe I could do something on dialogue about martial arts in martial arts films.

But the question was: what, specifically? And – more importantly – why? I always need to have an answer to the question of why: why this, why is this important, why now, why does it matter, to whom, with what significance, consequences, effects?

In order to answer such questions, I recalled my efforts in chapter two of Mythologies of Martial Arts (2017) to explore some of the discourse that surrounds martial arts ‘proper’, so to speak, in order to glean some insights into the status of martial arts in popular culture.

Specifically, in Mythologies of Martial Arts I asked questions about the kinds of jokes that are made about martial arts and martial artists, and explored them in order to reflect on what this might tell us about wider ideas circulating about martial arts today.

Consequently, I thought that the film dialogue conference might provide an opportunity to extend this kind of exploration. So, I came up with the following proposal:

Title:

‘Oh, no! That’s karate!’ Speaking of Martial Arts (in non-martial arts films)

Abstract:

Michael Molasky’s exploration of Japanese and Okinawan feelings about the American occupation proceeds by looking at the ways America and the occupation feature in a wide range of Japanese and Okinawan literature of the post-war period. Molasky’s focus is not literature specifically about the occupation or about Americans; rather it surveys Japanese and Okinawan literature in general, for clues, evidence, and interesting cases. In a similar spirit, and using a similar approach, this presentation (which is part of a larger inquiry into wider feelings and ideas about ‘martial arts’ in Western popular culture) will look at examples of dialogue about martial arts in non-martial arts films. In other words, for the purposes of this exercise, the focus is resolutely not on martial arts action itself, but only on dialogue about martial arts. Moreover, films that are widely regarded as ‘martial arts films’ will also be disallowed. The premise is that films, in various ways, record, register and deploy wider discursive sensibilities, configurations, structures of feeling, and so on; and the objective is to begin to glean some insights into the discursive status and conceptual, associative and connotative configurations of ‘martial arts’ in contemporary English language popular culture. (The reasons for wanting to do this are complex and perhaps beyond the scope of a short paper, but I will try to gesture to the wider value of such a project.)

As you can see, once again I am imposing a strategic limitation, or exclusion. In this case, I am not going to look at any dialogue about martial arts that takes place in anything that could be regarded as a martial arts film.

Drawing Lines, and Boxes

Of course, this is a tricky line to draw. When, for example, does an action film become a martial arts film? This is one hell of a question to begin to explore. But already, then, in obliging us to think about such questions (when does an action film become a martial arts film?), our self-imposed and ‘artificial’ limitation has prompted us to think a little more about categories that we might otherwise have merely accepted without thought. To this extent, in playing this game, we are already potentially sharpening our critical faculties.

In this instance, as I say, I am deliberately excluding all martial arts films. Furthermore, just to be sure, the ‘grey area’ exclusion zone will also extend to action films and also certain other difficult to classify films (say, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai).

However, as deconstruction has taught us, in the act of drawing a line, of specifying what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’, we always in some way and to some extent transgress that line, that limit. We have to pay some attention to what is on the other side of it.

Moreover, by drawing a ‘clearly artificial’ line, we may be provoked to think about what happens when any line is drawn. We may see that a lot of lines have been drawn that we have so far given little thought to. This might prompt us to reflect on the necessity or arbitrary character of the lines we use to structure our thought and actions more widely. So, we might see and possibly learn more about the boxes that we always think inside of.

But, that’s as maybe. For the purposes of this exercise, such possible gains in our propensity or likelihood to think critically ‘more widely’ are actually secondary. For, the primary purpose of the exercise in this case is to glean more insight into what we might call the ‘discursive status’ of martial arts in the wider circuits of culture. As my abstract puts it, my ‘premise is that films, in various ways, record, register and deploy wider discursive sensibilities, configurations, structures of feeling, and so on; and the objective is to begin to glean some insights into the discursive status and conceptual, associative and connotative configurations of “martial arts” in contemporary English language popular culture’.

So, that is what the paper will be about. But is this ‘my method’? It is not really a method – at least, not yet. What anyone could and would ‘bring’ to such an exercise will be determined by how they have been trained or learned to interpret films, and how they have been trained or learned to connect them to other areas of culture or consciousness or practice. But none of this is set in stone. None of it is certain. None of this is science.  My own efforts will be contingent connections that I make based on the contours and coordinates of boxes that my own thought processes have become accustomed to.

Of course, such boxes can be shaken up, disrupted, poked and prodded into movement. This is part of the value of imposing seemingly arbitrary limitations on the exercise from the outset. And there is much that might be said and thought and done about all of this.

However, I want to conclude by reflecting on some differences between the earlier occasion on which I undertook such an exercise (2013) and today (2017).

Then and Now

Some things are different. For me, the main differences relate to the development of my own experiences and thinking in martial arts studies. But another significant different relates to the growth of an online martial arts studies community. So now, unlike in 2013, I can easily put out a call or question or query on social media, and a community of people are present and listening and thinking and prepared to respond, to an extent that simply was not the case in 2013.

Accordingly, in a way that is very different from when I did this in 2013, as soon as my strategic limitation occurred to me in 2017, I put out a call online for ideas and suggestions. Specifically, I asked: ‘Can anyone suggest any films that are not martial arts films but people talk about martial arts in them?’

Maybe it has slightly convoluted syntax; but still I thought this concise question would be clear.

I got some predictable suggestions. I got some unique suggestions. I also got some recurring, repeated suggestions for films that I could look at. (The fact that several films immediately popped into the minds of quite a few different people from different countries suggests a lot: that such examples have some kind of special significance, and definitely deserve consideration, perhaps.)

But I also encountered some fascinating ‘resistance’, some surprise ‘results’, or at least peculiar responses. These took the form of a frequent inability to grasp exactly what it was I was asking for. Sometimes, when people did eventually ‘get’ what I was enquiring into, I was met with an inability to comprehend why I would be asking such a thing.

Of course, that’s fine. It is, after all, down to me to show why I would be asking such a thing – and to my mind there would be less point in undertaking an argument or analysis that is immediately transparent to anyone who hears about any aspect of its initiating question. In short, explaining why I would ask questions about martial arts dialogue in non-martial arts films is part of what my conference paper will do.

But one thing fascinated me. I asked the question (‘Can anyone suggest any films that are not martial arts films but people talk about martial arts in them?’) and many people came back with the titles of (… wait for it …) martial arts films.

When I reiterated that I was not going to look at martial arts films, people came back with suggestions about TV series.

When I reiterated that I was asking about films, not TV series, people suggested cartoons, action films, martial arts films; TV series, martial arts films, TV series – and moreover, and more specifically, people kept coming back to scenes with martial arts in, rather than scenes in non-martial arts films in which people talk about martial arts.

This happened so frequently that it really gave me pause for thought. What is going on here, when a question like ‘Can anyone suggest any films that are not martial arts films but people talk about martial arts in them’ is unintelligible?

One normally extremely lucid commentator even took the time to reflect on the question of why a film maker would take the time to have any kind of discussion of martial arts in their film if martial arts were not the theme of the film…

By way of a concise reply, I asked whether he had seen Napoleon Dynamite.

To this, he replied – as many had before, on the same discussion thread that we were currently on, as well as on several others – ‘Rex Kwon Do!’ So I duly clicked ‘like’, to confirm that we were still having fun, still ‘all in this together’, and so on.

And then – despite the fact that that this one conversation thread, prompted by one peculiar question, had already generated possibly thousands of words and quite a few interesting exchanges, and loads of examples, and loads to think about – someone commented, ‘I think this may be a refreshingly short presentation’.

The conversation thread stands at that, for now. But, to be clear: I beg to differ. On the contrary, I think that this may turn out to be a refreshingly and unexpectedly surprising and rewarding exploration – led not by ‘method’, as such, but rather by the generative potential of an apparently eccentric but fundamentally principled strategic research question.

 
oOo

About the Author:  About the Author: Paul Bowman is no stranger to Kung Fu Tea, where he has been a regular guest author.  He is Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and has written multiple book on Bruce Lee and Martial Arts Studies.  Bowman is also the co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Martial Arts Studies, the editor of Rowman & Littlefields’ Martial Arts Studies book series, and is one of the hardest working scholars you are likely to meet.  His practical resume includes decades of experience in Choy Li Fut, Yang style Taijiquan and Escrima (among other arts).  Lately he has been exploring the joys of Judo. Be sure to check out his most recent article. 

***I am very excited to introduce the following guest post by my friend Scott Phillips.  In this essay Scott draws on his extensive study of modern Chinese religious and social history in an attempt to develop a powerful new concept for describing and theorizing the massive reforms of the Chinese martial arts that occurred during the Republic period.  I thought that his idea was intriguing when he first told me about it a few months ago, and I am very happy that he agreed to compose a guest post that could be shared with the readers of Kung Fu Tea.  Hopefully this essay gets people thinking, debating and talking about how we should understand the trajectory of the Chinese martial arts during these critical decades.  Enjoy!***

The YMCA Consensus

by Scott Park Phillips

The Need for a Proper Name

Sometimes for an intellectual project to move forward a whole body of study has to be given a proper name. In this post I intend to coin a new term, The YMCA Consensus. The major cultural shift that happened at the beginning of the 20th Century has been a difficult obstacle to discussions about the cultural history of Chinese martial arts. Thus I’m proposing we give this cultural shift a name so that we can move the discussion forward.

For instance, when I explain to people that in China theater was subject to various forms of suppression, they naturally want to know why. And generally they want to configure an orderly victim-oppressor framework with which to understand this assertion. Generally in the West we understand the suppression of theater for two reasons, obscenity and subversion. And because of that bias we tend to see the problem as a discourse between a puritanical movement and resistance to it, or between a social order and an attempt to disrupt it. But the actual reason for suppressing theater in China was to break the connection between martial skills, public performance, and religious institutions, as part of a cultural movement to establish a new order. The main public justification offered for ongoing acts of suppression was that the combination of theater, martial skills, and religion kept the Chinese nation weak, vulnerable, ignorant, backward, and superstitious.

I wrote the book Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion (2016) because my interest in performance skills, martial skills, and religious experience gave me unique insights into the history of Chinese martial arts that were mostly absent from either popular or scholarly discussions of the subject.

1919 Shanghai YMCA basketball team. Source: Kautz family archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

Religion

Until quite recently, scholars of Chinese religion were averse to discussing or investigating martial arts or martial skills. (Avron Boretz, Douglas Farrer, and Meir Shahar are recent exceptions.) Informally, it was considered career suicide. This has been justified in all sorts of ways, mainly that it is difficult to escape personal biases and that the subject is politically charged, but frankly, it requires very specific skill sets that few Chinese religious scholars have acquired.

It is largely agreed among Chinese religious scholars who look at the early 20th Century, that there was a massive shift in practice and perspective that coincided with government restrictions and forced codifications of doctrine, practice and institutional frameworks (Goossaert, 2011; Palmer, 2011; Liu, 2009).

These ideas about what religion should be came from many sources. Sun Yet-sen and Chang Kai-shek were Protestants and both married to the daughters of Charlie Soong, a wealthy and influential Christian missionary trained in the United States. Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was common for Chinese elites to voice the view that traditional society was crippling innovations in technology, commerce, the emancipation of women, education, science, and medicine. These voices were amplified after the Boxer Rebellion and culminated in the May 4th Movement which, after gaining the support of the new government, became a powerful voice for radical changes in society.

Under the new Republic (1911), the fate of religion was debated, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) became the model of acceptable religious institutions. I am making this statement in hindsight, they did not name the YMCA specifically, but it is accurate. All religious organizations had to have outreach, charity, a membership, a regular constituency, a popular moral code for upright living, and many other elements of Evangelical Protestantism. Most importantly ritual was repressed and ridiculed if not outright banned. Theater which put gods and demons on the stage as sources of divine power was soundly rejected along with exorcisms of any kind (Paper, 1995). Martial skills which had been integrated with theater and religion had to be purified of superstitious and backwards elements, so that what had been a storehouse of chaotic forces and cosmos-rectifying intentions could be taught at the YMCA.

To describe this change, religious scholars sometimes use the term Protestant, or Protestantization (Palmer, 2011). They also use Scientization to refer to the project of adopting scientific sounding language to describe inner alchemy, meditation, qigong, or martial arts in an attempt to confer authority under the new consensus (Liu, 2009). While we could easily see suppression, especially as it escalated to mass murder during the Communist era, as ALL BAD—modern anthropologists have tended to emphasize the incredible resilience, innovation, creativity, and cooperation that the Chinese people have shown in continuing to practice these traditions (Lagerwey, 2010).

Cantonese Opera Performers in San Francisco, circa 1900. This picture came out of the same milieu as the one above it. Notice the wide rounded blades used by these performers. Such weapons had a lot visual impact but were relatively safe to use on stage.

Theater

Theater, defined broadly to include stage performance, masked processions, exorcistic puppet shows, home entertainments, spirit mediums, and street performers, has been given too little attention by scholars. In China theater was a profoundly physical art form with almost no documentation of method prior to the 20th Century. The most elaborate forms (opera) were performed by a permanently degraded caste, called mean people (jianmin) (Johnson, 2009). Some of the best studies make use of a play or a festival schedule and attempt to contextualize it with other supporting materials written by elite observers (Volpp, 2011; Johnson, 2009). There is a consensus among anthropologists of Chinese culture that religious ritual and theater are inseparable (Chan 2006; Lagerwey, 2010). Most of the informants who have studied Chinese theater report being required to learn some martial arts as part, if not the core, of their basic training (Riley,1997). The first Chinese films grew out of this theater tradition, but by 1930 the Shanghai film industry was shut down as theatrical martial arts displays were banned. The consensus against the integration of theater, martial skills, and religion had the force of government to back it up.

It should be noted that the YMCA and other Christian Evangelical organizations were profoundly anti-theater. They saw it as the source of Chinese resistance to “the Good News” Modern Western institutions were bringing. Chinese theater put unruly gods and demons on the stage as sources of history, social organization, moral order, and inspiration; the YMCA saw theater as the enemy.

From the beginning of the Republic, the YMCA Consensus was the official policy of both the Nationalist and the Communist factions; it was somewhat weaker in Hong Kong, which under exceptional British protection, became a refuge for those fleeing Communism (Judkins, 2015). Hong Kong movies which were banned in the PRC, unselfconsciously employed pure martial artists alongside Beijing opera trained performers, thus violating the consensus in a myriad of creative ways.

Heibi Guoshu School, located in Tianjin (1927). Source: Taiping Institute

Martial Arts

Under the YMCA Consensus, martial arts which were fully integrated with theater and religion had to be purified of superstitious and backwards elements. At first this movement was called Jingwu, pure martial arts, and Tiyu, physical culture (Morris, 2004). Later, as it took a role in the establishment of nationalist body discipline it was called Guoshu (national arts). After the Communist revolution in 1949 it was called Wushu.

Among scholars of Martial Arts in the first half of the 20th Century there was little dissent. While it is difficult to determine what is propaganda and what is serious scholarship, there is little doubt that the two most well known scholars Tang Hao and Xu Zhen were fully indoctrinated into the YMCA Consensus. This is a particular problem for a few Western scholars who have repeated their “findings” uncritically; Peter Lorge and Stanley Henning come to mind. For example the 16th Century general Qi Jiguang, whose writing has rightly been pointed to as an early source for Tai Chi and other martial arts, is presented as a “pure martial artist” with no religious or theatrical connections. This is really a sin of omission. He was in fact a deeply religious man, who practiced the golden elixir (jindan) in nine stages, healing by exorcism, and was involved in rituals for transforming the battlefield dead into ghost soldiers (guibing)(Berling, 1980; Meulenbeld, 2015). He also had a profound connection to the immortal Zhang Sanfeng through his meditation teacher who was a direct disciple of the immortal (Dean, 1998). As a military leader encamped for many years fighting pirates on the coast he worked closely with the local gentry and almost certainly sponsored theatrical festivals as part of the local liturgical calendar. Such things would have been expected of a man in his position (Dean 1998; Berling 1980). Lorge, Henning, and many others, frame Tang Hao’s work as debunking myths, when in fact he was attempting to impose the YMCA Consensus on those who still dared to hint at the theatrical and religious synthesis of martial arts (Lorge 2011, 219; Henning, 1994,1995).

The Chinese Boxing Club of Fukien Christian University. Source: http://findit.library.yale.edu

Why Call it a Consensus?

The inspiration for naming this change in Chinese culture the YMCA Consensus comes from a 2011 blog post by David Chapman. In the post titled “The Crumbling Buddhist Consensus,” Chapman summarizes many of the conflicts in modern Buddhism. He coined the term Consensus Buddhism to describe the coordinated response of Buddhist teachers in the West to suppress the more chaotic and ungainly aspects of Buddhist practice. This coordination happened toward the end of the 1980s as Buddhist lineages, initially populated by sex-positive and consciousness-expanding Hippies, were coming into conflict with the puritanical values of the larger culture. There were numerous scandals surrounding promiscuous, and otherwise badly behaved, teachers. That consensus lasted more than 25 years. But, in short, as second generation teachers became experts in language and history, they looked in vain for Buddhist teachings on peace, love, and understanding, much less “social justice” or “social engagement.” This new breed of Buddhist teachers realized these concepts are not authentically Buddhist, and since then, edgier practices like tantra have grown in popularity.

Besides being an inspiration for the YMCA Consensus, Chapman’s work is a powerful investigation of the way religion and culture interact, and how East meets West. I recommend it to everyone interested in the history, dissemination, and evolution of martial arts.

The YMCA Consensus was not a discourse between two competing social movements, tradition and modernity for instance. It was a conscious decision to re-center Chinese culture. That new center controlled many Chinese institutions, including military and educational. A discourse suggests a back and forth. The YMCA Consensus was a very strong political movement that swept up the majority of the population. Over forty years it expanded and contracted as institutions and individuals reacted or adapted to it. When the Communist took over in 1949, they made it absolute.

Previous scholars who have peeked in around the edges of this subject have most often referred to the YMCA Consensus as Nationalism, by which they usually mean Fascism. Understandably scholars wish to use the same terminology when discussing both China’s and Japan’s transitions to Modernity, but the parallels do not justify it, they are simply too different. Discussions of Communism sometimes get mixed in also–Communism broke the records for mass torture and intentional starvation of the Chinese people–but Communism did not change people’s understanding of martial arts, it simply continued and amplified the YMCA Consensus established earlier. Studies of theater also use the term Nationalism, but use the term Modernity to refer specifically to the process of aesthetic purification. Referring to the same cultural movement, religious scholars use the awkward terms Protestantization or Scientization.

Building on Chapman’s work I would like to coin the term the YMCA Consensus to describe the transition to Modernity that happened in China between 1890 and 1940. Specifically it refers to the process by which people came to see theater, religion and martial arts as separate subjects.

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Scott Park Phillips lives in Bolder Colorado, where he integrates the teaching of Chinese martial arts, dance, improvisational theater, and Daoist cultivation. He writes the blog “Weakness with a Twist,” and is the author of Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion, published by Angry Baby Books (2016). He is currently working on two separate monograms which are alternate histories of Taijiquan and Baguazhang incorporating their theatrical and religious origins.

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References

Berling, Judith A. The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en, Columbia University Press, 1980.

Boretz, Avron Albert. Gods, ghosts, and gangsters: Ritual violence, martial arts, and masculinity on the margins of Chinese Society. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011.

Chan, Margaret. Ritual is theatre, theatre is ritual: Tang-ki Chinese spirit medium worship. Singapore Management University, 2006.

Chapman, David. https://vividness.live/2011/06/07/the-crumbling-buddhist-consensus-overview

Dean, Kenneth. Lord of the three in one: The spread of a cult in southeast China. Princeton University Press, 1998.

Farrer, D. S. “Becoming-animal in the Chinese martial arts.” Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements (2013): 215-246.

Goossaert, Vincent, and David A. Palmer. The religious question in modern China. University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Henning, Stanley. “General Qi Jiguang’s Approach To Martial Arts Training”

Journal of the Chen Style Taijiquan Research Association Of Hawaii, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1995, 1-3 (minor editorial changes/clarifications, July 2006).

Henning, Stanley. “Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan” Journal of the Chen Style Taijiquan Research Association Of Hawaii, Vol. 2, No. 3, Autumn/Winter 1994, 1-7.

Johnson, David George. Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.

Judkins, Benjamin N., and Jon Nielson. The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts. SUNY Press, 2015.

Lagerwey, John. China: A religious state. Vol. 1. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

Liu, Xun. Daoist modern: Innovation, lay practice, and the community of inner alchemy in republican Shanghai. Vol. 313. Harvard University Council on East Asian, 2009.

Lorge, Peter Allan. A History of Chinese Martial Arts. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Morris, Andrew D. Marrow of the nation: A history of sport and physical culture in Republican China. Vol. 10. Univ of California Press, 2004.

Meulenbeld, Mark. Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel. University of Hawaii, 2015.

Palmer, David A., Glenn Shive, and Philip L. Wickeri, editors, Chinese religious life. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Palmer, David A., and Xun Liu, editors. Daoism in the Twentieth century: between eternity and modernity. UC Berkeley Press, 2012.

Paper, Jordan D. The spirits are drunk: comparative approaches to Chinese religion. State University of New York Press, 1995.

Phillips, Scott Park. Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion, Angry Baby Books, 2016.

Riley, Jo. Chinese theatre and the actor in performance. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Shahar, Meir. The Shaolin monastery: history, religion, and the chinese martial arts. University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Volpp, Sophie. Worldly stage: theatricality in seventeenth-century China. Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Source: Wikimedia

Introduction

Greetings!  I am traveling for a conference and workshop where I will attempt to convince a group of political scientists that they should pay attention to Martial Arts Studies. (If you would like to see my presentation click here).  As such, I have arranged something special for Kung Fu Tea in my absence.  The Martial Arts Studies Research Network just wrapped up a small conference in Bath that focused on the Japanese martial arts.  While this is a very interesting subject I suspect that most of us were not able to attend.  So, after talking it over with the conference organizer, it was decided to share some of the presentations here in an attempt to bring a larger number of people into this conversation.  The video quality is not fantastic as everything was shot from a static camera angle.  But some of this material is really great, so feel free to just let the audio play in the background.

The conference featured several papers and I will only be able to share a handful of them here.  I decided that it might also make things more interesting to pick a small subset of presentations, all of which addressed similar themes.  Over the next week we will be looking at a group of papers each of which examines the global spread of the Japanese martial arts into a different area of the world, and from a slightly different theoretical perspective.

Our first paper was presented by Dr. Emelyne Godfrey.  She tackles a number of topics including the early 20th century popularization of Japanese martial arts in the United Kingdom and Suffragette jujitsu.

Dr Godfrey is a writer and researcher specialising in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and has been interviewed by the BBC on numerous occasions. Author of Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (2010), and Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society (2012), her latest work Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris will be available in September 2016. Dr Godfrey is currently working on a book on the suffragettes.

Click here, or on the image below, to see the presentation!

Introduction

Prof. Phillip Zarrilli’s  name will already be familiar to many.  His book, When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art (Oxford UP, 2000) was an important landmark in the development of Martial Arts Studies.  It provided readers with both the first ethnographic study of kalarippayattu and new models for the scholarly study of the physical aspects of the martial arts.  Those wanting to learn more about his body of work may want to check out this paper, or watch his keynote address at last years Martial Arts Studies conference.

Recently, I was asked if I would pass along the following note from Professor Zarrilli, and I have done so below.  This could be a great opportunity for any scholar or filmmaker interested in this martial art.  Please feel free to share this request on social media.

OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE AN EXTRAORDINARY MARTIAL ARTS DOCUMENTARY on kalarippayattu, the martial art of Kerala, India

I began an initial year of ethnographic research on kalarippayattu as an embodied practice in 1976 at the CVN Kalari, East Fort Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala while on a Fulbright Fellowship. I immersed myself in the practice of kalarippayattu with the permission of my primary teacher, Gurukkal Govindankutty Nayar. I subsequently lived in Kerala for a total of seven years between 1976 and 1998 while conducting my research and immersing myself in the actual practices of kalarippayattu. During those seven years of ethnographic research in Kerala, I traveled the length and breadth of Kerala, observing many different styles and traditions of teaching, and documenting practice through photographs, silent super 8 film, super 8 film with sound, and eventually videotape.

The results of my research include: (1) my book-length ethnographic and socio-cultural study of kalarippayattu—When the body becomes all eyes: paradigms, practices, and discourses of power in kalarippayattu published by Oxford University Press (1998); (2) many articles in a diverse set of academic journals about kalarippayattu; and (3) a virtual treasure-trove of literally hours of visual footage of kalarippayattu and hundreds of black and white and color photographs.

It has always been my aspiration to see this audio-visual documentation shaped and edited into a documentary about kalarippayattu. During my years of involvement in higher education, I was never able to have to time or funding to undertake the making of this documentary.

I am writing this open invitation to see if there is a documentary film-maker, and/or academic faculty member who might be interested in seeking funds to archive my collection and shape it into a major documentary. Time is of the essence in order to preserve the original audio-visual documentation.

If interested, please contact me:

Prof. Phillip Zarrilli

Emeritus Professor, Drama Department, Exeter University

Permanent address:

Tyn y parc

Llanarth SA470PB

Wales, U.K.

Telephone: (44) 01545-580376; mobile: 07557416831

www.phillipzarrilli.com

www.thellanarthgroup.com

Introduction

My original plan for the day included writing a conference report on the recent Martial Arts Studies gathering at Cardiff University (which, as always, was a blast).  However, when I opened my email this morning I found a note from Paul Bowman reminding me that today is the 44th anniversary of Bruce Lee’s death.  Paul was kind enough to send me a copy of a draft chapter that he had written for the occasion and offered to share it with the readers of Kung Fu Tea as a guest post.  Normally I would post this early on Friday morning, but given that today marks the actual anniversary, I thought it would be better to break with tradition and get this up a bit early.  In addition to his more recent work on Martial Arts Studies, Paul Bowman has written multiple books on the cultural and social significance of Lee’s films and martial arts career.  As such, he is ideally situated to discuss Lee’s continuing legacy.  Enjoy!

Bruce Lee: Cult (Film) Icon

Paul Bowman

Cardiff University

Draft chapter written for a collection on cult film, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton.

I write these words on the 44^th anniversary of the death of Bruce Lee (July 20^th 1973). When he died I was two years old. Lee was at the height of his fame. At the time of his death, his fourth martial arts film, Enter the Dragon, was being released internationally. He was already well known around the world: in Asia he was stellar; in the West his films had a growing cult status (Hunt 2003; Teo 2009; Lo 2005). For all audiences, he was becoming the exemplar of a new type of masculine cool invincibility – a simultaneously impossible yet (possibly – almost) achievable ideal (Chan 2000; Nitta 2010). It was impossible because Lee was invincible, but it seemed (quasi) achievable because Lee’s invincibility was always shown to be the product of dedicated training in kung fu. So, his image wasn’t simply fictional. His image wasn’t merely fake. He wasn’t magic. He was simply a kung fu expert. This meant that all you had to do to be like him was train. Anyone could train. Everyone could train. So, very many people did. And this became known as the ‘kung fu craze’ of the 1970s (Brown 1997).

At the time of his death, Enter the Dragon was about to push Lee into the mainstream of global popular consciousness. If up until this point he had achieved ‘cult’ status in the West, he was about to attain the status he had already attained across Asia: superstardom. But this would not involve selling out or dampening down any of the ‘cult’ features that characterised his kung fu films. Rather, Lee’s success would amount to the international explosion of martial arts film and martial arts practice: its leaping out from the shadowy margins and into the bright lights of the mainstream.

This explosion is still referred to as the kung fu craze of the 1970s. Bruce Lee was the image and the name that exemplified this ‘craze’. There were other martial arts stars, of course, both before and after Bruce Lee; but he was and remains the quintessential figure. His name still sells books. Documentaries are still being made about him (Webb 2009; McCormack 2012). Martial arts magazine issues that have his image on the cover still sell more copies than those which don’t. Blog entries about him still generate spikes.[i] He is still credited as an inspiration by athletes, boxers, UFC and MMA fighters, and martial artists of all stripes (Miller 2000; Preston 2007). YouTube continues to throw up new Bruce Lee homages and montages. Computer games still have Bruce Lee characters. He is still used in adverts. He is universally regarded as having been a key figure for non-white film and TV viewers of the 1960s and early ’70s – a kind of oasis in a desert of white heroes and (at best) blackspoitation (Prashad 2003, 2002; Kato 2007; Bowman 2010; Chong 2012). He was immediately (and remains) a complex and important figure for diasporic ethnic Chinese the world over (Hiramoto 2012; Teo 2013; Marchetti 2001, 1994, 2012, 2006). And he forged the first bridge between Hong Kong and Hollywood film industries.

There is so much more to say about all of this. I could go on with this list. But I have said much of this before (Bowman 2010, 2013). So instead, having set the scene, however fleetingly, let’s pause to reflect on whether this makes Bruce Lee a ‘cult’ figure.

In order to focus principally on Bruce Lee as a cult icon, we cannot undertake too much of a digression into a fully elaborated discussion of the controversial and problematic term ‘cult’ in film and cinema studies (Shepard 2014; Mathijs and Mendik 2008; Mathijs 2005). Suffice it to say that in and around film studies the ongoing academic disputes about the notion of ‘cult’ centre on the question of what makes something a cult object. Is the thing that makes an object (normally a film but sometimes an actor, director or even genre) into a ‘cult’ object to be found in the properties of the object itself, or in the status of that object in relation to other objects, or in an audience’s response to it?

There is a lot of disagreement about this. My own sense is that cult is principally a useful descriptive term, but that it is less useful analytically. Nonetheless, in attempting to think about Bruce Lee through this lens, some hugely stimulating insights can emerge. In what follows, I will principally concern myself with responses and relations to the cinematically constructed image of Bruce Lee, rather than with attempting to adjudicate on the matter of whether this or that feature of his films (Barrowman 2016) or his cinematic, media or spectacular image fit into his or that categorisation or definition of ‘cult’ or ‘not-cult’. So rather than worrying about taxonomies, I will translate the ideas and associations of the word ‘cult’ into the sense of a variably manifested passionate relation to or with something – in this case, the textual field of objects known as ‘Bruce Lee’.[ii]

I do this because there is not now and there never has been a single or singular cult of Bruce Lee. It has always been cults, plural. The ideas, ideals, injunctions and aspirations associated with Bruce Lee were always multiple. In effect, there have always been several Bruce Lees – different Bruce Lees for different people. Lined up side by side and viewed together, the ‘Bruce Lee’ constructed by each group, audience or constituency often appears, on the one hand, partial and incomplete, yet on the other hand, larger than life and impossibly perfect. There are biographical, technological and textual reasons for this.

Firstly, Lee died unexpectedly, very young, in obscure circumstances, and for a long time afterwards much of his life remained shrouded in mystery – a mystery that largely arose because of a lack of reliable, verifiable information about him, his life, and the circumstances of his death. It is arguably the case that his family, their advisors, and his estate made a series of less than ideal decisions around the dissemination of information about Bruce Lee both in the immediate aftermath of his death and in the subsequent years and even decades (Bleecker 1999). These decisions all seem to have arisen from a desire to paint Bruce Lee hagiographically, as a perfect figure, a kind of saintly genius. Somewhat predictably, then, other voices have more than once come out of the woodwork to make somewhat contrary claims and to paint Bruce Lee in rather different lights . Through all of the mist and murk, one of Lee’s many (unauthorised) biographers, Davis Miller, makes an important point when he observes in his 2000 publication, The Tao of Bruce Lee, that surely there has been no other 20^th century figure, so globally famous, about whom so little was actually known for so long (Miller 2000; Bowman 2010).

The film theorist André Bazin might have disputed such a claim, however. For, as he argued when discussing the cinematic images of Joseph Stalin, the cinematically constituted, disseminated and experienced image does much to create a kind of double or doubling effect (Bazin 1967:1-14). Of course, there may be a world of difference between Bruce Lee and Joseph Stalin, but Bazin’s observations can be applied to the figure that viewers felt they experienced when they experienced Bruce Lee. Indeed, it can be extended to apply to many other cinematic or media experiences of many other kinds of celebrity image too. The logic is this. Firstly, the cinematic image can make the figure seem larger than life. Baudrillard would call this ‘hyperreal’: more real than real (Baudrillard 1994). But Bazin also notes that the image on the cinema screen is, in a way, already dead, absent, out of reach, ‘mummified’. Yet, at the same time, and paradoxically by the same token, the nature of the cinematic image can make us feel we personally have intimate, personal, access to the person we are watching (Bazin 1967: 1-14; Chow 2007: 4-7).

These kind of observations about the cinematic image can serve as an entry point into thinking about the ‘technological’ reasons why there has never simply been one cult of Bruce Lee, but always more than one. We each see a very distant, larger than life figure, and yet we can also come to feel that we have an intimate insight into him – whatever that may be. He is there, and we can see what he is saying and doing; but he is gone, and we have to construct an interpretation.

This is where the textual or semiotic dimension becomes fully active. For, like any other media image, ‘Bruce Lee’ is essentially and irreducibly textual. When we think of or speak about Bruce Lee we are dealing not with one single or simple thing, but with complex pieces of textual material, woven into different textual constructs (films, documentaries, books, magazines, posters, anecdotes, memories). In fact, taken to its most ‘radical’ extreme, the theory of textuality essentially dispenses with the need for there to be an actual ‘text’ (such as a film, a book or a magazine article) in front of us at all. For, as elaborated by Jacques Derrida, the theory of textuality (aka deconstruction), holds that for each and every one of us the entire world is a text. We relate to everything the same way we relate to texts: we look, we listen, we think, we try to interpret, to make sense, to extract or establish meaning, and so on. According to the infamous phrase of Derrida (who was the most famous proponent of textuality as an approach to more or less everything), ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida 1976: 158-9).

Whether we go this far or not, according to most theories of text and textuality, the meaning of any given text is produced in the encounter with the reader. So, although the creators of any given text (literary, cinematic, TV, radio, etc.) will have had intentions, and will have wanted to create certain effects and induce certain responses, the buck stops with the reader, or the person who experiences these devices and combinations of elements. Accordingly, whilst some viewers may watch Bruce Lee’s filmic fights with his opponents and find them thrilling, tense, exciting, brilliant, even tragic, other viewers may find them boring, turgid, unintelligible, or even comical, and so on. Elsewhere in his acting, where some may perceive ‘cool’ others may see ‘wooden’; where some may perceive genius others may see idiocy.

Nonetheless, despite the range of meanings that could be attached to any aspect of Bruce Lee, it is certain that he had a massive impact. Although many in the Western world had seen ‘Asian martial arts’ on TV and cinema screens more and more since the 1950s (most famously perhaps in the TV series The Avengers and the James Bond film, Dr No), the effect of Bruce Lee on many viewers was instant and transformative. More than one documentary about the impact of Bruce Lee contains newsreel footage showing children and young teenagers leaving cinemas and movie theatres in the UK and US and performing the cat-calls, poses and attempting to do the flashy moves and kicks of Bruce Lee (BBC4 2013). In fact this scenario has come to constitute something of a ‘creation scenario’ in stories about the birth of what has long since been referred to as the ‘kung fu craze’ that swept through the US, Europe and much of the rest of the world, starting in 1973 (Brown 1997).

This was the year of the box office release of Enter the Dragon – a film that is notable because it was the first Hollywood and Hong Kong co-production, the first Hollywood film explicitly framed as a ‘martial arts’ film, and perhaps the first ‘formal’ introduction of many Westerners to the imagined world of Asian martial arts (Bowman 2010). It is also the year that Bruce Lee died in obscure circumstances. In many countries news of Bruce Lee’s death came out shortly before the film was actually released (Hunt 2003). All of which immediately made both the film and the man extremely intriguing. It is true that this was not the first martial arts film that had been available to audiences in the West. Several Hong Kong martial arts films had been successful in the US before. Indeed, it was their increasing success that had given Hollywood producers the confidence that this venture could be successful in the first place. But Enter the Dragon is without a doubt the most important martial arts film of the period, precisely because of its mainstreaming of Asian martial arts.

There are perhaps no rigorously scientific ways of establishing ‘importance’, ‘effect’ or ‘influence’ in the realms of media and culture (Hall 1992), but it can be said (with the benefit of hindsight) that from the moment of the release of Enter the Dragon it was absolutely clear that Bruce Lee was not merely influential but actually epochal. The historian, philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault came up with the notion of a ‘founder of discursivity’ (Foucault 1991). For Foucault, a founder of discursivity is something or someone that generates a whole new discourse, or that radically transforms an ongoing discourse. Although not discussed by Michel Foucault, my contention is that Bruce Lee should definitely be accorded the status of founder of discursivity.

The meaning of the term ‘discourse’ in this sense is quite precise. In the tradition of Foucault, a discourse is also but not only a conversation. Discourses in this sense also involve actions. For example, the discourse of architecture is not the conversations and arguments of architects, town planners, residents’ associations, lawyers, and so on. The discourse of architecture also refers to the processes, practices and results of these conversations and arguments: what buildings look like, how they are made, the changes in their styles and configurations, and so on. In Foucault’s sense, there are discourses in and of all things: law, religion, science, fashion, music, taste, you name it. So, a founder of discursivity may be identified in a person (for example, Elvis or Jimi Hendrix), or in a technological change (the electrification of music). The point is, we are dealing with an intervention that disrupts and transforms states of affairs. Bruce Lee was precisely such a disruption and transformation.

Let us return to the mythic scene of our origin story: the excited or excitable young viewers of a new Bruce Lee film, who have just left the cinema. They are not merely discussing the films. They make cat-calls. They try to throw kicks and punches in ways that two hours previously were completely unknown to them but to which they have just very recently been introduced and instantly become accustomed. What is there to say about this scene or situation?

Bruce Lee made only four and a half martial arts films before he died. He only used his signature screams and cat-calls for dramatic cinematic effect within those films. There is no evidence that he made his signature noises off-screen. Moreover, few cinematic or actual martial artists ever really followed Bruce Lee in using these kinds of noises in fight scenes, never mind in sparring or in competition. If and when such mimicry occurs, it is always in some sense what Judith Butler would call a ‘parodic performance’. And yet, to this day, when children in the playground strike improvised/invented ‘kung fu’ poses and throw what they think might be cool kung fu shapes, they still very often make the Bruce Lee cat-calls, screams and kiais – in performances that are in one sense parodic but in another sense completely sincere.

Evidence for this claim is anecdotal, of course. But I often observed it personally at my own children’s primary school, four decades after Bruce Lee’s death. At the same time, people from both my own and other countries have recounted the same observation to me. Of course, there may be various kinds of confirmation bias at play here. I may actually only be remembering a highly select few instances, and blowing them up, out of all proportion, while forgetting or ignoring cases where children’s martial arts play is not accompanied by Bruce Lee sounds. Similarly, my interlocutors may be telling me what they think I want to hear. But, unlike trying to establish ‘influence’ and ‘effect’ directly, perhaps a research project could be constructed that could explore what children ‘do’ when they strike ‘martial artsy’ poses. And my hypothesis would remain that they very often make noises that can directly and unequivocally be traced back to no one other than Bruce Lee. The fact that few such children are likely to have any conscious knowledge or awareness of Bruce Lee makes this even more interesting. But, in such a situation, are we still dealing with a cult? And what is the relation of any such conscious or unconscious cult with ‘cult film’?

Bruce Lee’s films constituted an intervention, definitely. A transformation, certainly. In the realms of film, Bruce Lee’s fight choreography changed things, raised the bar, set new ideals in film fight staging. But this remains in the realm of what we might call ‘film discourse’ or ‘film intertextuality’, relating as it does to the ‘internal conversations’ and changing practices and conventions within, across and among films. But we are not yet really dealing with the effects of these films on actual people – or at least actual people other than film fight choreographers.

To turn our attention to ‘real people’, we might refer back to our creation scenario one more time, and ask what happened to all of those impressionable and impressed boys and girls who left the cinema with a newly inculcated desire for this new ‘ancient’ thing called kung fu. As a range of commentators and historians have remarked, the scarcity and rarity of Chinese martial arts schools in Europe and the US forced people who desired to learn kung fu ‘like Bruce Lee’ to take up the much more readily available arts of judo and karate. There were comparatively more judo and karate clubs in Europe and the US than kung fu clubs. This disparity has geopolitical and historical causes that are too complex to cover adequately here. Suffice it to say that kung fu clubs gradually emerged in response to the demand. But the first big explosion in participation in Asian martial arts in the wake of the ‘kung fu craze’ was an uptake of judo, karate, and taekwondo, not kung fu. The films that inspired the interest came from Hong Kong, but the Asian martial arts on offer in the West came from Korea and Japan, generally via some connection to the military.

Over time, more was learned about Bruce Lee’s art. He had trained in wing chun kung fu as a teenager in Hong Kong. Wing chun is a close range fighting art with short punches, locks, grapples, and a preference for low kicks. When he moved to the USA at the age of 18, he was definitely a competent martial artist, and apparently blessed with incredible speed and grace of movement. His speed reputedly impressed even very senior and well established Chinese martial artists. Famously, however, his iconoclasm didn’t (Russo 2016).

Stories about and studies of Bruce Lee’s iconoclasm, irreverence and various fights and tussles abound. Rather than recounting them here, the point to be emphasised in this context is that when Bruce Lee gradually began to enter into the TV and movie business, first as a trainer, then choreographer, and supporting actor, he clearly knew that what mattered most on screen was drama. Hence, his screen fights always involved high kicks, jumps, and big movements. Everything was exaggerated and amplified (although those closest to him have claimed that he really struggled to move slow enough to enable the camera to capture his techniques).

Because of the complexity of this chiasmus, Bruce Lee can be said to have always sent his ‘followers’ moving in one of two or more directions. First, his Chinese kung fu sent people flocking into Japanese and Korean style dojos and dojangs. Second, Bruce Lee publicly disavowed formal stylistic training – first claiming to have abandoned wing chun, then naming his approach ‘jeet kune do’, then coming to regret giving it a name at all (Inosanto 1994; Tom 2005). Nonetheless, fans flocked to find wing chun classes. Others sought jeet kune do classes. Others took his message of ‘liberate yourself from styles’ or ‘escape from the classical mess’ to mean that one should reject any and all formal or systematic teaching and work out how to ‘honestly express yourself’, as Lee was fond of saying (Lee 1971).

Furthermore, within the jeet kune do community itself, a sharp divide appeared immediately after Lee’s death. Some of his students felt that they should continue to practice and teach exactly what Bruce Lee had practiced and taught with them. Others felt that the spirit of his jeet kune do was one of innovation, experimentation and constant transformation, and that what needed to be done, therefore, was to continue to innovate and experiment in line with certain principles or concepts. Hence a rift emerged among Lee’s closest friends and longest students. It continues to this day.

As such, all different kinds of people with all different kinds of orientation believed and continue to believe that they are ‘following’ Bruce Lee, that they love him and honour him and respect him. Yet they are all doing very different things and adhering to very different images and ideas. For all of them, Bruce Lee was ‘The Man’. I use this term because I have heard these words – and words like them – in many countries and contexts, from many different kinds of people, the world over.

The most memorable occasion was in Hong Kong, after a kung fu class. The style we were practicing was choy lee fut kung fu. This is very different to the wing chun kung fu that Bruce Lee studied as a teenager in Hong Kong, and a world away from the jeet kune do style that he devised as an adult in the USA. In fact, choy lee fut is often positioned as wing chun’s nemesis. It is certainly the style that is mentioned most frequently in the various versions of mythical stories of the young Bruce Lee in Hong Kong. In these stories we are told that wing chun students and choy lee fut students would often have formal style-versus-style duels on the city’s rooftops. Sometimes in these stories Bruce Lee is depicted as the scourge of all rivals. In other versions, an innocent young Bruce Lee is depicted as starting his first rooftop fight and immediately recoiling in pain and shock, before being told to get back into the fray, doing so, and emerging victorious.

In all of the Hong Kong based wing chun kung fu stories about Bruce Lee, choy lee fut kung fu comes off badly. Perhaps this is the reason for the frequent animosity that exists between wing chun and other styles of kung fu in Hong Kong. I certainly witnessed some of this during a visit there in 2010. The sense among practitioners of other styles of kung fu seemed to be that wing chun kung fu only became famous because of Bruce Lee’s fame. In this sense, the global success of wing chun itself could be regarded as a kind of cult formation that is indebted to Bruce Lee (Bowman 2010; Judkins and Nielson 2015). Certainly, I was also told in Hong Kong that among the ‘traditional’ Chinese martial arts community of Hong Kong, wing chun was regarded as simply too new and too local to deserve the global fame it had achieved in the wake of Bruce Lee.

Knowing this is doubtless what made my choy lee fut colleague’s declaration that ‘Bruce Lee was the man’ so significant for me. On the one hand, Bruce Lee popularised a rival style of kung fu, and stories about his martial arts encounters often involved the disparagement of other styles (specifically choy lee fut). But on the other hand, for all who had eyes to see, Bruce Lee was unequivocally brilliant – amazing to watch, astonishing, inspiring, graceful, powerful, elegant. So, even practitioners of ‘rival’ styles, even traditionalists who may disparage either or both wing chun and jeet kune do, could easily concede Bruce Lee’s brilliance and their admiration for him.

Of course, some may say that none of the examples of influence and importance that I have so far given really fall into the category of ‘cult’ as it is normally used, either conversationally, colloquially or as technically conceived within film studies. Neither children parroting and copying moves after a cinema visit, nor an expansion of martial arts classes as part of an international boom, nor the elevation of a once obscure southern style martial art constitute evidence of a ‘cult’ – certainly not one organised by devotion to a personality or a celebrity. Nonetheless, my claim is that all such examples are ripples that attest to a significant and generative intervention.

For, in the end, Bruce Lee most often functions as a kind of muse (Morris 2001). People have been inspired by Bruce Lee in myriad ways: musicians, athletes, artists, thinkers, performers, dancers, and others, have all referenced Bruce Lee as an inspiration. In the realms of martial arts practice and film fight choreography, Bruce Lee arguably dropped a bomb, the effects of which are still being felt. But, being forever absent, forever image, forever a few frozen quotations, what we see are a diverse plurality of practices of citation.

The different ways in which bits and pieces of ‘Bruce Lee’ are picked up and used (and abused) attest to the nature of his intervention. Before Bruce Lee, one could dream of being any number of things – footballer, athlete, rock star, and so on. After Bruce Lee, one more gleaming new option was definitively out of the box, on the table, in the air, everywhere: martial artist. This is why the impact and importance of Bruce Lee has always exceeded the world of film, and seeped into so many aspects of so many lives. This is another way in which Bruce Lee can be said to be like water.

Works Cited

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———. 2013. Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through Film, Philosophy, and Popular Culture. Columbia University Press.

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Hunt, Leon. 2003. Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger. London: Wallflower.

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———. 2001. ‘Jackie Chan and the Black Connection’. In Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, edited by Matthew and Villarejo, Amy Tinkcom. London: Routledge.

———. 2006. From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997. Temple University Press.

———. 2012. The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema. Temple University Press.

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Mathijs, Ernest, and Xavier Mendik. 2008. The Cult Film Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

McCormack, Pete. 2012. I Am Bruce Lee. Documentary, Biography.

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Prashad, Vijay. 2002. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Beacon Press.

———. 2003. ‘Bruce Lee and the Anti-Imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure’. Positions 11 (1): 51–90. doi:10.1215/10679847-11-1-51.

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

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Teo, Stephen. 2009. Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. Edinburgh University Press.

———. 2013. The Asian Cinema Experience: Styles, Spaces, Theory. Routledge.

Tom, Teri. 2005. The Straight Lead: The Core of Bruce Lee’s Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing.

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[i] I have been told this numerous times by editors of martial arts magazines and bloggers, both UK, US, and transnational/online.

[ii] I discuss the ways in which the term ‘Bruce Lee’ organises a complex field of images, ideas, citations and allusions in Beyond Bruce Lee (Bowman 2013).

  Introduction Greetings from Germany, where I am now enjoying a much anticipated conference dedicated to the study of fightbooks hosted by the German Blade Museum.  I will be posting both the text of my keynote and a full report... Continue Reading →

  Introduction Last week I was flying over the Pacific Ocean.  This week it is the Atlantic.  If all has gone according to plan, I am now returning to the United States after a fantastic conference on fightbooks at the... Continue Reading →

  ***I had initially planned to share the first of my recent conference papers this weekend, but I think that should probably wait until next week.  Prof. Paul Bowman, whose contributions to the development of martial arts studies are literally... Continue Reading →

  Martial Arts in the British National Press Paul Bowman Cardiff University JOMEC Research Seminar, Cardiff University, 13th December 2017 Introduction This research project looked at stories, items and features about martial arts in the UK national press.[1] The basic... Continue Reading →

  ***I am happy to announce that our first substantive essay for 2018 will be a guest post by Lauren Miller Griffith.  While this is Prof. Griffith's first appearance on Kung Fu Tea she is already  leaving her mark on... Continue Reading →

    ***The following guest post has been generously provided by Paul Bowman.  It is significant in a number of respects, providing us with both a summery and commentary on the ongoing debate over the definition of "martial arts."  Bowman... Continue Reading →

  Introduction Greetings, and welcome! Earlier this year a reader asked me to comment on the current state of the popular martial arts publishing industry. I have certainly noticed a couple of interesting trends. There are many fewer martial arts... Continue Reading →

  ***I am excited to introduce the following guest post by Alex Channon and Christopher Matthews.   Readers may recall that in my 2017 MAS Conference Keynote I called on the field to dedicate more theoretical and empirical attention to... Continue Reading →

***We remember the martial arts through many mediums.  Countless videos can be found on YouTube.  Novels, opera and film have sanctified the heroes of the past.  Books have archived the wisdom of countless communities.  Yet over the last century no... Continue Reading →

It's been a while!   [Paul Bowman and I were recently chatting about important developments in the Martial Arts Studies community and we decided that it would be good to share some of this information on Kung Fu Tea, as... Continue Reading →

  Matthew Polly. 2018. Bruce Lee: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. 656 pages. $35 USD.   Introduction Matthew Polly is perhaps the best known and most popular author writing on the martial arts today.  His first two books... Continue Reading →

  ***Luke White has generously offered Kung Fu Tea the following report on this year's fourth annual Martial Arts Studies Conference at Cardiff University.  Sadly I was not able to attend, but reading Luke's report makes me feel as though... Continue Reading →

  Paul Bowman and I are happy to announce that the sixth issue of Martial Arts Studies (an imprint of Cardiff University Press) has been published and is now available. This interdisciplinary academic journal is free to read or download by any individual... Continue Reading →

  ***I hope that the following guest post will be the first entry in a new occasional series here at Kung Fu Tea. While I am neither a linguist or historian of ancient China, I have found myself regularly attending... Continue Reading →

  Translator’s Note Here is the full translation of the Qi Jiguang’s Fist Method as it appears in the Wubei Zhi, offered as a follow-up to my initial discussion of the challenges of translating this text into English verse. If... Continue Reading →