Martial Arts As Embodied Knowledge

This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book's cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies. Three central aspects emerge from this book: martial arts as embodied fantasy, as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation, and as a continuous process of identity formation. Contributors explore several popular and highbrow cultural considerations, including the career of Bruce Lee, Chinese wuxia films, and Don DeLillo's novel Running Dog. Ethnographies explored describe how the social body trains in martial arts and how martial arts are constructed in transnational training. Ultimately, this academic study of martial arts offers a focal point for new understandings of cultural and social beliefs and of practice and agency.

The phrase “martial arts studies” is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a new field of interest. But many academic fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, and Area studies already engage with martial arts in their own particular way. Therefore, is there really such a thing as a unique field of martial arts studies? Martial Arts Studies is the first book to engage directly with these questions. It assesses the multiplicity and heterogeneity of possible approaches to martial arts studies, exploring orientations and limitations of existing approaches. It makes a case for constructing the field of martial arts studies in terms of key coordinates from post-structuralism, cultural studies, media studies, and post-colonialism. By using these anti-disciplinary approaches to disrupt the approaches of other disciplines, Martial Arts Studies proposes a field that both emerges out of and differs from its many disciplinary locations.

Teaching the skills necessary to play sport depends partly on transmitting knowledge verbally, yet non-verbal or tacit knowledge also has an important role. A coach may tell a young athlete to 'move more dynamically', but it is undoubtedly easier to demonstrate with the body itself how this should be done. Skills such as developing a 'feel for the water' cannot simply be transmitted verbally; they are embodied in the tacit knowledge acquired from practice, repetition and experience. This is the first sociological study of the transmission of skills through tacit knowledge in sport. Drawing on philosophy, sociology and theories of embodiment, it presents original research gathered from qualitative empirical studies of young athletes. It discusses the concept of tacit knowledge in relation to motor skills transmission in a variety of sports, including athletics, swimming and judo, and examines the methodological possibilities of studying tacit knowledge, as well as its challenges and limitations. This is fascinating reading for all those with an interest in the sociology of sport, theories of embodiment, or skill acquisition and transmission.

Questions about how humans come to know themselves and their worlds have always been at the heart of anthropology, and are necessarily part of a broader intellectual history. This book brings together anthropologists to discuss how they come to know what they know about the societies they study.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This book explores the carnal experience of fighting through a sensory ethnography of MMA, and how it transgresses the cultural scripts of masculinity in popular culture. Based on four years of participant observation in a local MMA club and in-depth interviews with amateur and professional MMA fighters, Spencer documents fighters' training regimes and the meanings they attach to participation in the sport. Drawing from the philosophical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book develops bodies-centered ontological and epistemological grounding for this study. Guided by such a position, it places bodies at the center of analysis of MMA and elucidates the embodied experience of pain and injury, and the sense and rhythms of fighting.

The first authoritative overview of martial arts studies, written by pioneers of this dynamic and rapidly expanding new field

This book studies the Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat and related media practices, and, building on that, assesses mediatization processes, meaning the potential influence of technology-based media practices. Pencak Silat represents a cultural system of values and beliefs, with hierarchical structures and relations, and social advancement being mediated in embodied social learning. The study contributes to martial arts studies and media studies, demonstrating potentials and limitations of media technologies and their (dis-)embodiment – their extension or reduction of the body as medium, and their embeddedness in or detachment from a given socio-cultural context. With Pencak Silat being practiced all over Indonesia, by a large part of the population, the thesis also represents a contribution to Indonesian studies. Based on extensive fieldwork (between 2008 and 2016), the study analyzes martial arts and/as media in Indonesia, and presents an ethnography of Pencak Silat and mediatization.

What is the essence of martial arts? What is their place in or relationship with culture and society? Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies.