Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World

1. Introduction: Martial Arts, Transnationalism, and Embodied Knowledge

1 Introduction Martial Arts, Transnationalism, and Embodied Knowledge D. S. Farrer and John Whalen-Bridge The outlines of a newly emerging field—martial arts studies—appear in the essays collected here in Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World. Considering knowledge as “embodied,” where “embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience,” means understanding martial arts through cultural and historical experience; these are forms of knowledge characterized as “being-in-the-world” as opposed to abstract conceptions that are somehow supposedly transcendental (Csordas 1999: 143). Embodiment is understood both as an ineluctable fact of martial training, and as a methodological cue. Assuming at all times that embodied practices are forms of knowledge, the writers of the essays presented in this volume approach diverse cultures through practices that may appear in the West to be esoteric and marginal, if not even dubious and dangerous expressions of those cultures. The body is a chief starting point for each of the enquiries collected in this volume, but embodiment, connecting as it does to imaginative fantasy, psychological patterning, and social organization, extends “far beyond the skin of the practicing individual” (Turner and Yangwen 2009). The discourse of martial arts, which is composed of the sum total of all the ways in which we can register, record, and otherwise signify the experience of martial arts mind1 2 Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge and-body training, is the topic par excellence through which to understand the challenges of embodied knowledge, fantasy, and the body.1 The subject of martial arts studies may cause some readers to pause as it invokes a series of disturbing dialectical linkages between philosophy, religion and violence, self-defense and aggression, Buddhism and brutality , and points toward an Asian war machine supposedly usurped by the “evolution” of sophisticated modern (read Western) methods of remote disembodied technological warfare. The valorizing words that tether experience of various sorts to “knowledge” appear to be greased in the places where martial artists are most likely to attempt to catch hold. In Western academe, precisely because martial arts seem like an awkward pretender to “knowledge,” the problems associated with embodied knowledge and scholarly resistance to it are apparent. However, studies of the body and embodiment have resisted becoming the materialistic fall guy to “mind” or “spirit.” The growth of martial arts studies has almost certainly been stunted by one of the paradoxes of postcolonialism: the conceptual apparatus of embodied thinking, in its reflexive effort to liberate the body from its role as mind’s subordinate other, too often goes too far in the direction of what Spivak (1996: 214) has called “strategic essentialism.” The term “martial arts” signifies “Eastern” and can be accessed to champion, as a counterdiscourse to effeminizing Orientalist clichés, the contemporary paradigmatic image of the Asian-yet-masculine martial arts icon (think of Bruce Lee). To the degree that this reactionary response is highly predictable, so does the cumulative effect of Asian martial arts discourse serve, in spite of its advocates’ best intentions, to reify and falsely unify the notion of a centered, stable, objective Asian culture. Martial arts, meaning the things done to make the study of fighting appear refined enough to survive elite social prohibitions, has never been exclusively an Asian matter, but martial arts discourse, meaning the expectations that help order the texts and images of martial bodily training and its entourage of cultural side effects, remains predominantly projected onto the Asian body. In Western representation martial arts are powerfully associated with specifically Asian traditions and practices. The association of particular physical skills with particular kinds of socialization gathers even more complexity when we figure in the role of Orientalist fantasy. According to Edward Said (1979), we (especially the empowered “we” of the West as opposed to Asia) construct a fantasy self, and this fantasy self uses a distorted version of an Other to brace 3 Introduction itself. One casts oneself into a primary role and casts the other—the fantasized Other—into an often unflattering role, thus producing a foil for the fantasized self. The very act of imagining other civilizations is its own form of war, according to extreme extensions of this model, and so we must approach martial arts as a vehicle of intercultural transmission and communication with caution and care. Martial arts considered as embodied knowledge offers a rapidly changing...