Martial Arts Studies?
The birth of martial arts studies as a new subject area or field has been announced, and clearly: in the editors' introduction to a 2011 collection, Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World: its editors, Douglas Farrer and John Whalen-Bridge put it like this: 'The outlines of a newly emerging field – martial arts studies – appear in the essays collected here' (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011: 1).
The editors' introductory essay offers a reflection on the problems and possibilities of one possible type of martial arts studies – namely, that which would be organised by and focus on embodiment, in terms of martial arts as embodied knowledge. And they suspect, from the outset, that this may be eyed with some suspicion by some scholars. As they put it: 'the subject of martial arts studies may cause some readers to pause' (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011: 2). To their mind this is because the very proposition of studying martial arts within and even as a field 'invokes a series of disturbing dialectical linkages', or associations, 'between philosophy, religion and violence, self-defense and aggression, Buddhism and brutality' (2). Along with such contingent connotations, any suspicion about martial arts studies is likely to be compounded by a certain enduring 'Western' prejudice: namely, a tradition of prejudice against the body itself in Western theology and philosophy (Gilbert 1999). The prejudice against the body is the flipside of the overwhelming Western philosophical and theological tendency to privilege matters of the mind (what Jacques Derrida called the West's 'logocentricity').
Thus, Farrer and Whalen-Bridge propose: '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'. Chief among these, they suggest, is that 'the growth of martial arts studies has almost certainly been stunted by one of the paradoxes of postcolonialism'. This 'paradox' involves the problem of difference and legitimation. This problem may be explained as follows: established approaches to knowledge are sceptical of and resistant to different approaches to knowledge. Accordingly, established forms of knowledge cannot easily countenance 'different knowledges', and cannot easily deal with the idea of different knowledges of knowledge, different discourses about it, different understandings of understanding, and so on. For, established approaches and established bodies of knowledge are what they are because they conform to more or less agreed processes of verification, validation and legitimation. Anything that falls outside of established processes of verification and legitimation cannot but be regarded as invalid and illegitimate. Thus, 'different knowledges', 'alternative knowledges', etc., in all realms, are always and already suspect.
Moreover, Farrer and Whalen-Bridge propose, what might be called this version of the 'legitimation crisis in knowledge' (Lyotard 1984) is not helped when '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 has called "strategic essentialism"' (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011: 2). In other words, any effort to legitimate 'different knowledges' is not helped when certain studies seem to insist on transgressing (and offending) established or achieved and valued norms of scholarly language and protocol in elaborating themselves as different.
It is ironic that Farrer and Whalen-Bridge single out 'essentialism' as a risk in studies of body-knowledge. For, studies of 'body technologies' (Foucault 1977), 'techniques of the body' (Mauss 1992), bodies' propensities and capacities (see the many works of Bourdieu), and so on, actually have a long and well established tradition, as my evocation of Foucault, Bourdieu and Mauss here should indicate. But 'essentialism' seems to return, eternally. It has been the primary target of so many ethically and politically inflected kinds of cultural studies, which have singled out and attacked the circulation of essentialisms about race, gender, class, and so on, for decades. And the problematic of essentialism does seem to be particularly keen in postcolonial contexts, in which the establishment of postcolonial national identities does often seem to require at best 'strategic', at worst 'reflex' essentialism.
So Farrer and Whalen-Bridge seek to alert any nascent martial arts studies to beware of any martial arts essentialism. The problem is that such essentialisms may already have entered in the form of the specification of the object of study itself ('karate', 'kung fu', 'silat', etc.), as can be seen in any statement of the form 'x is (essentially) y' ('karate is…', 'kung fu is…', 'silat is…', etc.). For these types of formulation already imply a fixed and frozen object of study, one fixed in time, place and often ethnicity. In other words, 'essentialisms' can enter and abound, through conceptual conflations and displacements that can emerge simply by attempting to specify and define an object. Karate is essentialized as Japanese, Kung Fu as Chinese, Silat as Indonesian, and so on. Geographical associations overdetermine our thinking. We think of this or that style of martial art according to simplifications of place, nation, and ethnicity. As Farrer and Whalen-Bridge note:
These are some of what Farrer and Whalen-Bridge call the 'built-in conceptual problems' of martial arts studies (3). Accordingly, however it is approached, the object 'martial arts' constitutes 'a rapidly changing, ambiguous, contradictory, and paradoxical quarry' (3). It will be defined, related to, and treated in contingent and conventional ways, all of which will determine what is 'discovered' or 'learned'. For instance, they suggest that some studies have used arguments about Asian martial arts to try to show that there are discourses other than orientalism available to Westerners when thinking about 'Asia'. But, although such arguments may be motivated by admirable desires to reduce generalisations, simplifications and stereotypes about Asia, they may unwittingly feed into them. As they say:
With such arguments, Farrer and Whalen-Bridge begin to set out some of the problematics that the emergent field of martial arts studies must inevitably encounter, navigate and negotiate: entrenched prejudices against different registers of 'knowledge', the status of the practices involved, problems of conceptualising, articulating and expressing non-verbal and non-logocentric knowledges, the problems of condensation, conflation, and displacement around even such foundational and definitional terms as 'martial arts' itself, and so on.
Any serious approach to 'martial arts' as a complex processual field requires that such matters be noticed and tackled. This is why Farrer and Whalen-Bridge argue that martial arts studies must be organised by a sensitive, self-reflexive and both theoretically and methodologically literate ethos:
To some, this explicit advocation of a theoretical approach to martial arts studies may be received as disappointing or even disturbing. For one complaint against 'theoretical' studies is often that the object of study is somehow lost or transgressed and replaced with a soup of impenetrable jargon. It is often said that in 'cultural theory' approaches to any topic any real concern with the object of study is subordinated to concerns that are 'merely academic'. However, it is possible to argue and to show with a range of different sorts of evidence that this always happens anyway – that no matter what style of scholarship one adopts, the object of study is transformed into something else.
Farrer and Whalen-Bridge themselves give a list of so to speak 'approved' transformations of the object within martial arts studies as they envisage it – namely, a selection of orientating paradigms of martial arts studies: approaches and questions that will produce the 'object' as this or that sort of thing:
One might ask, are there other sorts of approach to martial arts studies, approaches that might not transform them away from themselves? Or, if such transformation is inevitable, are there other approaches that might deal with and 'reveal' martial arts still otherwise? These questions require further unpacking.
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