Martial Arts Studies [and] Disciplinary Decisions
1. From Disciplinary Demarcation to Disciplinary Myopia
A recent article, 'Exploring Embodiment through Martial Arts and Combat Sports: A Review of Empirical Research' (Channon and Jennings 2014), gives an overview of work published in the field of what the authors configure as 'martial arts and combat sports' (MACS). The article purports to give a review of the breadth of research in the field(s), but it also claims that the authors cannot – and do not intend to – attempt to review everything published in the realms of academic work on martial arts in English. As they note, there is no distinct database for logging or retrieving research in martial arts and combat sports research, and works in the field of martial arts and combat studies are not necessarily telegraphically signposted as being such, so they had to rely on a range of search methods, which essentially boil down to a double pronged methodology of doing their best and asking around.
At the same time as embracing incompleteness by acknowledging that they cannot be expected to find everything relevant, the authors also make two further gestures. These are represented as attempts to delineate and demarcate the field, but they also amount to exclusionary gestures. The first gesture acknowledges their deliberate decision vis-à-vis what to exclude, and why. Thus, they mention the range of fields they have not ventured into at all. The second gesture is hierarchizing: they say they focus only on texts that they deem to be most important or significant. In their words:
Our framework is not without limitations; the boundaries between these topical themes are in fact blurred in the reality of the social practice of MACS, while several other categories might have been instructive and may have seen the inclusion of other notable studies. Nevertheless, we focused on works which we felt were the most significant and instructive to issues pertaining to practitioners' embodiment, a key topic within the sociology of sport and cognate disciplines. For example, we omitted a large body of writing on MACS films, typically composed by media scholars (with the majority of studies analysing the representation rather than the action and experience of the body), and did not account for a large number of psychological studies of MACS. Finally, we have focused on works available in English, which limits the scope of our analysis, thereby inviting future contributions of this type from multi-lingual researchers around the world. (Channon and Jennings 2014: 15)
They also draw some inclusionary/exclusionary lines that appear to be somewhat less immediately intelligible. That is, they draw distinctions that are not obvious distinctions between disciplines – such as, say, empirical sociological work on embodiment might be clearly demarcated from film studies work focusing on embodiment. Rather, these other distinctions that they draw are distinctions between different kinds of sociological/empirical work:
From the outset, it must be clearly stated that this review is concerned with work on embodiment, which we define as research centred on the living, moving and feeling social experiences of human beings. This approach is different to the sociology of the body, for instance, which primarily sets out to explore and test social theory as applied to the body (Channon and Jennings 2014: 3)
Now, whilst such directness about selection processes is all part of good academic form, and registers an important awareness of disciplinary orientation as constitutive of what is seen and done, there are nonetheless some significant problems involved in such taxonomical labours as these. These problems include but are not limited to those caused by their decision to effectively elevate a kind of disciplinary myopia to the status of a disciplinary virtue.
Ben Judkins has recently zoned in on what I am characterising as the principled disciplinary myopia at work here. As Judkins writes, in response to the authors' list of (supposedly) under-researched areas that are (supposedly) lacking and calling out for further work:
My first reaction was to note that many of the items that the authors wished to see discussed had been addressed (sometimes quite well) in the various chapters of Farrer and Whalen-Bridge's 2011 volume Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011). Given that this is a recent university press volume dedicated exclusively to [the] authors' topic of interest, one would have expected it to play an important role in this review. It did not. Aside from a single cursory mention in their introduction, neither this volume nor the studies offered by its authors are ever mentioned.
Channon and Jennings are admirably upfront about what they are excluding and why. This is actually somewhat refreshing as not all literature reviews are. Specifically, they state that they have sought to restrict their work to empirical studies of the actual embodied experiences of martial artists and as a result they decided to exclude the more 'interpretive' and 'critical' contributions of cultural theorists and media scholars.
The crux of the issue is that Farrer and Whalen-Bridge (who have done as much old-school ethnographic research as anyone else in field) argue that this division is artificial and hard to maintain. In fact, their work was a conscious attempt to bridge this divide. So in excluding these arguments Channon and Jennings were not simply following the obvious and unquestioned contours of the field. They were in effect advancing their own argument about the proper shape of the literature and what constitutes research 'worthy' of engagement.
In some ways the picture of martial studies that Channon and Jennings paint is remarkably interdisciplinary. Ethnographic and sociological studies sit comfortably next to discussions of what role martial arts instruction should play in the development of grade school physical education curriculum. [But] while they have shown themselves willing to reach across disciplinary lines, their approach to theory seems a bit more conservative. (Judkins 2014)
To this astute assessment I would add the following. Channon and Jennings' approach is, in a sense, not simply their own – even if it is indeed 'not simply following the obvious and unquestioned contours of the field'. Rather, their article is their own performative interpretation of how to carry out a proper review of proper empirical work. Their approach ultimately reflects what might be called their disciplinary decision. The relative success or failure of their attempt to live up to the disciplinary protocols that they are valuing here is of less interest to me than a reflection on those implicit protocols themselves.
2. Taxonomical Apartheid
On this showing, it seems that the disciplinary protocols being valued involve what I would propose to call a constitutive drive to 'taxonomical apartheid'. That is: they want to put everything in its proper place. Everything must be ordered and hierarchized. Moreover, they want to exclude anything improper from visibility or presence within the field itself. Such is the orientation of a great deal of social science.
However, what is evinced in various ways is that the drive to taxonomical apartheid is met by a kind of 'impossibility'. The categories can never be pure and truly separate. In this article, then, much of what they seek and claim to exclude – because that's not what they are looking at or looking for – is included anyway. This actual inclusion of the avowed exclusion occurs for lots of reasons. One is because 'the empirical' is always both theoretically and methodologically defined. Empirical work is carried out according to theorised parameters (exclusions), and methodologies are the performative elaboration of theoretical frameworks. Moreover, even empirical work seeks to be 'interpretive' and/or 'critical'. (Channon and Jennings themselves call for future research to look into various 'political' matters, for instance – and every determination of every conceivable political field cannot exclude the theoretical, hermeneutic and interpretive.)[i]
Passages such as the following are populated with works that are not only supplemented by theoretical conceptions but that are far from simply empirical in any understanding of the term:
While other research has explored various phenomena linked to the effects of culture on the body, such as Kohn's studies of identity formation and corporeal discipline in Aikido practice, perhaps the most prevalent themes in this area have concerned the transmission and transformation of the 'original' cultural meanings of today's 'globalised' MACS, which forms the second principle research area on body cultures. Beginning with Back and Kim's largely theoretical discussion of the changing nature of Eastern martial arts in the Western (and particularly North American) world during the late 20th century, several authors have investigated how such arts, when disembedded from their 'home' settings, have been appropriated and altered by practitioners in different nations. For example, Krug considered the changes in Okinawan Karate following its integration into American body culture; Assunção explored the development of Capoeira from African tribal arts to today's global, cosmopolitan, Brazilian phenomenon; and Ryan explored the hybridisation of Taijiquan upon its introduction to Britain. (Channon and Jennings 2014: 6)
The key point I want to draw out of all of this here relates to the performance of disciplinarity. As Judkins puts it: 'The basic issue comes down to how the authors have defined the scope of the relevant literature, and in a more subtle way, what they have implied about the boundaries of the field'. Even something as apparently innocuous as a literature review involves 'an either implicit or explicit assessment of what "good work" looks like and where exactly the boundaries of the disciplinary conversation [lie]'. This is why 'it is just as important to consider what has been excluded from the conversation as what has been included' (Judkins 2014).
Judkins goes on to refute the necessity or even validity of many of the operative distinctions that Channon and Jennings use – or claim to use – to structure their review. On the one hand he deconstructs their taxonomies (revealing their reasonable-sounding distinctions to have a strangely impossible status), and on the other hand he points to the massive blindness and omissions that their disciplinary myopia produces:
After all, there already seem to be a number of interesting studies on the role of the mass media in promoting certain views of gender, violence and ethnicity in the martial arts. And it is not hard to point to studies on the experience of the martial arts in multicultural societies. I have reviewed a number of them here at Kung Fu Tea. So what exactly is going on here? (Judkins 2014)
There are two main books that Judkins cannot believe Channon and Jennings could have omitted. One is Farrer and Whalen-Bridge's recent collection Martial Arts As Embodied Knowledge (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011). The other is Adam Frank's Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity through Martial Arts (Frank 2006). Ironically, they mention Frank's PhD thesis (in footnote 26), a work from which his monograph is most likely derived and developed. But, given this, it makes the omission of his subsequent monograph all the more peculiar.
3. Disciplinary Decisions
If Channon and Jennings make a mistake that is larger or other than omitting work that is worthy of inclusion within their literature review, I think that it boils down to a mistake of the order of a disciplinary decision. To be fair to them, they do make modest claims for their ambitions, and they do acknowledge that they could have made different decisions. But it should be clear by now that both Judkins and I believe that they should have moved beyond making acknowledgements about limitations, and into the realm of overcoming some of them by making different disciplinary decisions and taking different steps.
Again, it is ironic, in this light, that Channon and Jennings omit Adam Frank's book Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity through Martial Arts (Frank 2006). This is not least because Frank begins the book with a reflection on theoretical, methodological and disciplinary choices, one that Channon and Jennings could do worse than to heed. Frank writes:
This book attempts to contribute to the development of phenomenological ethnography by focusing on the twilight zone where theory meets methodology, taking a kind of quantum approach to culture that considers the contributions that Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, and poststructuralism have made to our attempt to understand who we are as individuals versus who we are in social context. At the same time, I make a modest effort to move beyond ideology-centered frameworks. The postmodernist moment in anthropology began quasi-officially in 1986 with the publication of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986), a book that had the positive effect of demanding that anthropologists reflect upon their positionality in the writing of ethnography – in effect, that they treat ethnography as literature. This book opened a space for subaltern perspectives to move from the fringes to the center and, as Katz and Csordas (2003) note, created room for phenomenological ethnography. After Writing Culture, 'culture' as a given, useful concept for anthropologists ceased to exist for a time, and dire predictions arose as to the imminent demise of the discipline. Well into the 1990s and early 2000s, this situation had the effect of creating a contentious atmosphere in which the various isms competed with one another in journals and within departments. It was not merely a fight between the old and the new, but also a fight between contending pictures of the new. One largely unsatisfactory response to this state of affairs has been to pretend that those irritating isms never happened at all and return instead to a kind of modified, anachronistic empiricism. (Frank 2006: 14-15)
This reflection on the history of a key disciplinary antagonism indicates the kinds of convulsions, reactions, and reformations that can take place in disciplinary contexts when paradigm revolutions erupt. (Moreover, it is clear that the last sentence of the quoted paragraph could be applied to a characterisation of the article of Channon and Jennings.)
Frank continues:
The book is partly an outgrowth of my dissatisfaction with both the narrowness of the isms and the wholesale rejection of them that seems more attached to conservative victories in the culture wars than to the search for understanding that is still anthropology's disciplinary hallmark. Nor was I satisfied with unqualified deconstruction, the 'I have no position' position, which, I believe, has grown out of narrow interpretations of French poststructuralists such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan.
Uncritical, absolute or knee-jerk reflex extremes of position are equally to be avoided in the 'search for understanding', of whatever kind. Ultimately then, writes Frank:
My response is a modest proposal for reconstitution, an approach that asks us not just to acknowledge multiple perspectives but also to apply these perspectives at appropriate moments to appropriate situations, then reconstitute them into an interpretation of sorts. My hope is that the method of understanding a particular practice in terms of constant shifts between multiple levels of analysis – in this case, in terms of the intersubjectivity of body, city, nation-state, imagination, and transnation – is applicable beyond the current work. (15)
In this way, Frank proposes methodological sophistication, responsiveness and even a kind of dilatoriness – with focus expanding and contracting, going forward, backward, in and out, depending on the nature of the question and phenomenon under consideration. Indeed, Frank's methodological frames mirror, mimic, derive from and replay aspects of his object of study itself, taijiquan. In fact, he deliberately chooses to construct a theoretical, analytical, methodological and conceptual framework out of a thinking through of the 'logic' of the tai chi symbol – the yin/yang or taiji tu. As he states, his 'fundamental proposition can be expressed in two words: identity moves' (Frank 2006: 4). However, 'the interaction of the self with the world might be modeled as an ever-changing, yet changeless, process' (18) – exactly like the logic of the taiji tu or yin/yang.
From this subtle taiji-like paradigm, Frank is able to develop a work in which 'martial arts, as conduits for the mutually constitutive construction and experience of identity', are shown to 'move transnationally through people, media, kung fu movies, novels, and martial arts tournaments', and he is able to explore 'how they function both personally and socially in the very different contexts of urban China and the global diaspora of Chinese people and public culture' (Frank 2006: 4).
There is an awful lot more to be said about Frank's paradigm, and its significance for the development of martial arts studies. But, first and last, the differences between the approaches of Channon and Jennings, on the one hand, and Adam Frank, on the other, can be taken to illustrate the extent to which disciplinary approach is both a decision and an imposition, a reflection of a prior order, and the constitution of a new one.
References
Channon, Alex, and George Jennings (2014). "Exploring Embodiment through Martial Arts and Combat Sports: A Review of Empirical Research." Sport in Society no. Authors' Accepted Manuscript doi: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17430437.2014.882906.
[i] 'In addition, we consider several substantive issues to be particularly conspicuous in their absence from the literature. Firstly, research has rarely focused on martial artistry and sexualities, and given recent attention among wider sociology of sport scholarship to the interplay of sport, the body and sexuality, this is a pertinent area for further investigation. Secondly, participants' positioning within philosophical frameworks stressing self-defence, cultural tradition, and/or competitive fighting need to be comparatively examined in order to present an up-to-date view of the social significance and meanings of various MACS, which will also inform investigations of their pedagogical purposes and usefulness for physical education curricula. Thirdly, as MACS are (re)invented and 'lost' throughout the world, this brings with it plenty of scope for contemporary research on the impact of institutions and social forces (such as globalisation) on the body cultures represented by distinctive, transforming and hybridising martial disciplines.
Due to the complexity of such issues, various methodological and theoretical strategies may be required. In addition to well-established methods such as ethnography, interviewing, or documentary analysis, methods such as examining online forums, netographies and (auto)biographies of teacher-practitioners may be useful to explore online articulations of martial cultures within mass media and broader fan bases,91 and how these relate to the experiences of practitioners themselves.
Finally, we would assert that more explicit engagements with political and policy issues may be useful as scholars attempt to draw links between the specific, highly abstract worlds of MACS philosophy and practice, with the more tangible realm of policy interventions and recommendations' (15-16).
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