Martial Arts Studies vs Studies of Martial Arts

In diverse geographical and disciplinary spaces, the phrase 'martial arts studies' is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a new field of scholarly interest and academic activity. Of course, many academic fields already engage with martial arts in their particular ways. But, in the second decade of the 21st century, the term 'martial arts studies' is increasingly being used not only as a designation to refer to and connect work that is already being done in different disciplines, but also as a question. The question might be phrased like this: although there are various sorts of studies of martial arts, is there, or might there be, such a thing as a unique field of martial arts studies?

Forms of martial arts studies exist, in a wide variety of disciplines: in history, anthropology, psychology, area studies, sports studies, sociology, literary studies, peace studies, religious and philosophical studies, media studies and film studies; even political economy and branches of medicine could be said to have versions of martial arts studies. They certainly enable studies of martial arts. But the book I am currently reading will be among the first to engage directly and in a sustained manner with the emergence of 'martial arts studies' as such. It exists and operates in terms of a sharp awareness of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actual and possible approaches to martial arts studies, and it explores the orientations and limitations of existing approaches, in order to clarify the stakes and to make a case for the future directions in which martial arts studies might be elaborated, in order to grow into a unique field.

It does so because at its current stage of emergence and development, 'martial arts studies' requires some work. If martial arts studies is to blossom into a 'field' – a discrete field of academic study – this will not just 'happen', as if naturally. Rather, martial arts studies must be created, and this requires something rather more than simply surveying all of the academic work done on martial arts in the different disciplines, and stringing it together, as if to produce some kind of cauldron of shared knowledge. Academic disciplines don't work like that. This is because different disciplines have very different approaches, even when they are approaching 'the same thing'. Different disciplines are foreign countries: they do things differently there. This is so much so that it is not only their 'approaches' to martial arts that are different, but also their very conceptualisations of 'martial arts'.

Accordingly, this study begins from the proposition that any effort to combine, organise and synthesize the insights of all of the current scholarship on martial arts could not in itself produce a coherent field. It would therefore be wrong at this stage to proceed in the manner of the textbook, the survey or the literature review, by constructing a narrative account of 'martial arts studies scholarship' – an account of all of the work on 'martial arts' carried out all over the sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences, all over the world. This is not the best approach because, for all of their many merits and values as introductions and overviews, textbooks, surveys and literature reviews are arguably obliged to overlook, ignore or downplay the deep disagreements and incompatibilities between paradigms and disciplines. They are also limited in their ability to explore or reflect upon the reasons for disciplinary differences, as well as the significance and implications of such differences.

Engaging with the significance of disciplinary differences requires a different sort of attention. It involves a kind of double-focus. Accordingly, the development of martial arts studies requires a focus not just on 'martial arts' but also on the question of 'studies'. The requirement is to face up to the problems that spring up because of the differences between disciplinary paradigms, or disciplinary worlds, and to understand that looking squarely at these issues could – but should not – lead to two equally unsatisfactory alternatives.

When different disciplines come face to face with each other, sometimes the encounter can yield only mutual distaste. So the first possible outcome of any kind of engagement with disciplinary difference involves fragmentation, or the moving of approaches away from each other. This is underpinned by a sense that, when it comes to differences between two disciplines, 'never the twain shall meet'. This kind of splitting apart is based on disagreements about premises and methodologies, epistemologies, values, investments and orientations, and a closure to what might be called 'the otherness of the other' or 'the difference of the different'. In fact, this type of splitting amounts to little more than a demonstration and a reproduction of disciplinary demarcations.

An alternative outcome of the exposure of two different approaches to each other involves the more or less explicit 'take-over' or 'hegemonization' of one by the other. In this situation, the terms and concepts of both fields may appear to be preserved, but one paradigm will quietly rewrite and reconfigure the meanings and statuses of the terms appropriated or 'incorporated' from the other. This will involve subtle processes of translation and displacements of meaning, but it still amounts to a demonstration of the way disciplines work to preserve and strengthen themselves.

However, if martial arts studies is to amount to a distinct field or a unique development, then it should remain vigilant to the possible consequences of following either of these trajectories. The former would prevent martial arts studies from coalescing at all; the latter would ensure that martial arts studies was always an expression or subsection of an existing discipline; and both of these options would amount to the same thing: that martial arts studies as such would not exist.

In order to work towards a new, unique or discrete mode of existence and operation, then, it is important to be sensitive to the slippery 'logic' of disciplinarity. Of course, some academics, researchers and students interested in the questions of how and why to study martial arts may regard such a double focus as pointlessly or uselessly 'theoretical' and 'merely academic' in the most pejorative and dismissive way. However, as I hope will become increasingly apparent, a focus on the logic of disciplinarity is actually doubly relevant for any study of martial arts, because martial arts themselves are scenes in which the logic of disciplinarity is always in play. Martial arts are disciplines and contested scenes of disciplinarity. Questions of discipline and disciplinarity are either manifestly present and hotly contested, in all kinds of ways, or they are just a scratch below the surface away from flaring up.

Like martial arts themselves, then, martial arts studies must be at once theoretical and practical. All approaches to martial arts rely on a theory – of what to do and how and why. Similarly, martial arts studies cannot but be fundamentally theoretical, even if avowedly interested in matters deemed to be practical. Equally, just as all martial arts – no matter how avowedly 'pure' or 'unique' they may be – are always surely hybrid, so martial arts studies must navigate the fact of its own unique impurity. As I have already suggested, if it ever wants to be more than the sum of the bits and pieces of different disciplines that go into work on martial arts, then it needs to take seriously the question of how its many and varied 'ingredients' could genuinely produce something new and distinct.