Martial Arts in the Modern World (Part 3)

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the third of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

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Yamada Shoji's, "The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery," is a hilarious romp.  The German guy, Eugen Herrigel, who wrote the book, Zen and The Art of Archery, was so enthusiastic about Zen that he projected Zen into his study of Archery.  In Japan, Zen wasn't associated with Archery until Herrigel's  book was translated into Japanese.  The confusion is also do to the fact that the particular Archery teacher Herrigel hooked up with (Kenzo Awa) was more than a little eccentric, he had gone through a personal mystical enlightenment experience while practicing alone at night in which his "self" exploded into tiny grains of dust.  But even so Shoji suggests that most likely the connection of Archery to Zen was the result of mis-translations, like one that happened when Awa accidental split one of his own arrows in the center of the target while shooting at night in the dark.  In Japan, splitting an arrow is very bad form because you are damaging your equipment.  Awa probably said something like, "Whoops, accidents happen," and Herrigel took that to mean something like, "Actions happen of their own accord, this is do to Buddha Nature."

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The next essay by Stanley E. Henning is titled, "The Martial Arts in Chinese Physical Culture, 1865-1965." It's a sort of journalistic survey of other works which is biased by a sort of 1970's Taiwanese Nationalism.  Here, "martial arts" gets reductively defined as utilitarian combat skills.  Not coincidentally, all he has to offer about martial arts prior to 1900 are accounts of sensational violence from what must have been a kind of tabloid entertainment rag (think: 'Baby Born With Three Heads!').  There is a parallel here between this approach and the approach of Daoist experts (1950-1990) who went around saying that Daoism is a philosophical way of life and not a religion, dismissing actual Daoists as superstitious and ill-informed villagers who perform silly rituals.  Henning's references to historical works about how Nationalists and Communists have influenced the development and perception of martial arts are excellent.  Anyone not already familiar with this material will certainly benefit from that aspect of this article. (Also see my review of Andrew D. Morris's Marrow of the Nation, of Qigong Fever, or here for a discussion of Lineages.)  But Henning's reductionist definition of martial arts can no longer be taken seriously.  To dismiss religious, ritual, and theatrical origins of martial arts as some form of failure, or deficiency, or superstition, or side track, or degradation from a past purity, is nothing less than cant.

Martial Arts in the Modern World (Part Two)

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the second of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

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Svinth and Green's "The Circle and the Octagon:  Maeda's Judo and Gracie's Jiu-Jitsu," traces the interaction between Judo players and Wrestling in the early 20th Century.  Maeda Misuyo made the leap from Judo to competitive wrestling, starting in America, and then in England, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and finally Brazil.  But competitive wrestling has the problem that it is either over in a few seconds, or it lasts for hours with little action.  So most of the wrestling involved slap stick and elaborate back stories and costumes.  He was a huge star, especially in Mexico and Cuba.  In Brazil he was part of a circus show, where he met the Gracie brothers who were also in the circus.  He taught them Judo and the rest is history.  In summary, neener, neener, neener, MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) comes from the circus and is a kissing cousin of WWE.

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Graham Noble's "The Lion of the Punjab:  Gama in England, 1910," tells the story of an extraordinary South Asian Wrestler named Gama who traveled with two other top wrestlers to the heart of the British Empire to claim the title of the world's greatest wrestler.  Do to the fact that most of the pro-wrestlers were performance artists with superb slap-stick skills, he had a terrible time getting anyone to allow themselves to be smacked down for real. As an American reading the story I was cheering for him to humiliate a few of the old Colonials.  But the expression 'chicken' is too good for them.  Finally a sympathetic American was recruited from New York to fight him and was soundly defeated.  They found a guy from Poland to fight him too.  Gama and his crew, after 6 months of waiting, returned home having had only a handful of fights.  The account of his rise in India, his insane workouts, and his drive to succeed, are inspirational.  A timeless tale of human achievement, stuck in a strange moment in time.

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Thomas A. Green has two essays on African martial arts, "Surviving the Middle Passage: Traditional African Martial Arts in the Americas," and, "Freeing the Afrikan Mind: The Role of Martial Arts in Contemporary African American Cultural Nationalism."  Green must get credit for publishing first on these extremely interesting topics.  Unfortunately I already devoured TJ DESCH-OBI's, Fighting for Honor (2008), which I loved and reviewed here.  Obi's notion of honor makes these essays somewhat out of date and goes a long way toward explaining the unique forms of African Nationalist martial arts Green describes in Freeing the Afrikan Mind.

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James Halpin's "The Little Dragon:  Bruce Lee (1940-1973)," is the best succinct history of Bruce Lee I've ever read.  His father was a comic opera star, which is really where he got his chops.  He was a rich kid that wanted street cred, so he trained at the Wing-tsun school and got involved in illegal competitive roof top fights.  He got busted and in court his mom asked the judge if she could send him out of the country instead of to jail, and that's how he ended up in the United States.   His ex-girlfriend said he had the maturity of a 12 year old.  He gave amazing lecture demos, published a book on the philosophy of martial arts, and wrote the original screenplay for the Kung Fu television series.  Lee was an awesome egomaniac who transfixed a generation and propelled the martial performing arts of China into an international sensation.  He died from an allergic reaction to a large Aspirin.  The essay covers a lot of territory, and draws on many sources.

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to be continued....

Martial Arts in the Modern World

A number of new scholarly books on martial arts have come across my desk in the last month.  This field is in its infancy and I am exited to be part of the project of defining and inspiring it.  In that spirit, there is much in these works to praise, much to criticize, a yawn here and there, and a few things that need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

So this is the first of a series in which I will discuss individual essays within larger works.  The following essays are from a collection edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth titled, Martial Arts in the Modern World (Praeger, 2003).

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In "Sense and Nonsense:  The Role of Folk History in the Martial Arts," Thomas A. Green notes that most lineage histories and biographies appear to be false, yet they serve important social functions which should be explored.  He also points out that many stories from different schools concerning different teachers are essentially the same story.  I like his take on the problem.  But I would add this; unless and until we achieve widespread acknowledgement of the theatrical roots of these arts we will be forced to physically flip-flop between telling our lineage histories as social glue, as educational flux and as inspirational catalyst on the front end, and transmitting our knowledge of history and how the world actually works on the back end.  The reason we as martial artists tend to be contorted over lineage histories stems from a failure to adequately place those histories within social and intellectual movements.

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Joseph R. Svinth's "Professor Yamashita Goes to Washington," is a superb history of the first people to teach Judo in the United States.  The highlight of this account is that Theodore Roosevelt studied Judo at the White House! Over the years the President demonstrated his throwing and flipping skills on many a hearty visitor to the Oval Office Dojo.  While Roosevelt felt that after a period of months he had at least managed to throw Professor Yamashita convincingly, the Professor gave a slightly different account,  "According to a journalist named Joseph Clarke, Yamashita said that while Roosevelt was his best pupil, he was also 'very heavy and very impetuous, and it had cost the poor professor many bruising, much worry and infinite pains during Theodore's rushes, to avoid laming the President of the United States.'"  It's a brilliant and fun read.

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To be continued...

Surprise - The World Has Discovered that Kungfu is Good for Film

The misconception that Kungfu at some point in the past was purely and exclusively a fighting art is so wide spread that the Wall Street Journal is reporting AS NEWS that Kungfu is actually good for actors, and film making.  The article suggests that the technology of Chinese Martial Arts is being adopted or adapted to fulfill an urgent need world wide!  That need?  Better action in the movies!  More action too!

Maybe I'll write a letter to the WSJ explaining that before 1900 the dominant form of entertainment in China was a form of performance theater that used Kungfu to train its actors.  Perhaps I could also explain that in the old days it was through theater that most people got their knowledge of history.  Or even that this form of theater was commonly called "Entertaining the Gods" because statues of the gods were carried out of the temples on palanquins and set up in front of the stage.  And that it was all a huge money making event, often times with seasonal markets popping up around the main event.  And if I really wanted to go out on a limb with this letter I could point out that this "experience" was probably the dominant form of public communal religious expression. Or maybe I'll just go out and get hot chocolate instead.

Do read the article, it's fun.  Since it mentions the new Shaolin movie, I do have a comment.  I wrote out a wild rant about that terrible movie a month or two ago which I decided not to post, for now anyway.  But I will say this.  Enough about foreigners stealing antiquities already!  White guys with big noses did not destroy Shaolin!  Not now, not then, not in any way shape or form. And I'm thinking Jackie Chan owes me an apology.  Why does the Official Chinese Government Movie Script Contortion Department think it can get away with this?

Oh never mind.  Here, clear your mind with this stimulating big of fun!

Some Cool Images Of Soldiers and Such

Click for originals and bigger size.

Mongol Ship Found in Japan

No way!
Wreck of 13th century Mongol invasion ship discovered

Here is more on the Archeology

History of Boxing

This article wet my appetite for a thorough cultural history of competitive fighting.

Boxing’s beginnings in America go back to slave days, when plantation owners pitted slaves against one another and wagered on the outcomes. One freed slave, Tom Molineaux, even fought overseas against the British champion, Tom Cribb—and probably would have won their 1810 match, had Cribb’s desperate supporters not intervened just as Molineaux seized a decisive advantage. Boxing then was conducted with bare fists, under the old London Prize Ring Rules, which stipulated fights to the finish—that is, until one man could not continue. The rules also permitted wrestling holds and other tactics, and rounds ended only with “falls,” when one man went down, whether from a punch or a throw or sheer exhaustion. Before the Civil War, boxing enjoyed a brief vogue in New York, where fighters often associated with the Tammany Hall machine rose to prominence. But the war interrupted the sport’s momentum.

African Martial Arts

The following is a review of Fighting for Honor, The history of African Martial Arts Traditions in the Atlantic World, by T. J. Desch Obi.
The book breaks a lot of new scholarly ground, it really challenged me to think about culture and history in new ways.  It’s not light reading.
Obi begins with a Japanese definition of Marital arts as an exacting movement transmission of routines, movement qualities, and techniques which are taught generation to generation and which are used to instill ethics.  African martial arts and dance generally meet this definition.
He then goes into a detailed history of several different peoples from Central and West Africa and explains the cultural origins of their specific martial arts traditions.  The details are fascinating.  For instance Kandeka boys of Angola were taught to slap fight from early childhood.  By 6 or 7 they were left with older boys in charge of young calves, while the women went off to farm and the men took the full grown cows and bulls to distant grazing areas.  The boys learned to socially dominate the calves using head butts, and by the time they were adults they would have complete control of the herds by this method.  He later explains that this extraordinary skill becomes the preferred method of execution used by Capoeirista secret slave societies (bonded communities?) in Brazil.
The Kandeka boys also learned stick fighting.  They would begin with leaf covered branches to slow the fight down, as the leaves fell off, the fight would become faster.  As skill in avoiding injury developed the sticks would get thicker.  Adult men would carry these sticks or clubs in their belts at all times and were experts at throwing them as well.
This same group, made extensive use of inverted kicking in puberty rituals, in duels and other contexts.  He makes a very good case that this is the origin of Capoeira’s most distinctive fighting techniques.
In discussing the history of Nigeria, he explains that secret societies played a key roll in maintaining order and regulating violence.  Knowledge of wrestling and head butting was very widespread in the form of competitive games, it was used for settling disputes of honor.  There were also some extraordinary defense oriented groups on the border regions who made taking a head in battle a prerequisite of adulthood, which Obi contrasts with the interior groups who had strong rules against bloodshed.

The second part of the book deals with North America.  Obi did extensive research and fieldwork in South Carolina, and he sheds new light on the Seminole/Gullah Wars.  I loved this part of the book.  He succeeded in reframing North American slavery in my mind.  I really didn’t know that the Gullah fought a 50 year war, set up a strong hold in Mexico and after the Civil War were invited to join the US Cavalry as “the Buffalo Soldiers” made world famous by Bob Marley.  I certainly didn’t know that they used a style of inverted high kicking!
There is so much in this book to think about.  Obi, after months of trying to find African Martial Artists in South Carolina, and being told that nothing of the sort exists, is finally excepted as a student by the first person he had originally asked.  The fact that he was Nigerian and already knew a style of competitive leg wrestling did eventually help him break in to the secret society.  He was told that his (Nigerian) style of wrestling had been very popular a generation ago, with many champions the locals could name, but at the same time it was totally secret.  If you weren’t an insider, you didn’t know about it, you couldn’t know about.
The third part of the book deals with Francophone parts of the Caribbean, and the forth part of the book deals with Brazil.  There are tons of cool details here, like his discussion of folding blades held with the toes.
Obi raises three striking controversies.  The first is a challenge to the Albion Seed Theory.  The second is a challenge to the notion that slaves weren’t able or allowed to fight.  And the third is that the martial traditions of honor and secret societies allowed Africans in the Americas to maintain their martial arts traditions through dance, ritual, and games.
There are two main theories of cultural development in the United States.  The first is the melting pot theory which holds that we are a mix of a bunch of different cultures.  The other is the Albion Seed theory which holds that there are four primary folkways which all come from England and which have been totally dominant in determining American values and behavior.  Long time readers know that I’m a fan of the Albion Seed theory (given that name by it’s primary proponent David Hackett Fischer).  Obi challenges Fischer’s scholarship of fighting traditions.  First he says that boxing was a much later development, and didn’t exist in early America.  Second he says that “gouging” was the primary fighting style of the English who came here.  That is not a big departure from Fischer’s “rough and tumble rasseling,” they are essentially talking about the same art. But Obi asserts that its primary characteristic was eye “gouging” and that it usually went by that name.  The friendlier style of stand up grappling, “catch as catch can” was also prominent.  This is very important because it leads to Obi’s assertion that African-Americans had unique ways of fighting.  At the meta level, he seems to be a supporter of the Albion Seed approach, namely that there are a few base cultural folkways which dominate over the centuries.  However, he argues that there are clearly a few African cultures which have remained stable cultural influences to this day.
African Americans continued to train slap fighting, as anyone who went to an urban public school in the U.S. like I did, can attest.  They also practiced “knocking” or head butting, kicking and distinctive styles of wrestling.  The knocking is particularly interesting.  The history of American Football is nearly always described as a development of the Ivy League schools.  But it seems fair to ask why the American version of Football/Rugby developed with direct head to head smashing and no other Euro-origin country has developed anything like it.  Obi gives examples of African American Sailors sharing the art of head butting as both a martial art and a form of entertainment.  Obi does not come out and say this, but I will.  Football has some African Cultural roots.
Okay, did bonded people fight?  Obi is utterly convincing on this account.  They did.  It’s true that they were often forbidden to fight under the rules of slavery and there was a death penalty for attacking a white person, but that simply didn’t stop them.  They fought each other a lot, and they fought whites too and sometimes got away with it, particularly because whites would have been embarrassed to admit they weren’t in control and because slaves were valuable so there was a strong impetus to try and resolve problems.
African-Americans maintained their culture through secret societies and what Obi calls Tricknology!  That is, the art and culture of hiding your culture, of subsuming it, obscuring it, and of pretending it isn’t happening when it actually is.  Celebrations with dance, and singing, are obvious places where this happened, and where ritual and cultural values were passed on.  He argues that fighting culture played a key role in the transmission of culture, but that it was well hidden.
And that leads us to Honor.  Bonded people dealt with the humiliation and loss of autonomy by maintaining a very strong sense of honor.  Fighting style was and still is a key element in the maintenance of this sense of honor.  Who, what, when, where and how a person fights, are all factors which determine a person's honor with in a society.  When you train to fight through dance and play, it has a profound effect on the way you move and interact, the way you make judgements, and the way you make friends.  It forms your world view.

I am deeply appreciative of T. J. Desch Obi for all his research and scholarship.

All of this is very personal for me for numerous reasons including that I studied Congolese Dance with Malonga Casquelourd for about 3 years, about 20 years ago.  I also studied Katherine Dunham’s technique for teaching Haitian Dance for about 4 years around the same time.  It was a very intense training period for learning Chinese Martial Arts too, as I steadily increased the number of hours I was training gongfu from about 3 a day to 6 a day.
Katherine Dunham invited Malonga to come teach in the United States in the early 70’s.  Malonga’s father was a military leader, so he was able to travel around the Congo a lot as a child and learned the dances from many different regions- from soldiers.  Malonga was sent to military officer training in Maoist China in the 1960’s, where of course he learned Mandarin.
Malonga danced with extraordinary martial skill and power.  All of his dance was functional.  He didn’t teach it that way in class, but he freely showed me stuff when we were joking around in the halls.  The spirit of fighting was very real for him and he could turn it on.  Because of my Chinese training, I can still fight with my Congolese dance, they are of course different, but that difference is getting smaller the better I get.  (I plan on doing more videos about this, but for now you can still watch these antiques from 2005 --African Bagua, Part 2.)

It's all Local Now Baby!

Samurai bones are being brought back from the dead...sort of.

Very large numbers of fighters had been beheaded – many almost certainly as a result  of trophy-taking practises by the emperor’s forces. In 14th century Japan, victorious warriors often only received rewards for success in war if they proved their achievements by presenting the decapitated heads of enemy warriors to their leaders.

Decapitated enemy heads thus became a bizarre currency of a military accounting process which rewarded victors only if they could furnish proof of their military accomplishments.

One of the skeletons, looked at in detail by Dr. Wysocki and featured in this Sunday’s Channel 4 documentary, is a probable female samurai. In the 13th and early 14th century, many Japanese women, under the Shogun’s rule, were relatively emancipated, enjoying virtually the same property rights as men, the right to inherit property and were, like men, required to perform military guard duties.

Or maybe like this.

And this is of note, particularly since a new student collapsed from medication in my class on Saturday, we called 911 and took care of him.  He is doing fine now, thank goodness.

The new movie Warrior is excellent.  I'm not linking to the video preview because I think it gives too much away.  Here is all you need to know.  It is emotionally very well composed, better than "Good Will Hunting," of a few years back.  It is the third major film to use a new style of stage combat based on Mixed Martial Arts, the first was the steam bath scene from "Eastern Promises," the second was "Red Belt."  The fight scenes are really good.  I never knew what was going to happen next and was totally engrossed in the ups and downs of winning and losing and doing the right thing.  The theme of the film is fighting for love.

Here comes the Hong Kong film festival this weekend!  Looking to checkout "Mr. and Mrs. Incredible," and "City Under Siege."

The corruption at The San Francisco Unified School District just won't stop.  (Here too.)

Here is some sobering news about China, and a rather dark vision too.

If that is too much for you to take in, this funny culture crash story about Chinese religion should brighten your day.

I've got some great stuff for you on African American martial arts in the next few days but while you're waiting check out this old master!



Oh yeah, and I love this invention!

Block Prints of the Unseen World

I'm going to a lecture on Wednesday at 4 PM, with a slide show by David Johnson the author of Spectacle and Sacrifice, The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China.  He is speaking about the following exhibit.  Check it out.

Speak of Good Things: Nianhua and Chinese Folk Tradition

Exhibit - Artifacts: Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies | June 22 – September 28, 2011 every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday with exceptions | 9 a.m.-5 p.m. |  Institute of East Asian Studies (2223 Fulton, 6th Floor)

And...happy Moon Cake Festival!  Just ate mine.