Preschool in Three Cultures: A Method for Martial Arts Studies

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“They don’t want to know.”

The ancient Greek story, “Casandra” is about a woman laden with the curse to see the (dark) future, and yet also cursed to have no one believe her. Perhaps we should extend this myth for modern times. Like the situation where people have access to knowledge but simply do not want to look at it? Or the curse of being surrounded by people with blindspots who simply cannot see what you see?

The notion of cognitive bias is spreading mostly as a tool for seeing other people’s limitations, rather than our own.

Marshall McLuhan popularized the notion of culture shock in the 1970s. It has two parts 1) recognizing that behavior in another culture is inexplicable or incomprehensible (or at least extremely different) 2) seeing your own culture for the first time. These two experiences were once the primary drivers of anthropology.

Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China and the United States
By Joseph J. Tobin, David Y.H. Wu, Dana H. Davidson

Preschool in Three Cultures is the name of a book and a video study that was done in 1989. It remains the best cross-cultural study ever done. Why? Because no one has bothered to repeat it or extend it. It is fantastic because it does both jobs. It reveals insights into how cultures are different and reveals what we could not previously see about ourselves.

The authors invented a method called: Video Cued Multivocal Ethnography. This allowed them to compare cultures in a systematic way, self-referential within each culture, and between cultures. Brilliant. Now, of course, almost nobody cares about preschool. The disaster of academia is that the study itself is viewed, even by its authors, as being about preschool. This is absurd. The book is barely even about education. It is about cultural blindspots and how to get around them.

Why hasn’t it been replicated for other areas? For example, we could use the same method to study “motherhood,” or “what is a fish,” or “dreaming,” or chairs, dinner, flexibility, the shoulder, farming.” The subject does not even have to be a coherent category in all three+ cultures for it to work.

My guess is that it has not been replicated because people unconsciously resist knowing anything about their unconscious mind. And culture itself looking inwards, is always about the unconscious mind.

Preschool in Three Cultures had a big influence on both of my books. My first book attempted to look at Chinese martial arts from three points of view: theater, martial skills, and religion. My second book uses my experience of dance and religion in India, America, and China to guide my excavations into the origins of Tai Chi and Baguazhang.

The field of Cultural Psychology was also a big influence on my books. Richard Shweder is the man responsible for the field. It has the same problem. People don’t want to know. Bringing up his work in a university context is the kind of thing that gets you expelled or shunned.

I have a friend who invented a career for herself studying corruption in different cultures. The UN or some other granting organization would fund her to study corruption in a particular country. She would collect data and interviews for a couple of years and then move on to another country. After a decade she was the world expert on corruption. But she quit. Why? Because everyone was sort-of-curious about how corruption works in other countries but had zero (negative) interest in knowing how corruption works in their own country.

Given the current ubiquity of video capturing cellphones, these kinds of studies should be exploding. But I fear the opposite. Cellphones have stolen peoples attention to such an extent in the last two years that they can now travel the world without experiencing other cultures. Pity.


Reversal is the Direction of the Dao

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This is the biggest idea around. I have written several rants about it here before. I deal with it in the last chapter of my new book. It seems completely original. Please let me know if you are aware of anyone else talking about this.

One of the major characteristics of internal martial arts is reversing. It is a type of non-progressive learning. The way it works is that you learn something, you get good at something, and then instead of progressing to the next step or integrating that experience into a previously learned practice, instead, you reverse the practice. You do the reversal. You do the opposite. Sometimes the opposite would be better described as an inversion, backwards, or flipped.

Structuring knowledge around opposites may be the most natural thing in the world. Because learning in some primordial sense is taking the wrong path, retracing your steps and then taking a different path. It is, “Oops I failed at that, I’ll try the reverse next time.” In a competitive martial arts sense, reversing is knowing what the other person is doing so well that you can do it backwards. And not just any backwards, the backwards the creates the illusion in your opponent’s mind that everything is going fine, until it isn’t.

The world of commerce is mainly based on imitating what works. If someone else is doing it, do what they are doing. Combine other people’s successes to create a new success. But commerce is evolutionary because it dies. I dies all the time. It is always failing, even when it is successful, the successes are full of failures which have been overcome. In the commercial realm reversing or doing things backwards, flipped or inverted is pretty common. It is perhaps only a variation of imitation. By the way, this expanded definition of imitation is called mimetic desire, to learn more about that read Rene Girard.

Western education since the industrial revolution has been based on progressive pedagogy and curriculum. I mean this in the structural sense, basic information is laid out as the building blocks of more complex and advanced knowhow. In this model a hierarchy of knowledge is constructed. That’s one of the reasons we have such unequal eduction systems, they are set up as contests. Progressive contests of homogenization.

This type of knowledge organization works well for building things or for repairing well understood technologies. It also works extremely well for operational procedures.

In the world of machines, however, self-taught people learn by taking things apart and putting them back together again. This is called reverse engineering, it used to be called tinkering. It is also a characteristic of inventors.

If you want to take notice of how generous and goodnatured people are, start watching ‘how to’ videos. These so called “knack” videos are full of people who want to help solve problems and encourage creativity.

But I caution the world. It looks like we are creating unlimited opportunities for self-teaching, but are we? There are two problems.

The first is that progressive procedural knowhow will solve one problem but fails to communicate the kind of problem solving skills which are characteristic of immersive environments. For example, I fixed both my home gas heater and my electric clothes dryer using videos I found online. Now because I fixed two objects which are somewhat related, I learned that they both have three different types of heat sensors. And that heat sensors are a type of fuse designed to shut down your machines. But because this knowledge came to me through procedural videos, I still do not know how to repair either of these machines in general, much less how I might build one. That’s the first problem and it applies equally to martial arts and healing, by the way.

The second problem is true for all self-learning, it does not come with a badge or a certificate. To be an expert at something you need to be able to convince people that you are an expert. That skill may not overlap with the knowledge base itself.

What are the other possibilities? One way to do things is to create two or more progressive tracks for the same thing, but organized in different progressions. This encourages learners to learn by thinking outside of the track they are in, and by comparing tracks rather than thinking ahead (the compulsion to ‘get it right’) or passively waiting for the next lesson.

I know about this approach because I accidentally did it for myself by what I am now calling Cross-cultural Training, that is, training similar things but from different cultures. My readers know that I intensively studied dance, drumming, and martial arts from several different cultures simultaneously. Often found myself reverse engineering simply because the process gave me a bigger view of what was there.

For example, whole body unity is a pre-requisite for many African dances, whereas in Chinese martial arts it is something that comes only from years of practice.

In the Asian cultures where I have studied, knowledge is sometimes presented as a perfect model. This is an exquisite method for transmitting precise knowledge which remains unchanged across generations. In this method, a master work is presented to the beginning student to copy and copy and copy until they can replicated it flawlessly. This also allows for secret knowledge to go untransmitted, which is either a feature or a bug depending on your point of view. This is very common in martial arts, but my favorite example is from tabla drumming. My teacher, who is world class, taught us a composition he plays as a solo in concert. It required enormous amounts of memorization. I can play that master composition, but it is still too advanced for me, I sound better playing simpler stuff. But it does give the student an eagle eye view. They can see all the layers of knowledge intertwined into an exquisite whole.

The ‘perfect model’ style of teaching weeds out the untalented, and those who are talented but lack discipline. These two tasks are less important in egalitarian cultures like our own, but are crucial in cultures where who-your-father-is determines what type of knowhow you are allowed or encouraged to acquire.


Martial Arts Math

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Math and Martial Arts have a long and bazaar history. Basically people just make up connections because it helps them think or organize information in the kinesthetic realm. Let's call it situationally useful junk. In this video I blow the lid off of this practice by making mathematical concepts come alive in an overview of martial skills leading to the donut of complete emptiness and timelessness.

The Golden Elixir, Identity and the Martial Arts

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Scott Park Phillips discusses Daoist golden elixir theory and practice as they relate to martial arts, emotional transformation and identity. Tai Chi, Baguazhang and The Golden Elixir: Internal Martial Arts Before the Boxer Uprising --- https://amzn.to/3112dPh https://patreon.com/ScottParkPhillips http://northstarmartialarts.com/

Can You Compare Cultures Somatically?

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If you learn an art or a skill in one culture and then study it, or something similar, in another culture you might not notice how different it is. Comparing somatic (felt/kinesthetic) experiences across multiple cultures can give big insights into what is different or, on the other hand, what might be Universal. 

Let’s look at rhythm and its relationship to Dance-Martial-Arts. 

I first learned Modern Dance in the Western tradition and then Classical Ballet. Of course I grew up in multi-ethnic San Francisco and  already knew how to dance to popular music and a few Western folk dances. 

In Modern dance you are taught to count, the early modern dancers used hand-drums and beat out 3s, 4s, 5s, and 7s with various accents. The Dances followed the precision of the drum. 

A ballet pianist is told what to play by the teacher, the music is set. Sometimes the teacher will tell the pianist to accent the music in a particular way so that the dancers will match it. 

In African music the dancer is one among several poly-rhythms that fit together in a particular composition. When it works, you cannot tell who is leading, all the rhythms pull against each other to create a dynamic whole that fits perfectly together. It is a definite feeling. One drummer usually plays the dance accents and syncopations, and also the “calls” to change dance patterns. If the dancer is not fitting correctly into the rhythm, the drummer won’t play the accents. It is a weird feeling, an absence or a separation.

The subtext of what I am talking about here is authenticity. It can be faked. And in the era of Youtube it often is. …..
The rest of this post is available on Patreon for $10 a month, I am currently experimenting with making a living.