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Overview
Martial Arts Studies is the first book to engage directly with these questions. It assesses the multiplicity and heterogeneity of possible approaches to martial arts studies, exploring orientations and limitations of existing approaches. It makes a case for constructing the field of martial arts studies in terms of key coordinates from post-structuralism, cultural studies, media studies, and post-colonialism.
By using these anti-disciplinary approaches to disrupt the approaches of other disciplines, Martial Arts Studies proposes a field that both emerges out of and differs from its many disciplinary locations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783481293 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/09/2015 |
| Series: | Disruptions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 527 KB |
About the Author
He has edited multiple issues of the journal Parallax, plus issues of the journals Postcolonial Studies, Social Semiotics and Educational Philosophy and Theory, as well as regular issues of JOMEC Journal. In addition, he has edited several books: Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), The Truth of Žižek (2006), The Rey Chow Reader (2010), Reading Rancière (2011) and Rancière and Film (2013). He has also authored many academic monographs: Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Culture and the Media (2012), Beyond Bruce Lee (2013) and Reading Rey Chow (2013). His work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Farsi. He is on the editorial board of Culture Machine, Global Discourse, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, The Poster, and Ctrl-Z: New/Media/Philosophy.
Read an Excerpt
Martial Arts Studies
Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries
By Paul Bowman
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Paul BowmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-129-3
CHAPTER 1
Martial Arts Studies as an Academic Field
INTRODUCTION: MARTIAL ARTS STUDIES: DISRUPTING DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES
The subtitle of this book is as important as the main title, if not more so. This is because the book is as much invested in Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries as it is in Martial Arts Studies. What this means is that the book not only offers arguments about martial arts studies in terms of academic disciplines and their boundaries, but it also seeks to enact at least some of the disruption to disciplinary boundaries that it proposes. This gives the book a unique — some may say peculiar — character. It is about martial arts studies in terms of disciplinary boundaries, and it also disrupts certain disciplinary boundaries as a result of the ways it studies martial arts.
All of this may strike some people as odd, eccentric, or excessive. On the one hand, readers interested primarily in martial arts may wonder what kind of a book this is that appears, on first glance, to be about martial arts but that, on second glance, is actually about something called martial arts studies, and that for some reason feels the need to connect this with a project of disrupting disciplinary boundaries. On the other hand, readers who may already be familiar with some of my other works — whether on matters of cultural studies, deconstruction, and theories of intervention and agency (Bowman 2007a, 2008a, 2008b, 2012, 2013b) or on the impact of Bruce Lee on global popular culture (Bowman 2010b, 2013a), for example — may have different kinds of questions. For instance, such readers may notice that the title and subtitle appear to be at war with each other. First, the main title, Martial Arts Studies, seems to propose a (new) discipline or field. But upon the announcement of this, the subtitle immediately stipulates some kind of correlated disrupting of the very thing just proposed, namely disciplinary boundaries. On such a reading, the question would become one of whether the book is about the establishment of a new discipline or the disruption of the very possibility of stable disciplinary boundaries. These are very different kinds of objectives — unless the disruption to disciplinary boundaries is one caused simply by the emergence of another discipline within an already overcrowded academic space. In other words, the questions may be posed like this: Is this about jostling for space, subverting the established allocation of space, or deconstructing the very idea of space?
Although this work does make certain claims and arguments about an emerging academic movement or discourse that has been called 'martial arts studies' (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011a; Liu 2011), both as it is currently emerging and as it might develop, my agenda is not to stake out, map out, and measure a territory (a 'field'), or to presume to make decisions about what is inside and what is outside or what is good and what is bad 'martial arts studies'. Rather, my agenda is to argue that the self-conscious elaboration of such a field that is currently taking place should proceed in full awareness of the stakes and critical potentials of such elaboration and construction. Martial arts studies need neither rely on nor 'be like' the disciplines and fields from which it is currently emerging. Its objects, topics, foci, and problematics, its approaches, methodologies, and ways of writing and discoursing, need neither mimic nor be beholden to the practices and protocols of other disciplines and fields. Rather, the objects of martial arts studies, the foci, the questions, and relations into which its studies engage may be constructed in ways that disrupt and reconfigure the fields from which martial arts studies emerged. As such, martial arts studies could constitute an intervention into more than its own space, an intervention that challenges established norms and proprieties in a range of fields. This may seem inconsequential, but in the pages and chapters that follow, I hope to demonstrate some of the ways in which academic discourses are political and consequential in some perhaps surprising ways.
The underpinnings or ingredients of this argument will not be obvious to all readers. Indeed, these few prefatory paragraphs may already have signalled to some that this is not likely to be a book for them. Nevertheless, to clarify this matter, in the following pages, I will introduce many of the main concerns that will be developed and explored more fully in the subsequent chapters.
Readers who have managed to stomach these opening paragraphs may be inclined to read on. Other readers may put the book back on the shelf or leave the preview pages of the website on which they found them. This is undoubtedly not a book for everyone interested in martial arts. It is a book for those concerned with questions of the academic study of martial arts, and it seeks to persuade such a readership of the sometimes subtle but always present and active place and work of disciplinarity, and of the value and virtue of disrupting disciplinary boundaries. Of this, much more will be said. But first we should turn to the object evoked in the main title: martial arts studies.
MARTIAL ARTS STUDIES VERSUS STUDIES OF MARTIAL ARTS
In diverse geographical and disciplinary spaces, the phrase 'martial arts studies' is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a growing field of scholarly interest and academic activity. Indeed, many academic fields already engage with martial arts in their particular ways. But, halfway through the second decade of the twenty-first 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 (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011b; Judkins 2012 — ; García and Spencer 2013)?
Studies of martial arts 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 a range of versions of martial arts studies. These fields are certainly hospitable to studies of martial arts, at least provided such studies are carried out in terms of relevant disciplinary concerns and methods. But the book you are currently reading is perhaps the first to engage directly and in a sustained manner with the discourse of 'martial arts studies' as such. This is so even though it may often seem to fly in the face of respectable disciplinary concerns and methods. But this is because respectable disciplinary concerns and methods are part of its focus. So, rather than following any one disciplinary approach, this book exists and operates in terms of a cultivated critical awareness of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actual and possible approaches to martial arts studies. It is concerned with the consequences of the often tacit decisions which police disciplinary borders, norms, proprieties, and conventions. So it explicitly and implicitly 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 perhaps to grow into a unique field — perhaps a field disruptive of the idea of unique fields.
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. Establishing what it is requires something rather more than simply surveying all of the academic work done on martial arts in the different disciplines, and stringing it all together, so as to produce some kind of archive or encyclopaedia of shared knowledge. As illuminating as such a work might be, academic disciplines, en masse, don't work like that. Different disciplines have very different approaches, even when they are approaching the 'same' thing. Each discipline is a foreign country to the others: they do things differently. This is so much so that it is not only their 'approaches' to martial arts that are different but also their very conceptualizations of 'martial arts', as well as their guiding questions and the sorts of concerns and values that animate them.
Accordingly, this study begins from the proposition that any effort to combine, organize, and synthesize the insights of all of the current scholarship on martial arts would not in itself produce evidence of a coherent field of martial arts studies. It may even be unhelpful, at this stage, in this study, to proceed in the manner of the textbook, the survey, or the literature review, by constructing a narrative or encyclopaedic account of something called '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. Such projects will always be interesting and stimulating in many ways. But for present purposes it is not the best approach. This is 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 considerations of the implications and consequences of the inevitable deep disagreements and incompatibilities between the paradigms of disciplinary approaches. They are 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 questions of the field requires a different sort of focus: a kind of double-focus (Bowman 2008a). Indeed, my argument is that the development of martial arts studies requires a focus not just on 'martial arts' but also on the question of 'studies'. One requirement of this is to engage with the problems that spring up because of the differences between disciplinary paradigms, or disciplinary worlds (Lyotard 1984), and to entertain the possibility that looking squarely at these issues could — but need not — lead to two equally unsatisfactory alternatives.
Alternative one. When different disciplines come face to face with each other, sometimes the encounter yields only mutual distaste. Think of the 'culture wars', the 'Sokal affair', or the tendency of academics in one field to joke about other disciplines being 'Mickey Mouse subjects', for instance. 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' (Lyotard 1988). In fact, this type of splitting amounts to little more than a demonstration and a consolidating reproduction of disciplinary demarcations.
Alternative two. The exposure of two different approaches to each other can culminate in the more or less explicit takeover 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 any kind of distinct field or a unique development, then it should remain vigilant to the possible consequences of following either of these common trajectories. The former would prevent martial arts studies from coalescing at all; the latter would ensure that martial arts studies always remained 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 (Mowitt 1992; Bowman 2007a). 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 of senses. However, as I hope will become apparent, my argument throughout Martial Arts Studies will be that a focus on the logic of disciplinarity is actually doubly relevant for any study of martial arts. This is because martial arts are themselves scenes in which logics of disciplinarity, or disciplinary logics, are 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, in martial arts, 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 to do it, 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 kind of impurity. As I have already suggested, if it ever wants to be more than the sum of the bits and pieces of the 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.
Martial arts discourses of all kinds are arguably preoccupied with matters of purity, impurity, continuity, and change. They have a fraught relationship with ideas such as authenticity, tradition, and essence, on the one hand, and invention, innovation, revolution, and mixing, on the other. Many arts make sometimes incredible claims about improbably long unbroken histories and have incredible origin myths. They make such claims in order to claim that from the outset the art was pure and complete. However, history invariably reveals complexity, chiasmus, divergence, hybridity, and even dislocation and discontinuity between now and then, here and there. Similarly, martial arts studies must be sensitive and attentive to its complex origins and contingent development. It can never pretend to have been born in the blink of an eye, out of nothing. It will always owe a debt to the other disciplines and discourses from which it emerged. Moreover, it will always remain in complex and ongoing relationships with these discourses. However, my hope is that martial arts studies might come to be not only different to the disciplines and discourses that predated and in some sense produced it, but hopefully, it will be able to produce new insights and approaches that will then feed back into and modify the disciplines from which it as a field is currently emerging.
THE DOUBLE FOCUS OF MARTIAL ARTS STUDIES
Accordingly, this book approaches the study of martial arts in terms of a double focus. It all hinges on the theme of institutions. Two of its basic premises are (1) that martial arts are best understood as institutions and (2) that the ways martial arts are thought about, known, discussed, and studied are also institutional — whether connected to institutions or productive of institutions. For these reasons, the book proposes that the concept of 'institution' is fundamental to martial arts studies and that by approaching both martial arts 'themselves' and martial arts studies 'itself' in terms of a focus on 'institution' (understood as both noun and verb) we will be able to unlock unique insights into martial arts. But not only martial arts: also scholarship, pedagogy, history, subjectivity, ideology, knowledge production, embodiment, and many other aspects of culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Martial Arts Studies by Paul Bowman. Copyright © 2015 Paul Bowman. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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