Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge

Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge PDF Author: D. S. Farrer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438439687
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book's cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies. Three central aspects emerge from this book: martial arts as embodied fantasy, as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation, and as a continuous process of identity formation. Contributors explore several popular and highbrow cultural considerations, including the career of Bruce Lee, Chinese wuxia films, and Don DeLillo's novel Running Dog. Ethnographies explored describe how the social body trains in martial arts and how martial arts are constructed in transnational training. Ultimately, this academic study of martial arts offers a focal point for new understandings of cultural and social beliefs and of practice and agency.

Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge

Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge PDF Author: D. S. Farrer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438439687
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book's cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies. Three central aspects emerge from this book: martial arts as embodied fantasy, as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation, and as a continuous process of identity formation. Contributors explore several popular and highbrow cultural considerations, including the career of Bruce Lee, Chinese wuxia films, and Don DeLillo's novel Running Dog. Ethnographies explored describe how the social body trains in martial arts and how martial arts are constructed in transnational training. Ultimately, this academic study of martial arts offers a focal point for new understandings of cultural and social beliefs and of practice and agency.

Martial Arts Studies

Martial Arts Studies PDF Author: Paul Bowman, Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, UK
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783481293
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book disrupts disciplinary boundaries to make a case for the future direction and growth of martial arts studies as a unique field

Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment

Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment PDF Author: Dale C. Spencer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136499156
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This book explores the carnal experience of fighting through a sensory ethnography of MMA, and how it transgresses the cultural scripts of masculinity in popular culture. Based on four years of participant observation in a local MMA club and in-depth interviews with amateur and professional MMA fighters, Spencer documents fighters' training regimes and the meanings they attach to participation in the sport. Drawing from the philosophical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book develops bodies-centered ontological and epistemological grounding for this study. Guided by such a position, it places bodies at the center of analysis of MMA and elucidates the embodied experience of pain and injury, and the sense and rhythms of fighting.

Fighting Scholars

Fighting Scholars PDF Author: Raúl Sánchez García
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783083468
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
‘Fighting Scholars’ offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The book’s most innovative features are its empirical focus and theoretical orientation. While ethnographic research is a widespread and popular approach within the social sciences, combat sports and martial arts have yet to be sufficiently interrogated from an ethnographic standpoint. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body.

Martial Arts in the Modern World

Martial Arts in the Modern World PDF Author: Thomas A. Green
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Martial arts, once restricted to a few specific locations and practiced by small groups of devotees, have truly spread throughout the world. The plethora of tae kwando and karate dojos in U.S. shopping malls attests to the popularity of various kinds of martial arts in this country. Though generally perceived and advertised as means of self-defense, body sculpting, and self-discipline, martial arts are actually social tools that respond to altered physical, social, and psychological environments. This book examines how practitioners have responded to stimuli such as feminism, globalism, imperialism, militarism, nationalism, slavery, and the commercialization of sport. In a series of chapters devoted to Asian, African, and European systems of the late 19th to early 21st centuries, the authors examine the forces and philosophies that shaped fighting arts in diverse cultural settings. Because of political, social, and economic factors, this period witnessed the spread of martial arts to areas outside of their original contexts. Some of these arts flourished in their new environments, but others did not. The authors demonstrate that martial arts are not the conservative strongholds of tradition posited by conventional wisdom, but are instead responsive and mutable barometers of change. This book is essential for students of multicultural dialogues and devotees of martial arts performance and practice.

T'ai Chi Ch'üan

T'ai Chi Ch'üan PDF Author: Sophia Delza
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780887060304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"For the Western reader this is quite simply the best of the many books on T'ai Chi Ch'uan." -- David L. Hall, University of Texas. The foremost work on the ancient Chinese art of T'ai Chi Ch'üan in the English language is now even better. Master practitioner and teacher Sophia Delza has thoroughly revised her original guide to include substantial new material. T'ai Chi Ch'üan: Body and Mind in Harmony is a comprehensive survey of the age-old martial art, a system of activating the body for the development of physical, emotional, and mental well-being. Clearly detailed descriptions of the movements, illustrated with detailed drawings and photographs, enable you to practice alone. The book features a stimulating analysis of how body and mind function harmoniously, and a concrete explanation of how form and structure develop lasting physical health, mental alertness, stable vitality, and tranquility. "You have reaped a good harvest from your faithful practice and perseverance. Your book reveals profound comprehension (mind plus feeling). I am happy your are teaching." -- Grandmaster Ma Yueh-Liang, President, Wu Chien-Ch'uan, T'ai Chi Ch'uan Association of Shanghai, People's Republic of China

兵法家伝書

兵法家伝書 PDF Author: 柳生宗矩
Publisher: Kodansha International
ISBN: 9784770029553
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This is a translation of an important classic on Zen swordfighting. Yagyu's Buddhist spirituality is reflected in his central idea of the life-giving sword' - the notion of controlling an opponent by the spiritual readiness to fight, rather than during the fight. This is a translation of an important classic on Zen swordfighting. Yagyu Munenori was so widely renowned that he was appointed official sword instructor to two Tokugawa shoguns. (The position was always coveted by Miyamoto Musashi, but he never succeeded in gaining the post). Yagyu's'

Martial Arts and Well-being

Martial Arts and Well-being PDF Author: Carol Fuller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315448068
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Martial Arts and Well-Being explores how martial arts as a source of learning can contribute in important ways to health and well-being, as well as provide other broader social benefits. Using psychological and sociological theory related to behaviour, ritual, perception and reality construction, the book seeks to illustrate, with empirical data, how individuals make sense of and perceive the value of martial arts in their lives. This book draws on data from over 500 people, across all age ranges, and powerfully demonstrates that participating in martial arts can have a profound influence on the construction of behaviour patterns that are directly linked to lifestyle and health. Making individual connections regarding the benefits of practice, improvements to health and well-being – regardless of whether these improvements are ‘true’ in a medical sense – this book offers an important and original window into the importance of beliefs to health and well-being as well as the value of thinking about education as a process of life-long learning. This book will be of great interest to a range of audiences, including researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in sports and exercise psychology, martial art studies and health and well-being. It should also be of interest to sociologists, social workers and martial arts practitioners. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315448084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Deconstructing Martial Arts

Deconstructing Martial Arts PDF Author: Paul Bowman
Publisher: Cardiff University Press
ISBN: 1911653032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
What is the essence of martial arts? What is their place in or relationship with culture and society? Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies.

Shadows of the Prophet

Shadows of the Prophet PDF Author: Douglas S. Farrer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 140209356X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This is the first in-depth study of the Malay martial art, silat, and the first ethnographic account of the Haqqani Islamic Sufi Order. Drawing on 12 years of research and practice, the author provides a major contribution to the study of Malay culture.