World Anthropologies of Martial Arts Beyond and Within National Boundaries: Asiatic Disciplinary Subjectivities in the Making Yuxiao (Jason) Long
Fudan University
Abstract
This article shall present an appraisal of emergent Asiatic subjectivities in the global landscape of sport anthropology as an academic discipline, with a special focus on the anthropology of martial arts. Along with recent development of anthropological studies of sport and physical culture in more and more nation-states, the anthropology of sport has become much more plural than ever before, in terms of variance in research topic preferences, theoretical orientations, methodological choices, and some more other aspects. Differentiating from the singular form of Anglo-Saxon originated anthropology of sport, the anthropologies of sport in non-Western countries have developed their own genres, whether Asiatic or Hispanic or otherwise alike. Drawing on the conceptions of ^world anthropologies^ refined in World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power (2006) edited by Ribeiro and Escobar, this article examines the anthropological texts of martial arts produced by scholars of China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, in comparison with those from Western scholars, primarily based on textual analysis and discourse analysis. The research findings illustrate that criticism of the ^hidden^ Orientalism, decolonization of research methodology, locating natively pertinent research problems, reinterpretation and reevaluation of national heritages of martial arts, and construction of disciplinary subjectivities are some of the main concerns among scholars of these nations, who have been insistently interrogating the (im)possibilities of the Asianness in sport practice and sport science, albeit most of them have been deeply afflicted with predicaments between the disciplinary cosmopolitan ideals and the disciplinary subjectivities in the making.
Keywords: Anthropologies of Martial Arts, World Anthropologies, Nation-States, Asianness in Sport, Disciplinary Subjectivities
Topic: Comparative analysis of sport in Asian societies and other sports cultures and traditions
