Call for Papers for our 8th Annual Conference! 50 Years After Bruce Lee: Asian Martial Arts On-Screen and Off 19-21 July 2023, University of Sheffield (UK) On the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee’s untimely death, our 2023 conference will... Continue Reading →
Mysteries In a post reviewing the portrayal of weaponry in Han Dynasty mortuary art I confessed that I really, really, want to assemble a recreation of the sorts of long, horizontal, weapons racks that you see in some of these... Continue Reading →
A Collection of Chinese Arms, Published in 1905, posted by Peter Dekker. Spring Cleaning I sat down this morning to work on a project looking at sword aficionados in China, their customers in the West, and how the relationship between... Continue Reading →
Silent Riddles Our discussion of the origins of modern martial arts is always haunted by twin specters. The first is the claim of great, almost unimageable, antiquity. The second is arguments from silence. We have explored at length all of the cultural,... Continue Reading →
Hong Kong Martial Artists, 2021, by Daniel Amos (Rowman&Littlefield). Daniel Miles Amos. 2021. Hong Kong Martial Artists: Sociocultural Change from World War II to 2020. Rowman & Littlefield. 230 pages. $115 HC/$38 Kindle Some years ago, one of my younger brothers married... Continue Reading →
Song Dynasty Soldier with Dao Shi Jin and Chinese Martial Arts It is axiomatic among martial arts studies scholars to assert that the fighting systems that people practice today are not the ancient creations that so many modern students, in... Continue Reading →
Introduction: The Butterfly Swords and Southern Martial Arts Defend the Nation I recently ran across two photographs that I think students of the southern Chinese martial arts may find very enlightening. They speak to interesting tactical and cultural questions. On... Continue Reading →
***Today's post continues our discussion of economic markets and modernity in the Chinese martial arts. This essay, first posted in May of 2013, was one of my first attempts at hashing out these questions as they related to advertising... Continue Reading →
***I am happy to report that I am making good progress on my current writing project. But it is still an ongoing task, and one that consumed much of my weekend. As such our post for this Monday is... Continue Reading →
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