Martial Arts Studies blogging is a hard habit to break. No sooner had I resolved to step away from more academic questions and spend a few months writing about Wing Chun practice and history than I came across an... Continue Reading →
The Emergence of the Dao “The Chinese martial arts that we practice today tend to be a recent phenomenon.” This is something that I have said on this blog many times, but what does it actually mean? Our earliest extent... Continue Reading →
Introduction I have always wondered about the Song period (960-1279) and its connection to the modern Chinese martial arts (let’s say 1850 to the present). One could be forgiven for placing the genesis of our current systems sometime in... Continue Reading →
This post started life as a book review, but as I thought about what I actually wanted to say it quickly became a different sort of essay. It was inspired by Janet O’Shea’s 2019 Oxford UP Press, Risk, Failure,... Continue Reading →
Paul Bowman. 2019. Deconstructing the Martial Arts. Cardiff: Cardiff University Press. 165 pages. Free to Download. Introduction Summer is typically the time when scholars get caught up on their reading. Yet judging from the pile of books, manuscripts, dissertations... Continue Reading →
Greetings! I am still traveling for a conference on Chinese History. Unsurprisingly my paper is an attempt to introduce a new group of scholars to the joys of Martial Arts Studies. Speaking of which, have you ordered a... Continue Reading →
An Essential Book This is a time of year to sit back and reflect on our achievements and struggles. I suspect that within the broader historical record 2018 will be remembered for its calamities. Yet it has... Continue Reading →
Unanswered Questions Everyone likes a good mystery. They engage, they motivate and (whether we want to admit it or not) they make the hours vanish. That certainly explains at least part of the popularity of historical studies... Continue Reading →
Introduction: Wing Chun Enters its Esoteric Phase This is the third and final installment of our short series on the earliest printed publications to discuss Wing Chun in English. These books and articles range in date from 1968 to... Continue Reading →
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