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 →
Answering their Questions COVID-19 has badly disrupted our world. Both jobs and lives have been lost. Professional commitments have been put on hold and training schedules transformed. Yet the oddest thing about this virus is its seeming ability to... Continue Reading →
“If it is necessary to debunk the Bodhidharma myth since it is historically false, we must also be wary of the modern materialist impulse to tear aside the veil of myth to uncover the real martial arts beneath. The... Continue Reading →
D. S. Farrer. 2019. “Brazilian jiu-jitsu is therapy: Shifting subjectivities on Guam.” ETNOGRAFIA E RICERCA QUALITATIVA (ERQ). No. 3. 407-428. Introduction Donn F. Draeger’s made no secret of his love for the real “battlefield” martial arts, both... 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 →
“There is a problem with the study of martial arts similar to that identified by Markus Davidson in the case of “spiritual studies”: many of the scholars involved in the topic are themselves practitioners and their work betrays a... 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 →
Doing the Homework Students of Martial Arts Studies are the fortunate few. As research areas go, ours is pretty interesting. Yet as I review the literature (even recent publications from big name academic presses), it is clear that many... Continue Reading →
As the indomitable Professor Farnsworth would say, good news everyone! The long anticipated Martial Arts Studies Reader (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) is now shipping. Weighing in at 244 pages, and featuring articles by over a dozen of the most... Continue Reading →
Kung Fu Tea 
Recent Comments