New Life

A Group of Chinese Archers, Fujian Province. Circa 1900. Source: USC Digital Collections. Old Friends One of the more rewarding things that I have been able to do with this blog has been to showcase previously unseen, or rare, images of Chinese martial arts.  I have tried to keep these photos, engravings, paintings and other visual representations  within a single series for ease of future study and reference .  And a number of these images are worthy of further thought and meditation.  Some reveal interesting information about the practice of the martial arts, while all of them speak to the ways that these practices have been framed and understood within the global system. Yet contextualizing these photographs has been a problem.  While ephemera (postcards, newspaper engravings, etc…) reach a wide audience, they do so at the expense of any depth of descriptions.  Images of specific individuals, each with their own practices and ideology, are inevita...

Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee. The Master Said: “I transmit, I do not create. I trust and love the ancients…” -Confucius,  The Analects  7.1 I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine. -Bruce Lee (Quoting Fritz Perls) Introduction When describing a cultural practice anthropologists sometimes differentiate between “emic” and “etic” accounts. To oversimplify, an emic account is one that comes from inside the group. It is a subjective description of how something functions from an insider’s perspective. An etic account is usually produced from an outsider’s point of view. It often poses as an objective description of why something “really” happens. Thus an anthropologist and her key interlocutors may give two very different accounts of the same phenomenon. Perspective matters. One does not have to be committed to cultural relativism to understand why some actors might view the same process differ...

Introduction Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!”  Lots has been happening in the Chinese martial arts community, so its time to see what people have been saying. For new readers, this is a semi-regular feature here at  Kung Fu Tea  in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts.  In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media. While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we may have missed something.  If you are aware of an important news event relating to the TCMA, drop a link in the comments section below.  If you know of a developing story that should be covered in the future feel free to send me an email. Its been way too long since our last update so let’s get to the news! A fight club in Chengdu. Source: New York Times. News From All Over ...