Martial Arts Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

A fight! A fight is not merely a chaotic, meaningless act. Where all hell breaks loose and combatants, yell, scream, curse, boast, moan and give way to the untamed beast within. Yes, all this can be true of a fight, but at the same time it is so much more. Combat is a highly meaningful and social act where people move their bodies in traditionally effective, culturally approved and morally correct ways. Looking at the unspoken rules and movements and meanings of how men fight is the object of hoplologists. Hoplology first emerged as a social science parallel to the rise of Anthropology during the19th century. At this time when colonial expansion was reaching its peak, colonial administrators, scholars and intelligence officers sought to classify all the tribal peoples they encountered as living examples of the evolutionary progress of mankind from the uncivilized promiscuous horde to the civilized urban industrialized society where they lived in. While anthropologists looked at kinship systems, religious rituals or languages, hoplologists focused on how primitive and tribal people fought. What were the origins of the bow, the spear, the sword? What type of social complexity was necessary for these weapons to develop, and how did these weapons spread across a region? This was the principal concern of early hoplologists such as R. F. Burton and E.E. Evans-Pritchard who correlated the use of specific types of weapons to increasing levels of civilization. For example, where did the bow and arrow originate, how did the technological knowledge to create a bow spread across and area, and how did the composition and style of bows change as new peoples adapted them to their needs? Technological advances in warfare and the consequential casualties of 20th century wars resulted in the decline of hoplology as a discipline as people recoiled in horror of the killing fields of trench warfare in Flanders, or the bloody campaigns of island-hopping in the Pacific against the Japanese. Not long after WWII ended, veteran and lay-scholar Don Draeger began a study of contemporary Japanese combative traditions, soon shifting his interest to earlier still extant battlefield-oriented arts. Draeger's efforts to learn and publish his results led to a number of young people moving to Japan