Martial Arts in the British National Press
Paul Bowman
Cardiff University
th
JOMEC Research Seminar, Cardiff University, 13 December 2017
Abstract
This paper discusses the findings of initial CUROP-funded* research into the
representation of martial arts and martial artists in the national British press. It
is part of a larger project that aims to map out the main ways that martial arts
and martial artists have been and are represented in British popular culture
more widely. This specific research looks into what kinds of stories have been
told about martial arts and martial artists in the British press, and seeks to
relate these newspaper findings to the types of representation that take place
in other media (such as film and TV). Methodologically, the approach has so
far involved broad searches for items on anything to do with martial arts.
Theoretically and analytically, the work is interested in establishing the types
of (cross)cultural literacy that these items suggest may circulate in these
contexts of British cultural discourse.
Bio
Paul Bowman is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Journalism,
Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is author of ten books
and editor of quite a few more, on a range of topics including theories of
politics, cultural theory, popular culture, Bruce Lee, and martial arts studies.
He is Director of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network and founding coeditor of the journal Martial Arts Studies.
* Thanks to the Cardiff University Research Opportunities Programme (CUROP), JOMEC
undergraduate Paul Hilleard carried out research on this project during the summer of 2017.
1
Martial Arts in the British National Press
Paul Bowman
Cardiff University
JOMEC Research Seminar, Cardiff University, 13th December 2017
Introduction
This research project looked at stories, items and features about martial arts
in the UK national press.1 The basic area of enquiry is into the kinds of stories
that have been and are being told about martial arts and martial artists in
mainstream British popular culture.2
This study of the press is only one part of a larger research project, which is
looking at the representations of martial arts in a range of different realms of
British popular culture, such as films, adverts, magazines, music videos and
books.3
The project is specifically interested in non-specialist publications, nonspecialist texts, and non-specialist contexts. This is because I am interested in
finding out what kinds of stories about martial arts circulate in mainstream
contexts; what kind of representations dominate, what kinds of images,
associations, connotations, values and understandings congregate around the
terms, images and practices, and are available to people who aren’t
specifically interested or involved in martial arts.4
This is because a premise of this study is that martial arts are neither
necessarily nor inevitably to be understood in one particular given way.
Rather, the very notion of ‘martial art’ (or as is more common in British English,
‘martial arts’ – plural singular) is a discursive construct.
1
Cardiff University Research Opportunities Programme (CUROP), ‘Martial Arts in the UK
Press’, PI: Paul Bowman; RA: Paul Hilleard. June-July 2017.
2
The initial aim of the project was to explore the construction of the figure of the martial artist.
The original subheading of the project was ‘From Mindfulness to Madness and Beyond’. This
aim was modified to enable more basic research.
3
The research for this overarching project should hopefully be carried out during the
academic year of 2018-19.
4
I have presented research on other kinds of ‘non-specialist’/mainstream representations of
martial arts and martial artists elsewhere: first at a Waseda University Research Group
meeting, headed by Professor Mike Molasky, Tokyo, in March 2016; and second at a
conference on film dialogue, organised by Evelina Kazakevičiūtė, at Cardiff University in June
2017. The former has been published in my book Mythologies of Martial Arts (2017); the latter
will appear in JOMEC Journal in 2018.
2
What this means is that the term itself is neither necessary, nor inevitable, nor
straightforward, nor transparent. It is something that has grown and
developed – or been cobbled together. It has a history. And I want to explore
that history, in terms of a few key premises and hypotheses, and with a view
to testing the validity or verifiability of some things that are sometimes claimed
about martial arts.5
Theory
My hypotheses come from discourse theory.6 However, like the discourses
that discourse theory theorises and discourses upon, discourse theory itself is
a rather difficult thing to demarcate. It doesn’t have one stable identity or one
necessary approach (despite the scientistic impulses of some approaches).
This lack of unity in both the subject and the object of discourse arises
because the word ‘discourse’ is irreducibly metaphorical,7 and the objects and
fields that are discursively constructed within the discourse of discourse
studies (or theorised in discourse theory) can only ever really be indicated,
evoked, conjured up, or argued for, rather than specified and measured
unproblematically. A discourse is not a referent. It is a construct. The claim
that ‘this or that discourse’ exists ‘out there, in the real world’, is at root, only
ever an argument.
Perhaps this is not the place to interrogate the ontological status of discourse
theory and discourses in the world. But I want to say a couple more things on
the subject, as quickly as possible.
Firstly, because of the premise of the power of open-ended articulation and
ever-altering reiteration (in all versions of discourse theory), ‘discourses’ are
rarely conceived of as being confined to specific spaces, or to closed
networks or discrete media. Rather, in discourse theory, the logics of causality
5
In saying this, I had in mind two specific things: first, claims made by ethnographer Sara
Delamont, that capoeira is not widely understood in the UK (Delamont, 2008; Stephens,
2006); and second, some arguments made about the shifting discursive status of different
martial arts, made by Sixt Wetzler in issue 2 of Martial Arts Studies (Wetzler, 2015).
6
Specifically/originally, the theory of Laclau and Mouffe, as seen in their book Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). However, my reading of this was modified by
Mowitt’s critique of ‘discourse’ in Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Mowitt,
1992). I deal at length with my understanding of ‘discourse’ in my own books, Post-Marxism
versus Cultural Studies (Bowman, 2007a) and Deconstructing Popular Culture (Bowman,
2008). All of my writings are infused with this post-structuralist concept or paradigm.
7
Key structuralists such as Derrida and Spivak have both discussed the ‘irreducible
metaphoricity’ of notions such as ‘structure’ and ‘discourse’. However, for an accessible
discussion, see Hall’s ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’ (Hall, 1992).
3
and determination are always to some degree unstable and unclear. So
discourses can be said to overflow or leap from context to context, medium to
medium, language to language, game to game, network to network (or
whichever metaphor you use to conceptualise it).
Inevitably, therefore, they are regarded as being variably transformable and
transformative. So it’s never entirely certain whether a thing in a given
discourse is in fact one thing (or indeed a thing), or indeed whether any
putative or notional discourse is in fact one thing (or indeed a thing). This is
because, once a thing is understood to be a construct, it becomes eminently
deconstructable. It is a construct because it is not one thing. Hence it is
deconstructable.
(As an aside: this is why a lot of schools of discourse analysis disavow any
debt to deconstruction, and even denounce it, claiming that you can’t do
discourse studies using deconstruction.8 As certain radical or deconstructive
discourse theorists used to say: this is because deconstruction is a condition
of possibility for discourse analysis that is by the same token a condition of its
impossibility. But let’s move on from ontological questions.)
Method
Translated into practical terms, most discourse theorists and analysts could
possibly agree that modern discursive entities and identities, contemporary
terms and values, are all stabilizations that have a history, and will not always
have been the way they are now. Consequently, when looking for discourses
– especially when looking for discursive development and transformation –
one should cast the net wide and be prepared to follow any lead and any
possible line or angle – like a detective – rather than sticking to contemporary
notions, current terms, and present assumptions about stable entities and
identities.
Accordingly, the very terms that structure this project (‘martial art’, ‘martial
arts’, ‘martial artists’, and so on), should be understood to be modern
constructions. This means that, to get a sense of the movements, changes,
developments, modifications and tectonic shifts that have gone into making
our modern terms and commonplaces of everyday life, one should search
very widely, diversely, creatively, and dynamically.
However, we did the exact opposite of this. Rather than chasing around in the
murky prehistory and twists and turns in the development of martial arts
8
For a discussion, see Niels Akerstrøm Andersen’s Discursive Analytical Strategies:
Understanding Foucault, Kosselleck, Laclau, Luhmann (Akerstrøm Andersen, 2003).
4
discourses, my research assistant (Paul Hilleard) and I instead chose two
contemporary British terms – ‘martial arts’ and ‘martial artist’ – and looked for
the occurrence of only these two things throughout the archives of five
national British newspapers.
The reason for this is that we already knew that these terms are
comparatively recent stabilizations. They may seem familiar, natural, and
universal to us today – as if they have been around forever. But they have not.
(One recent study looked at adverts for what we now call self-defence and
martial arts schools and classes in the USA. It found that, in the USA, such
terms as ‘martial art’ or ‘martial arts’ really only become predictably frequent,
stable, regular, self-evident and organising rubrics during the 1990s.)9
We may wonder what (if anything) preceded our current terms. Martial arts
historian Joseph Svinth has pointed out the difficulty of finding reliable searchterms when trying to get a sense of the historical development and changes in
martial arts discourse, in different places.
Even if we are looking only at ‘the British context’, Svinth notes,10 there are
actually several of these (there is the UK, and Northern Ireland, then preseparation, Commonwealth, and so on); and there are different terms and
different uses of related terms in different places, such as Australia, Canada
and New Zealand.
Svinth himself has widely researched British newspapers, looking into such
matters as the reporting of boxing deaths. Hence, he notes that the word
‘boxing’ can mean ‘a box for your lunch, a slap to the ears, a brawl at the pub,
or a betting occasion outside of town. The Americans are worse’, he adds:
synonyms for boxer ‘include bully, shoulder-hitter, pugilist, pug’, and more.
‘And even in Britain, during mid-Victorian times, the papers sometimes made
the distinction between bare-knuckle boxers and glove fighters’.
Consequently, Svinth recommended that we search newspapers using terms
that would be ‘very politically incorrect’ today. ‘For instance’, he suggested,
‘search “Jap wrestling”, “Chinamen AND boxing”, “Hindoo AND stick fighting”,
and so on’. As he notes, ‘Jack Johnson was not described in kind terms in the
sporting press of 1910’.
9
See Mike Molasky’s contribution to The Martial Arts Studies Reader, forthcoming (Bowman,
2018).
10
All quotations from Svinth are from email communication in June 2017.
5
As Svinth points out, old martial arts stories may be organised by terms as
diverse as ‘old Samurai art’, ‘antagonistics’ or ‘assaults-at-arms’. In the 1920s,
terms like ‘all-in fighting’ and ‘dirty fighting’ emerged, along with ‘commando
tactics’. ‘Judo’ was also sometimes used to mean ‘dirty fighting’, rather than
Kodokan judo. ‘Then as now’, writes Svinth:
the distinction between theatrical and practical use was often not
remarked. Thus, you'll see Chinese street entertainers and sword
dancers, Indian dacoit and fakirs, Turkish strongmen, and so on, all
doing what we'd today call ‘martial art’, but were then viewed as curios…
[Similarly] circus and music hall [has long been] a place to look for feats
of swordsmanship, archery, stick fighting, and so on. The British booth
fighters and the Australian tent fighters are straight out of this tradition.
Then there is the time-honoured problem of variant spellings. The way we
spell judo, jujitsu, capoeira, tai chi, and myriad other terms is a matter that is
still mired in difficulties and differences – and in some cases will always be.
As such, tackling the prehistory of our current discursive conjuncture – in
which the term ‘martial arts’ can be assumed to need no explanation to most
people – just as terms like ‘teenager’ or ‘air quality’, ‘Brexit’ or ‘climate change’
seem to need no explanation to most people (even if they could benefit from
it) – was way beyond the scope of this study.
Neither my research assistant nor I had the time or the means at our disposal
to try to excavate the ancestors of the terms ‘martial arts’ and ‘martial artist’.
We did not want to play search-term battleships or bingo.
So we used these broadest of contemporary search terms, in order to find out
where and when and how our current terms appeared and developed. As
such, this research is into the development of the current discursive
conjuncture, and is not a genealogy or history of any of the precursors of the
terms, concepts or practices. It is about the coming into focus of the present
conjuncture, and what that conjuncture looks like and looks at.
Value
The value of this kind of project relates to another key tenet of all discourse
theories: namely, the proposition that the way something is understood and
valued (or devalued) in ‘wider cultural contexts’ (aka ‘in general’) and in
powerful social institutions can be influenced by general tendencies in
representational practices.
6
Put crudely, if we constantly hear (for instance) that many capoeira
practitioners are criminals, or that many criminals are capoeira practitioners,
then we may disapprove of capoeira – we may even want to make it illegal, or
be happy if it is illegal. Conversely, if we constantly hear that capoeira is an
ancient, complex, subtle, athletic, balletic, skilful and culturally rich tapestry of
African slave and indigenous Brazilian culture, then we may value it, cherish it,
fetishize it, even fantasize or elaborate ideas of cultural identity in and through
and around it.
Both of these situations have existed, at different times, in Brazil.11 Other
equivalent situations vis-à-vis different martial arts in different countries exist
today.12 Representations and values differ – both across time and across
space.13 What seem key are the stories that are told and the associations that
are made. And this is what this research project sought to investigate around
martial arts in the British press.
Size and Scope
Five national British newspapers were surveyed: The Daily Mail, The Times,
The Daily Mirror, The Guardian and The Independent. We had access to
archives spanning different time periods for each. Not everything was from the
beginning of each newspaper’s until the present moment.
11
•
Results from The Daily Mail archives spanned 1970 to 2004, a period
of 34 years. The total number of results recorded, omitting repeated
items like adverts, came to 101.
•
Results from The Times archives spanned 1974 to 2011 – a period of
37 years. Repeated items were omitted, and the total number of results
recorded was 268.
•
Results from The Daily Mirror archives spanned 1918 to 2017, but the
solitary item from 1918 is only a play on words,14 and from 1918
onwards there is long gap, until the next item occurs in 1974. So, really,
See Greg Downey ‘Domesticating an urban menace’ (Downey, 2002).
12
See for example the work of Boretz (Boretz, 2011); also the article of Doug Farrer on
martial arts and triads in Singapore, forthcoming in Martial Arts Studies issue 5, Winter 2017.
13
See Wetzler’s argument (Wetzler, 2015).
14
The 1918 item is part of a section called ‘To-Day’s Gossip’, about a ‘girl doctor’s market’,
which reads: ‘Martial Art—Art and cabbages will flourish together that day, for next to the
homely green stall will be one where Major Sir William Orpen, Major Augustus John and
Captain Handley-Read will sell their produce. Do you recognise our martial artists?’
7
The Daily Mirror results span 1974 to 2017 – a period of 43 years.
Despite this long period, the total number of items recorded is only 77.
•
Results from The Guardian cover 1992 to 2017 – a period of 25 years.
The total number of items recorded is 111.
•
Similarly, The Independent covers 1992 to 2017 – the same 25 years.
The total number of items recorded is 128.
•
This means that the total number of items recorded in the study was
685.
Methodologically speaking, if we wanted to do certain kinds of things with the
findings, we would have to either (i) open things up considerably, or (ii) close
them down systematically. So, if we want to compare and contrast the
newspapers in various scientific or scientistic ways, we would either need to
gain access to the entire archives of all of the newspapers (which we couldn’t),
or delimit our discussion to either an arbitrary or a specific time period.
An obvious arbitrary time period would be between 1992 and 2004 – the only
period we have access to all of these newspapers. Conversely, an obvious
specific time period would relate to the timeline of a specific event or story –
such as, for example, a period of time from before the first murmurings that
UFC champion Connor McGregor first announced that he wanted to fight
multiple world champion boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., through to some time
after the post-fight analysis.
But the main aim of this first study was to get a clearer sense of what kinds of
stories were out there, being reported, being told, about martial arts and
martial artists in the British national press.
Daily Mirror
If we take the tabloid paper, The Daily Mirror first, of the 77 items mentioning
martial arts/artist, there are at least nine which I called ‘incidental’ – i.e., where
the terms appear as comparisons, analogies, or tangential asides (so,
something is said to be ‘like a martial art’, or a term is really only the name of
a race horse or a crossword clue, and so on, or a key term is added as a
piece of information about someone or something – such as a celebrity who
‘is a martial artist’ or ‘practices the martial art of wing chun kung fu’, etc.).
8
These ‘incidental’ uses of martial arts are in themselves potentially significant,
in what they suggest about the understanding of the entities, notions or
practices of actual martial arts.
The first item about tai chi, for example, is wonderfully illustrative of the value
of ‘incidental’ mentions. It occurs in a 1999 item about new entries in the
Encarta World Dictionary. The Daily Mirror notes that Encarta feels tai chi is
understood by around half the population as some kind of Chinese martial art.
So this is interesting. I’ll come back to it.
There are other frequent tangential or incidental occurrences, such as
obituaries, and the fixation of the columnist Tony Parsons on boxing, which he
repeatedly characterises as Britain’s indigenous martial art. Parsons also
returns several times to the story of footballer Eric Cantona who famously
jumped at someone in the crowd with a side-kick.
The question of how representative Tony Parsons’ fixation on boxing is of
anything more than his own idiosyncrasies is something that would require
further and wider discussion.
But there are some other regularities, produced by multiple authors, that stand
out and grab the attention in a different way. One is the status of tai chi.
There are eight articles on tai chi. This makes it the most frequently
mentioned martial art – more frequent than taekwondo (six stories), judo (four
stories), and the surprising occurrence of capoeira (four stories).
I was surprised about the appearance of capoeira in The Daily Mirror because
I seemed to have passively accepted claims made by certain ethnographers
that very few people in Britain know what capoeira is. Academic ethnographic
publications about capoeira continue to appear which operate in line with the
assumption that it needs explaining to readers; and yet here it is, in a Daily
Mirror story about Charlize Theron learning capoeira moves for a film role in
2005, and then in a story about the British football team attending a capoeira
demonstration in 2014 in Brazil, and then in two stories about Joe Joyce
celebrating his boxing victory at the 2016 Olympics with a capoeira
performance of his own.
In fact, these capoeira stories encapsulate the ways that The Daily Mirror
handles most martial arts stories: martial arts are mostly made sense of in
terms of celebrity activities, fitness fads and film roles; or as sports (in the
case of taekwondo and judo), or occasionally as curios from other cultures
that visiting dignitaries abroad have to sit through, or supposedly salient
pieces of information about violent criminals, or self-defence narratives. An
9
ideal Daily Mirror story would involve a female celebrity surviving a violent
attack at a sporting event thanks to moves she’d learnt for her new film role,
perhaps with the assistance of a passing postal worker who’d learned selfdefence as a new part of his work training.
But then there is tai chi. There are three stories The Daily Mirror tells about tai
chi. The first is that it is an ancient Chinese martial art involving yin and yang.
The second is that women should do it – to find ‘balance’, to ‘balance’ their
‘energies’, and so on. And the third is that old people should do it.
For old people, tai chi promises longevity, health, balance and physical
energy. For younger women, it offers metaphorical balance. Some men report
on the tai chi they have tried in their travel journalism trip to Hong Kong, for
instance, but the target audience remains women and old people.
Daily Mail
To stay with this focus on women and old people, we could now turn to The
Daily Mail. Of 101 references recorded, 13 are ‘positive’ stories about tai chi.
Again, these are almost invariably health stories providing information for
women or the elderly. Again, there are no negative stories about tai chi. The
closest we come to anything remotely like a negative statement is one article
that suggests younger people should ‘also’ do more vigorous exercise.
However, tai chi is not the most frequently occurring subject. It is second to
aikido, about which there are at least 17 stories. However, the vast majority of
these are columns by Nigel Dempster, The Daily Mail’s ‘Tony Parsons’ in his
fixation on one recurring subject.
Indeed, Dempster is worse than Parsons, in the sense that he merely repeats
the same phrases over and over again. These are phrases which connect
aikido with a handful of aristocrats and their acquaintances. Dempster
regularly reports in on a certain Earl of Cawdor – a kind of playboy about
whom Dempster always tells us two things: first, that he is a descendent of
Macbeth; second, that he practices aikido.
Dempster’s aikido-aristocracy focus also draws him into stories about
celebrities. But after Earl Cawdor’s obituary in June 1993, other than a couple
of stories about people who stop being ‘slobs’ by taking up aikido, it tails off as
a topic.
There are frequent stories involving other martial arts, including a surprisingly
‘pc’ micro-article about how insensitive it is that the BBC used white capoeira
performers in one of their ‘idents’ when capoeira is originally an afro-Brazilian
10
slave practice.15 There are also intermittent ‘how to choose a martial art /
physical activity’ features.
But the stories about tai chi (and related practices like qigong) are of a
qualitatively different order. Other martial arts are often mentioned in the
context of someone famous, or as a side issue, subordinate to a different
story or focus. But when tai chi appears, it is front and centre, the main focus.
Tai chi is always viewed positively. There are often articles advocating that
people try it. It often appears in the ‘Femail’ or ‘Health’ sections, and is often
positioned as something that prevents osteoporosis, improves joint health,
mobility, balance, and helps to de-stress. So it is positioned as explicitly
healthful, implicitly feminine and aimed either at women or older readers.
Both The Mirror and The Mail are enamoured of tai chi’s meditative
dimensions, which they treat as ways to de-stress, combat hypertension, etc.
However, they do not explicitly follow an orientalist or mystical mumbo-jumbo
angle. Nonetheless, the mind-body connection theme could be regarded as a
precursor of the even more recent interest in ‘mindfulness’.16
There are slight spikes in martial arts stories around 1974, the mid-1990s, and
an upward trend from 2000. It is never stated, but the 1974 spike probably
relates to the ‘kung fu craze’ which peaked at that time. The spike of the mid90s relates to stories about kickboxing as an exercise craze, often for women,
coming from the USA, especially in relation to celebrity females. The spike of
the early 2000s relates to the newer iteration of kickboxing, known as Tae-bo
(also boxercise and kick-boxercise), and also the emergence of a kind of neohippy new age ethos that seems evident in certain items.17
One can certainly see the formation of a kind of feminised deracinated and
only crypto-orientalist new age sensibility, in which tai chi, yoga and
mindfulness come to represent sensible antidotes to stress, aging and
infirmity. These practices are articulated in very different ways from sports
martial arts like taekwondo, on the one hand, and budō arts like kendo, on the
other, and even so-called traditional martial arts like karate. The latter are
strongly connected with ideas of ethics, honour, control, Zen, Buddhism and
specific Asian traditions. Tai chi is deracinated.
15
The ident can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OVVm82R55M
16
See Žižek (Žižek, 2001), Bowman on Žižek (Bowman, 2007b), and Benesch (Benesch,
2016).
17
The time period squares with Žižek’s argument about the emergence of Taoism as the
‘spontaneous ideology of postmodern capitalism’ (Žižek, 2001).
11
Two quick final points about The Mail. First, it is interesting that the very first
story we found in The Daily Mail in 1970 is one debunking the myth of the
black belt as proof of invincibility. This is the first story: the debunking a myth.
This means that there was already a well established body of cultural
discourse (mythology) on Asian martial arts at the time, even though the
article does feel the need to give definitions and introductions to practices like
karate and judo. However, the point is: the first story signals the existence and
familiarity of martial arts myths before the first story about them in The Mail.
Second, The Mail (like The Mirror) does not register the rise of mixed martial
arts (MMA) in the wake of and around the explosion of interest in the Ultimate
Fighting Championship (UFC), which has grown ever more prominent year by
year since 1993.
The Guardian and The Independent
Both The Guardian and The Independent, however, become completely
dominated by the UFC. Surveying The Guardian, for instance, there are no
clear patterns in martial arts stories. Games reviews, film reviews, health
items, and occasional news stories are all present in equal numbers. But by
2015, stories about the UFC are taking off and taking over. There were 29
items on the UFC in the period looked at, from one in 1996 to a rapid
proliferation between 2015 and mid-July 2017.
Similarly, The Independent becomes dominated by UFC stories in the same
period. There are 31 items on the UFC, starting in 2009, but increasing
dramatically from 2015 to 2017. The search terms also picked up 10 articles
on boxing. Of course, there will have been many more stories on boxing, but
these ones register in the context of martial arts, and most prominently around
the McGregor-Mayweather fight in Summer 2017. So 8 of these articles are
about MMA fighter Connor McGregor.
There are other minor patterns in these two publications, but all are dwarfed
by recent interest in all aspects of the UFC.
The Times
The Times is different again. It is often written by very well informed writers
(e.g., Nicholas Soames, 2nd degree judo black belt). Unlike the more tabloid
Mirror and Mail, The Times always seems to assume that the reader already
has some knowledge (or at least an ability to follow what is being talked
about). So The Times will often discuss specific (often quite obscure) martial
arts without any of the Mail’s sense of wide-eyed wonder that such things
could possibly exist in the world.
12
Interestingly, as with The Mail and The Mirror, the Times has a consistent
interest in exactly the same kinds of health stories about tai chi. As in the
other publications, Olympic sports get more attention in the run up to Olympic
Games. Traditional martial arts and budō arts get a fair amount of coverage.
And, again, there were lots of stories about capoeira: 21 in total, starting in
1988, with 1-2 stories on average per year from 2000 until 2011. This seems
largely to arise because of The Times’ interest in reporting dance and theatre
productions, in which capoeira often features.
Conclusion
By dint of the format and characteristics of Times journalism, it is neither easy
nor appropriate to reduce articles to one theme or one value. We often find
long articles, covering many subjects, often involving relatively meandering
first-person accounts. This gives rise to at least three things – which I will
mention quickly by way of heading towards some kind of provisional
conclusion.
First, it seems OK in The Times to positively delight in violence – as long as (if,
and only if) that delight is framed as part of some kind of female self-defence
experience.
Second, the longer, possibly more meandering or expansive and literary
styles of articles in The Times gives rise to a lot more ‘incidental’ references to
martial arts – similes, metaphors, comparisons: many things are said to be
(‘like’) a martial art.
In my first pass through the articles, I initially found these ‘incidental’
references to be frustrating – like red herrings giving false readings:
interference that I wanted to squelch out. But on reflection, as mentioned, I
think that these ‘false readings’ are actually a pertinent research topic in their
own right. What do we compare martial arts to? What do we compare to
martial arts?
Doubtless, like the seemingly transcultural compulsion to tell the same story
about tai chi over and over again, many of these things will appear to be
relatively fixed. But, as the recent defeat of a self-declared tai chi master by
an MMA fighter in China may presage (and as the many negative stories told
about tai chi within specialist martial arts circles are my witness), none of
these things are necessarily fixed.
It all depends on how they are read. And this is my third and final concluding
point. It all depends on how these things are read. I have certainly not read
13
these stories to you here – either in the sense of recounting them or in the
sense of interpreting them. I have kind of indicated, kind of enumerated, kind
of introduced. But a great deal more reading needs to take place, both of the
newspaper archives and of the many other texts and intertexts that feed into
and grow out of it, and others, in other realms and registers of British popular
culture.
References
Akerstrøm Andersen, N., 2003. Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding
Foucault, Kosselleck, Laclau, Luhmann,. The Policy Press, London.
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