The place of martial arts in society says a lot about how an individual relates to other individuals and to the government. In many societies, training in the martial arts is confined to men, and sometimes only to certain specifically defined groups. This intentional distribution of the means of violence is further amplified by laws that restrict the ownership of weapons to particular sanctioned individuals or institutions. A society’s fiction and myths often use the martial arts as markers of value and moral lessons. We are all familiar with the Arthurian romances where brave and skilled knights rescue helpless young women from various evil-doers. A similar process was at work in China, which included female martial heroes and where male martial heroes expressed little interest in women.

Martial arts in general, and Chinese martial arts specifically, are the subject of many websites and online videos. For the last few years there has been extensive coverage of fights in China between practitioners of “traditional” martial arts and modern mixed martial artists or fighters trained in Western boxing. This has an important nationalist overtone because the Chinese government promotes traditional martial arts as part of a broader promotion of Chinese culture. Unfortunately, thus far the Chinese traditional martial arts practitioners have fared poorly against these other arts.

For more general academic discussions of the field of martial arts studies, see the Youtube channel maintained by The Martial Arts Studies Network.

Next Section »