Martial arts historical research methods

[brianlkennedy]

I wrote a piece that might be of some interest to people interested in how to research martial arts history. The piece is titled Historical Methods in Chinese Martial Arts Research and it appears in the current issue (#40) of Classical Fighting Arts magazine. (no disrespect to Gene or Kung Fu Taichi magazine, I have always enjoyed working for Gene and publishing in his magazine, it is just I owed the other magazine a piece and this is what I did for them)

To give folks an idea of what I covered, the outline of the article is:

Accurate history matters because of respect
Contemporaneous accounts
Myth versus historical fact
Forensics of documents
Look at past and current Chinese culture
Admit when there is no evidence
Realize the “facts” are very hard to pin down, even for current events
History and dollars
What is not historical research
Conflicts of interest, hopeful beliefs
A bright future for Chinese martial arts history

Take care,
Brian

[Skip J.]

Thanks for the heads up Brian;

I really enjoyed your book - CMA Training Manuals...

Good to have you on here.

[Dragonzbane76]

i did a research piece in college about history and such of CMA and was wondering where you got most of your sources from? I had to order a bunch of books from off campus from other colleges and then i got crap. just wondering if you had some leads.

Thanks

[brianlkennedy]

Hi SkipJ,
Thanks for the kind words. I will pass them along to my wife. She and I's book on the Jingwu Association is due out in June (although Amazon Canada already has it discounted!).

Hi Dragonebane76,
Most of the books I used came from Lion Books in Taiwan. Their website (in Chinese) is at:
http://www.lionbooks.com.tw/

Plum Publishers in California carries a lot of the Lion Books stuff. As to what I relied on, it was mostly Republican Era training manuals (i.e. 1900 to about 1940). There are only a handful of legit Qing manuals and even less in the Ming dynasty.

take care,
Brian

[Skip J.]

Hi SkipJ, Thanks for the kind words. I will pass them along to my wife. She and I's book on the Jingwu Association is due out in June (although Amazon Canada already has it discounted!). As to what I relied on, it was mostly Republican Era training manuals (i.e. 1900 to about 1940). There are only a handful of legit Qing manuals and even less in the Ming dynasty.take care,
Brian
Yes, most definitely give my compliments to your wife!

I'll order your next book when it comes out!

[sanjuro_ronin]

I wrote a piece that might be of some interest to people interested in how to research martial arts history. The piece is titled Historical Methods in Chinese Martial Arts Research and it appears in the current issue (#40) of Classical Fighting Arts magazine. (no disrespect to Gene or Kung Fu Taichi magazine, I have always enjoyed working for Gene and publishing in his magazine, it is just I owed the other magazine a piece and this is what I did for them)

To give folks an idea of what I covered, the outline of the article is:

Accurate history matters because of respect
Contemporaneous accounts
Myth versus historical fact
Forensics of documents
Look at past and current Chinese culture
Admit when there is no evidence
Realize the “facts” are very hard to pin down, even for current events
History and dollars
What is not historical research
Conflicts of interest, hopeful beliefs
A bright future for Chinese martial arts history

Take care,
Brian

Your stuff is always top notch Brian, I recommend to everyone.
It should be mandatory reading :D

[brianlkennedy]

Thanks much Sanjuro Ronin,

To give folks an idea of what the article says, let me post a section of it (this is kind of the middle of the piece--I don't want to post the whole thing because that issue is still on the newsstands.


Realize the “facts” are very hard to pin down, even for current events
As a historian I often laugh when I hear someone start talking, with seeming authority, about something that happened in Chinese martial arts history hundreds of years ago, or even one hundred years ago. The reason I laugh is because even in my short period of time as a martial artist and martial arts historian, (1976 to now) I have seen numerous “historical events” occur and even though they occurred in modern times there is no agreement on what the “facts” are. Let me give some examples:
· What happened in the fight between Bruce Lee and Wong Jack Man?
· Was Rickson Gracie undefeated?
· What was Count Dante’s role in American martial arts?
· Was the taiji master Cheng Man Ching invincible in push hands?
· Was Robert Smith’s depictions of Taiwanese martial artists accurate or not?

The answer to these questions is “nobody knows for sure” and all these events have occurred within my lifetime. So when you hear talk about something that happened in martial arts history 500 years ago, realize that we often do not even know our own present day martial arts history, let alone something that happened a hundred years ago on the other side of the globe.

History and dollars
It is important to remember that the profit motive has a strong impact on writing about Chinese martial arts history. The profit motive impacts Chinese martial arts history in several ways and these problems occur both in Chinese language and English language writings. First, writers often write as a business. They sell their words to a publisher who in turn sells books or magazines to the general public. This creates the economic pressure to tell the public what they want to hear. For example if stories about Shaolin monks having invented Chinese martial arts are more attractive to the general public, if they sell better, then publishers are more interested in those kind of books than in books that come out and say that Shaolin monks had very little to do with Chinese martial arts. The basic publishing rule is, telling the public what they want to hear is how you sell books. And this has a very apparent effect of skewing what is said in Chinese martial arts books about the history of the arts.

Another effect of the economics of publishing has is that it favors bizarreness, exaggeration and simple storylines. Normal, mundane stories that reflect the regular workings of life do not move magazines on the newsstand. The result being accounts of martial arts “masters” will include wild stories of fights, death matches, and secret techniques. The exaggeration factor comes out in such things as all “masters” must be “commandoes” or “generals”, they can never be normal soldiers, and they all followed impossibly difficult training regimes.

History and dollars also comes out in another major way. Modern China has developed a business out of martial arts tourism. Places such as the Shaolin Temple, the Wudang Mountain area, Chen Village and Yong Chun Township all have lucrative martial arts tourism businesses. The attraction of these places comes from their supposed place in Chinese martial arts history. Note the word “supposed”. Historians doubt that some of these areas really had much to do with Chinese martial arts history. The owners and business operators of these places attempt to establish their historical bona fides by pointing to historical manuscripts that probably are modern forgeries and by cranking out magazine and website articles that make historical claims that are without historical support. The Shaolin Temple and the Wutang Mountain areas are notorious for this.

What is not historical research
It is common to see people taking information from current sources and simply rehashing it and saying they are doing historical research. That is not historical research. Let me give an example; a person goes out and buys all kinds of modern day books on the Shaolin Temple, these books maybe written in both English and Chinese. Then the person simply digest what these modern day books say about the history of the Shaolin Temple and cites them as “proof”. The problem is, the modern day books he is working from are simply rehashes of unsubstantiated nonsense. Historical research is not rehashing unsubstantiated claims; it is going back to original sources and analyzing them.


take care,
Brian

[sanjuro_ronin]

The answer to these questions is “nobody knows for sure” and all these events have occurred within my lifetime. So when you hear talk about something that happened in martial arts history 500 years ago, realize that we often do not even know our own present day martial arts history, let alone something that happened a hundred years ago on the other side of the globe

Read it people, learn it people, ACCEPT it people !

[Skip J.]

What is not historical research........ It is common to see people taking information from current sources and simply rehashing it and saying they are doing historical research. That is not historical research. Let me give an example; a person goes out and buys all kinds of modern day books on the Shaolin Temple, these books maybe written in both English and Chinese. Then the person simply digest what these modern day books say about the history of the Shaolin Temple and cites them as “proof”. The problem is, the modern day books he is working from are simply rehashes of unsubstantiated nonsense. Historical research is not rehashing unsubstantiated claims; it is going back to original sources and analyzing them. take care, Brian
This is exactly what sets your information apart from all others Brian;

You are not a "Master" selling us on why a style is more historically correct than another - or internal is better than external - or historically correct is better than modern whatever.......

You find out what is out there, and then analyze the information under consideration in order to glean what main purpose the writer had in mind - other than the strict historical truth - and then present it to us in such a fashion as we can decide for ourselves what we want to think about it. There is no related product or service to benefit from the content of your words.

I can just imagine the dialogue between you and your wife as your 1st draft is getting ready to go out the door...