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Musings on Japanese and Ryukyu Budo
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 Work reviewed: Sukhoverkhov, A.V., Klimenko, A.A. and Tkachenko, A.S. (2021) ‘The influence of Daoism, Chan Buddhism and Confucianism on the theory and practice of East Asian martial arts’, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 48(2), pp. 235–246. Returning to the Question of What Budō IsAfter almost forty years travelling the road of budō, I have become increasingly suspicious of simple explanations of what budō is. Perhaps this is one consequence of remaining with a practice for long enough: certainty gives way to complexity. This question has become particularly immediate as I work towards establishing a budō club in Waterford. I repeatedly encounter familiar propositions: budō is violence; budō teaches discipline; budō is self-defence; traditional Japanese budō is ineffective in a ‘real fight’. None of these claims is entirely without foundation. Yet none is sufficient. I do not believe that budō itself teaches discipline, humility, courage or virtue. Budō simply is. Meaning emerges through the practitioner’s engagement with it, mediated by teachers, communities, histories and particular cultural understandings. A dō provides a road; it does not determine what the traveller becomes. This is perhaps especially difficult to communicate when budō is removed from the East Asian intellectual milieu within which the idea of a ‘way’ developed. The road extends simultaneously outwards and inwards. Outwardly, one encounters distance, timing, technique, another body and, ultimately, the problem of violence. Inwardly, one encounters fear, ego, attachment, impatience, failure, responsibility and self-understanding. These are not two distinct journeys. They continually fold back upon one another. Plato’s Cave offers one analogy; the Buddhist and Jain parable of people encountering different parts of an elephant offers another. Each apprehends something genuine, yet mistakes a partial encounter for the whole. It was with precisely this problem in mind that I returned to Sukhoverkhov, Klimenko and Tkachenko (2021). Philosophy as Martial Practice The authors examine three intellectual traditions—Daoism, Chan Buddhism and Confucianism—and argue that their importance to East Asian martial culture lies not merely in abstract doctrine but in their practical embodiment. Daoism informs concepts of softness, adaptation and non-forcing; Chan Buddhism contributes ideas of equanimity, non-attachment and perceptual clarity; Confucianism provides a language of propriety, obligation and socially situated ethical conduct (Sukhoverkhov, Klimenko and Tkachenko, 2021). Their treatment of Daoism is organised principally around wuwei (無為) and ziran (自然). They connect these concepts to yielding, conserving energy, avoiding unnecessary opposition and adapting to an opponent’s movement rather than imposing a predetermined response (Sukhoverkhov, Klimenko and Tkachenko, 2021, pp. 237–240). This is among the article’s most persuasive discussions because the philosophical language corresponds readily with embodied martial experience. What appears ‘natural’ in an experienced practitioner is rarely natural in the sense of unlearned. It is accumulated practice rendered increasingly tacit. Ziran may therefore be understood as cultivated naturalness: considerable effort transformed into apparently effortless action. The discussion of Chan Buddhism shifts attention from movement towards consciousness. The authors emphasise non-attachment, composure and the capacity to perceive circumstances without becoming overwhelmed by fear or fixation upon outcome (Sukhoverkhov, Klimenko and Tkachenko, 2021, pp. 241–242). Non-attachment, importantly, is not indifference. In martial terms, it suggests engagement without psychological captivity: acting seriously while remaining sufficiently free from the desire to win, the fear of losing or the need to preserve an image of oneself. Confucianism introduces a rather different dimension. Through li—ritual propriety—and through ideas of duty, education and social responsibility, the authors locate martial practice within relationships rather than within the isolated individual. Their discussion of bunbu ryōdō, the complementary cultivation of martial and literary accomplishment, is particularly valuable because it complicates the modern tendency to measure martial worth principally through combative effectiveness (Sukhoverkhov, Klimenko and Tkachenko, 2021, pp. 242–243). Strengths, Limitations and the Wider Field The article’s principal strength is its refusal to treat philosophy simply as ornament. It asks how ideas become bodily dispositions, ways of perceiving and forms of social conduct. In this respect, it sits productively within contemporary martial arts studies, which increasingly treats martial practice as cultural, embodied and socially produced rather than merely as a collection of fighting techniques. Its weakness lies in historical compression. At times the relationship between philosophical traditions and martial systems appears more direct and coherent than the evidence warrants. The narratives surrounding Zhang Sanfeng, the crane and snake, or the willow yielding beneath snow are powerful pedagogical stories, but philosophical usefulness should not be confused with historical provenance (Sukhoverkhov, Klimenko and Tkachenko, 2021, pp. 237–238). The authors recognise that some of these accounts are legendary and that distinctions such as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ martial arts are historically problematic, but this methodological distinction deserved greater prominence. Indeed, this may suggest a more fruitful reading of such material. Martial myths need not be discarded simply because their historicity is uncertain. They may instead be read as evidence of how communities subsequently chose to understand, legitimise and transmit their practice. Myth can reveal meaning without necessarily revealing origin. Directions for Further Research The paper consequently opens several worthwhile avenues for further enquiry. Ethnographic research could examine how concepts such as wuwei, non-attachment and li are interpreted within contemporary dojo rather than assuming that their textual meanings translate straightforwardly into practice. Comparative work might explore whether the same philosophical language acquires different meanings across kendō, jūdō, aikidō, karate and Chinese martial traditions, and how those meanings alter when practices move between East Asian and European cultural settings. Pedagogy deserves particular attention. If budō does not automatically create disciplined, humble or ethical people, then the instructor and training culture become analytically significant. Research might ask when hierarchy cultivates responsibility and when it produces conformity; when ritual promotes attentiveness and when it becomes empty performance; and whether proclaimed values are actually visible in relations between senior and junior practitioners. That returns me to Waterford. The significant question is not whether budō ‘teaches discipline’ or ‘works in a real fight’. Those are fragments of a much larger phenomenon. The deeper question concerns what practitioners make of the road and what kinds of practice, relationships and understandings emerge while travelling it. Budō does not guarantee wisdom. It offers a path upon which wisdom, vanity, fear, courage, insight and self-deception may all be encountered. The path moves both outwards and inwards. What we make of that journey remains our responsibility. 日本語この論文を改めて読んだのは、現在ウォーターフォードで武道クラブを立ち上げようとする中で、「武道とは何か」という問いに再び向き合っているからである。約40年間この道を歩いてきた私にとって、武道を「暴力」「規律」「護身」「実戦性」のいずれか一つで説明することはできない。どの見方も一部は正しいが、全体ではない。私は、武道そのものが自動的に規律や徳を教えるとは考えない。武道はただ存在し、そこに意味を与えるのは実践者であり、その意味形成には指導者、共同体、歴史、文化が関わる。Sukhoverkhovらは、道教の無為・自然、禅の非執着と平静、儒教の礼・義務・社会的責任が武術の実践にどのように関わってきたかを論じる。本論文の最大の強みは、哲学を装飾的な思想ではなく、身体、知覚、行動として捉える点にある。一方、張三豊や柳の逸話などでは、象徴的物語と歴史的起源が接近し過ぎる危険も見られる。今後は、こうした思想が現代の道場でどのように解釈され、実践されているかを民族誌的・比較的に研究する必要がある。武道という「道」は外へ向かう技術の道であると同時に、内へ向かう自己認識の道でもある。その道が何を生み出すかは、武道そのものではなく、私たちがどのように歩むかにかかっている。  Migration is often discussed geographically.
They are rather inadequate questions for human beings. A person who has lived between cultures for decades does not necessarily leave one identity behind and replace it neatly with another. Habits accumulate. Languages occupy different emotional spaces. Ways of greeting, apologising, teaching, disagreeing, eating, waiting and even remaining silent become embedded. Culture eventually ceases to feel like something one consciously performs. It becomes bodily. This is particularly true of budō. Decades of training do not simply leave behind a collection of techniques. They shape posture, expectations, relationships with hierarchy and ideas about effort, patience, responsibility and self-restraint. The dojo travels with you. So does the language. So does memory. An immigration office can withdraw a legal status. It cannot quite revoke these things. But I would be dishonest if I pretended that knowing this made the loss somehow easy. It did not. The pain went considerably deeper than losing a residence card. For almost thirty years, my legal status in Japan had represented something profoundly important to me. It was an official acknowledgement that, although I was not Japanese and could not participate politically in the same way as a citizen, I nevertheless belonged there in a recognised and enduring way.
And suddenly, through the brutal neutrality of a missed deadline, that official connection disappeared. There was no ceremony. No acknowledgement of the decades that preceded it. No distinction between somebody who had lived in Japan for most of an adult lifetime and somebody whose connection had been brief. There was simply a date. I had returned too late. Legally, the answer was finished. Emotionally, it was not. What hurt most was the feeling—irrational perhaps, but real nonetheless—of no longer being wanted.It was clear to me the current government of Japan no longer wanted people like me! Japan had been one of the principal answers to the question Who am I? Now the country itself seemed to be saying, at least bureaucratically: not here, not in the same way anymore. At roughly the same moment I was also selling my house. Those two events became difficult to separate. One removed a legal connection. The other removed a physical one. Together they felt almost like an eviction from a version of myself. And that still hurts. 居場所 — A Place Where One Belongs Japanese has a useful word here: 居場所 (ibasho). It can mean the place where one is, but emotionally it can carry something more: a place where one belongs, where one has a recognised place in the world. Perhaps what I feared I had lost was not simply residence. I feared I had lost my ibasho. That distinction matters because a house and an immigration status are external things, while belonging is partly internal. But knowing that does not remove grief. Indeed, perhaps grief is precisely what happens when internal belonging and external recognition suddenly separate. I still felt Japanese culture moving through my habits and decisions. I still found certain thoughts easier to formulate in Japanese. I still understood myself through decades of experience there. Yet the legal structure that had once mirrored that internal reality no longer did. The two had come apart. And then, while walking through the bamboo groves and tanbo around my former home, I came upon a field of lotus. 蓮 — hasu. A flower rooted in mud, rising through clouded water, opening above it without pretending the mud was never there.
Buddhism begins from an uncomfortable place. 苦 (ku)--dukkha. Life contains suffering, dissatisfaction, instability and loss. This is the starting point of the Four Noble Truths — 四諦 (shitai).
But standing there, the relationship seemed almost painfully obvious. My mud was not theoretical. It was grief. Loss. Dislocation. The end of a legal status I had valued deeply. The sale of a home. And the realisation that one chapter of life had closed without asking whether I was ready. The flower did not make any of that disappear. It merely offered another way to see it. 無常 — Impermanence This is not nihilism. It is 無常 (mujō)—impermanence. Not the claim that nothing matters, but almost the opposite. Things hurt because they matter.
Buddhism does not ask us to pretend otherwise. The problem begins when we require that what we love remain unchanged for it to remain meaningful. That was the part I was struggling with.
“You Must Go On” Perhaps this is where Beckett belongs in the piece. Not as an inspirational slogan. Beckett is much too unsentimental for that. At the end of The Unnamable comes the contradiction: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” There is something almost Buddhist in that refusal to resolve the contradiction neatly. I cannot go on.
I was not ready to let go. In some ways I am still not. But continuing does not require pretending that the loss was insignificant. It means carrying it differently. The mud remains mud. The lotus does not deny it. Budō and the Practice of Continuing There is something here that also returns me to budō. Martial practice frequently teaches through loss.
The lesson is not indifference. It is continuation.
A Different Kind of Residence I no longer possess the same formal right of residence (evening writing this causes pain) that once meant so much to me. That still hurts deeply. I do not want to tidy that pain away for the sake of a neat Buddhist conclusion.
But perhaps 居場所 cannot ultimately be granted entirely by an institution. Japan remains in my language.
In the landscape I can still see when I close my eyes. The sounds I hear when English is just too jarring...when the oroa of Tokyo fades away on the bike on the Waterdord Greenway... Thirty years of breakfasts, train journeys, dojo evenings, typhoons, humid summers, New Year mornings, arguments, friendships, births, losses and ordinary Tuesdays do not vanish because an immigration category changes. They become sediment. Mud, perhaps. And from that mud something else may yet grow. I cannot go on. I’ll go on. The lotus does not need to forget the mud in order to flower. They are one, indivisible. この夏、私は「故郷」と呼んできた日本に戻った。しかし、その帰国は深い喪失感に覆われていた。 私は日本でほぼ30年を過ごし、家族を築き、子どもたちを育て、仕事をし、武道を学び、日本語で考え、日本の文化の中で自分自身を形づくってきた。日本は単に「住んでいた国」ではなく、私の成人後の人生そのものに深く結びついた場所である。 しかし今回、再入国の期限を約2週間過ぎてしまったことで、それまで長く維持していた在留資格を失った。 法的には単純な手続き上の出来事であったとしても、私にとってその意味はまったく単純ではなかった。 長年、自分が日本社会と正式につながっていることに誇りを感じていた。たとえ選挙権がなくても、その在留資格は「ここに居場所がある」という公的な承認のように感じられていた。 そのため、それを失ったことは、単なるカードや資格の喪失ではなかった。 「もうここには必要とされていないのではないか」という感覚さえ生まれた。 同じ時期に、日本の家も売却した。 法的なつながりと、物理的なつながりがほぼ同時に失われたことで、自分の一部が強制的に終わらされたように感じた。 その痛みは、今も残っている。 日本語には 居場所（いばしょ） という言葉がある。 単に「いる場所」という意味ではなく、「自分がここにいてよい」「ここに自分の場所がある」という感覚を含む言葉でもある。 私が失ったと感じていたのは、在留資格だけではなく、この 居場所 だったのかもしれない。 そんな中、家の近くの竹林や田んぼの間を歩いていた時、蓮の花が咲く場所に出会った。 蓮（はす） は、仏教を象徴する代表的な花である。 根は泥の中にある。 濁った水を通って伸びる。 そして水面の上に、鮮やかで美しい花を咲かせる。 大切なのは、蓮が泥を否定していないということである。 泥がなければ、蓮もない。 仏教の出発点には 苦（く）、すなわち dukkha がある。 人生には苦しみ、不満、喪失、変化がある。 これは 四諦（したい）、すなわち四つの聖なる真理の出発点である。 苦しみがあること。 苦しみには原因があること。 そこから自由になる可能性があること。 そしてそのための道として 八正道（はっしょうどう） が示されること。 蓮そのものが四諦の直接的な象徴というわけではない。 しかし、自分が感じていた喪失と重ねると、その意味は非常に強く感じられた。 泥は消えない。 苦しみも消えない。 それでも、そこから何かが育つ可能性はある。 ここで重要になるのが 無常（むじょう） である。 無常とは、「何も意味がない」ということではない。 むしろ逆である。 物事は大切だからこそ、失われると痛い。 家も、家族も、国も、居場所も、自分の立場も、大切だからこそ、その変化は深く心に響く。 仏教が教えるのは、苦しみを感じないことではない。 変化し続けるものに永遠の安定を求めることの難しさである。 私は日本が自分を形づくったことだけでなく、日本がこれからも同じ形で自分を認め続けてくれることを望んでいた。 そこに執着があった。 そして現実は、それを許さなかった。 ここで思い浮かぶのが、サミュエル・ベケットの『名づけえぬもの』の最後の言葉である。 「進まなければならない。進めない。進もう。」 この言葉は、単純な励ましではない。 「大丈夫だ」「忘れればよい」と言っているのでもない。 進めないほど苦しい。 それでも進む。 その矛盾をそのまま抱える言葉である。 私にとって、それはこの夏の経験にとても近い。 まだ手放せていない。 まだ痛い。 しかし、それでも人生は続く。 武道にも、同じような無常の学びがある。 技は失敗する。 身体は変化する。 師は亡くなる。 道場は閉じる。 組織は変わる。 弟子は去る。 かつてできたことが、できなくなる日も来る。 武道は、ある意味で、無常を身体で学ぶ稽古でもある。 大切なのは、失わないことではない。 失った後も、どう立ち、どう礼をし、どうもう一度始めるかである。 私は以前と同じ形では、日本に「住んでいる人」ではなくなった。 それでも日本は、自分の中に残っている。 言葉の中に。 家族の中に。 習慣の中に。 教育観の中に。 武道の中に。 そして何より、自分がどのように人と関わるかという感覚の中に。 30年近い人生は、在留資格が変わったからといって消えるものではない。 それらは土のように、自分の中に積み重なっている。 泥のように。 そしてその泥から、まだ何かが咲くかもしれない。 進めない。 それでも進もう。 蓮は、花を咲かせるために泥を忘れる必要はない。  Pain, Pleasure, Belonging and Embodied Knowledge in Mixed Martial Arts. Work reviewed: Stenius, Magnus (2015), The Body in Pain and Pleasure: An Ethnography of Mixed Martial Arts, Ethnological Studies 60, Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University. There is an obvious difficulty in writing academically about fighting. One may watch martial artists train, interview them, count injuries, analyse rules and study institutions. Yet something remains frustratingly inaccessible. What does it actually feel like to have another person trying to choke you? What happens when exhaustion alters judgement? What does repeated physical contact do to fear? How does a painful technique that appears brutal from outside become understood as useful, pleasurable or even necessary by those participating in it? Magnus Stenius’ The Body in Pain and Pleasure addresses that problem by doing something both methodologically productive and academically dangerous. He gets onto the mat. Stenius spent several years conducting participant observation and training in MMA gyms, principally in Sweden but also through fieldwork in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, Brazil and the United States. His argument is that MMA cannot be adequately understood from a disembodied position because much of its meaning exists as bodily knowledge: rhythm, exhaustion, fear, trust, pain, timing, adrenaline, and the tacit understanding that develops between training partners. The researcher therefore becomes part of the research instrument. But there is a stronger possibility here. The body in Stenius’ ethnography becomes something like a social archive. It stores not merely techniques but experiences: the first awkward entrance into the gym, the embarrassment of not knowing what to wear, the memory of being submitted, the gradual disappearance of panic, the recognition of familiar bodies, the accumulated bruises, the changing sense of what counts as acceptable pain, and eventually the feeling of belonging. Martial knowledge is therefore not simply stored in the mind. It is sedimented through the body and through relationships with other bodies. That, I think, is where this thesis becomes especially valuable. The Body as a Way of Knowing Stenius situates the study within autoethnography, phenomenology and what Loïc Wacquant famously described as a form of “carnal sociology”. The basic proposition is persuasive. Martial knowledge cannot be reduced entirely to language. Anyone who has trained for a significant period knows the problem. Explaining kuzushi, distance, timing, pressure or sensitivity verbally is possible, but verbal description never fully captures the phenomenon itself. A technique becomes intelligible in a different way when another body resists it. Stenius therefore argues that his own body had to enter the cultural system he was studying. His fatigue, bruises, physical development, anxiety and eventual familiarity with MMA were not simply side effects of fieldwork. They became forms of data. Phenomenologically, this follows Merleau-Ponty: we do not merely possess bodies through which we observe the world. We encounter the world bodily. For martial-arts research, this matters enormously. A researcher standing beside the mat can observe that two practitioners are hitting or grappling with one another. The participant begins to understand something else: how force is calibrated; when a training partner withdraws pressure; how a submission is communicated before injury occurs; how panic diminishes with familiarity; how exhaustion changes decision-making; and how something externally resembling violence may internally operate through elaborate systems of cooperation. The body does not simply endure the culture. It learns the culture. Pain Is Not Simply Pain The title "The Body in Pain and Pleasure" points to another important insight. Pain within martial practice does not carry a single meaning. Pain may signal injury and danger. But it may also indicate effort, technical effectiveness, endurance, achievement or entry into a particular community of practice. Stenius connects this with Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. The trained fighter may become absorbed in an activity in which action and awareness merge, ordinary self-consciousness diminishes, and highly demanding physical activity becomes pleasurable. Pain and pleasure can therefore coexist rather than simply oppose one another. This is useful because outsiders frequently interpret bodily pain through categories developed outside the practice.
Neither interpretation should simply displace the other. The participant’s interpretation does not magically make injury harmless. Nor does the outsider’s identification of bodily harm exhaust the cultural meaning of what is occurring. The interesting space lies between them. And crucially, the gym teaches the practitioner how to interpret that space. The gym does not simply teach the body how to fight; it teaches the body what pain means, whom to trust, when to endure, when to stop, and what kind of person belongs there. Controlled Violence — But Still Violence Stenius repeatedly returns to MMA’s uneasy position between sport and violence. The fighters in his research resist descriptions of themselves as violent people. They understand their practice as disciplined, technical and regulated. MMA violence operates within tactical frameworks in which participants have consented to particular forms of bodily risk. That distinction matters. But consent in a martial environment deserves more scrutiny than it sometimes receives. It is tempting to describe the gym simply as a space of consensual violence: everyone knows what they are doing, everyone has agreed to participate, and therefore the moral problem largely disappears. Yet consent is not socially weightless. A novice trains in a culture already populated by instructors, senior students, norms of toughness, rituals, and expectations. The practitioner may technically be free to stop, yet simultaneously feel pressure not to appear weak, cowardly or unserious. A tap is straightforward. The decision about when one is permitted to tap without losing status may be much less so. Likewise, the newcomer who agrees to spar does not necessarily possess the same cultural knowledge as the experienced practitioner who understands exactly how hard the session is expected to be. Consent, therefore, exists but is continually negotiated within unequal fields of experience and authority. This does not invalidate martial training. It makes the instructor’s role more important.
The Gym as a Social Body Some of the most revealing material in Stenius’ thesis actually concerns belonging rather than fighting. The chapter Moments in the Gym follows his painfully slow movement from outsider towards recognised participant. Initially he is awkward, uncertain and intensely self-conscious. He worries about where to put his shoes, what clothes to wear, whether he is behaving correctly and whether the fighters accept him. What is fascinating is that while Stenius believes he is observing the gym, the gym is simultaneously observing him. One participant later tells him that it took perhaps a year and a half before the group believed he was serious rather than simply another temporary visitor. Stenius gradually realises that he has been subjected to an informal process resembling initiation. This is one of the richest elements of the work. Martial knowledge is therefore not simply embodied. It is socially authorised embodied knowledge.
Eventually Stenius is invited to join the group for coffee. The moment may seem trivial, but emotionally it serves almost as a rite of incorporation. He has moved from a tolerated presence to social recognition. The incident reveals something larger than MMA.
The Instructor and the Hidden Curriculum Stenius’ discussion also raises a question he does not fully pursue. Who manages this process? The coach appears throughout the fieldwork as technical instructor, gatekeeper and interpreter of acceptable behaviour. This matters because martial teaching always contains a hidden curriculum. An instructor teaches obvious things: technique, fitness, tactics, movement. But the instructor is simultaneously communicating other lessons.
Nevertheless, they are learned. The instructor therefore occupies an important ethical position. Someone may be technically exceptional while possessing little awareness of group dynamics, vulnerability or the subtle pressures that accompany belonging. In such a case, harmful norms can become embodied precisely because nobody explicitly intended to teach them. Conversely, a reflective instructor can create a culture in which toughness does not require humiliation, physical challenge coexists with care, and belonging is not contingent on ignoring legitimate limits. The gym is therefore not socially neutral. Technique is transmitted within a community, and communities teach people how to understand themselves. Bourdieu: Learning to Belong Without Thinking About ItBourdieu provides a particularly useful way to extend Stenius without overburdening the analysis. At the beginning of his fieldwork Stenius cannot decode the gym. He has to think consciously about everything.
It also exists through tiny distinctions visible only to those who already belong: posture, vocabulary, timing, confidence, bodily ease, the way someone steps onto the mat or interacts with a senior practitioner. Those signs become readable within the community. The martial body therefore communicates status even when nobody mentions rank. Masculinity — or Comradeship? Stenius also engages extensively with gender. The obvious interpretation of MMA is hegemonic masculinity: muscular men engaging publicly in controlled violence and displaying endurance, courage and domination. Stenius rightly considers this insufficient. His fieldwork instead reveals bodies that are deeply dependent upon other bodies.
The fighter who appears radically autonomous in the cage is actually the product of profound dependency. His or her body has been constructed collectively. Coaches, sparring partners and other practitioners literally help manufacture the supposedly individual athlete. That observation destabilises the mythology of the solitary warrior. But I am less persuaded that homoeroticism always provides the most productive language for interpreting these relationships. Physical closeness between men certainly complicates simplistic accounts of masculinity. Yet embodied intimacy does not necessarily require a sexual interpretative frame. There is another vocabulary available: comradeship, interdependence, trust and mutual formation. These concepts may tell us more about what actually sustains martial communities. The fighter needs another body not simply to defeat but to become. The Great Strength — and Danger — of AutoethnographyThe strongest methodological claim in the thesis is also its greatest vulnerability. Stenius argues that without physically participating, he could never properly understand MMA. I largely agree. But embodied access does not necessarily produce epistemological privilege. Being punched provides knowledge unavailable to the spectator. It does not automatically provide the correct interpretation of being punched. Indeed, immersion creates its own blindness. Stenius provides a wonderful example himself. Near the end of the thesis, Coach Chris tells him that he seemed so intensely focused on observing everyone that he sometimes forgot to become genuinely interested in the people themselves. Chris concludes:
The researcher who enters the field imagines that proximity solves the problem of distance. But proximity creates different problems. Stenius wants acceptance.
Quite the opposite: his willingness to disclose it makes the ethnography valuable. But the body that provides access also develops loyalties. The researcher who learns the culture also learns its justifications. Autoethnography therefore does not abolish the insider/outsider problem. It relocates it inside the researcher. Pain, Pleasure — and Comradeship This is perhaps where Stenius’ thesis can be pushed beyond its own conclusions. What makes martial training meaningful is not simply that pain can become pleasure. It is that pain becomes socially shared and interpreted. A difficult training session undertaken alone is exhaustion. The same session, undertaken repeatedly with trusted partners, becomes memory, narrative, and belonging.
They are not simply attached to an activity. They have constructed part of themselves through other people. This also connects Stenius with the problem of martial community more broadly. The boundaries that initially make entry difficult can ultimately make belonging meaningful. Yet those same boundaries can become exclusionary. A community may legitimately require commitment before offering trust. But if hardship itself becomes proof of moral worth, or if outsiders must continually be diminished to maintain the group’s identity, comradeship can turn into tribalism. The difference is partly determined by leadership. A healthy dojo or gym uses difficulty to build confidence, responsibility and relationship. An unhealthy one uses difficulty to enforce obedience and reproduce grievance. Final Thoughts The Body in Pain and Pleasure is occasionally overstuffed with theory. Flow, performativity, phenomenology, materiality, posthumanism, masculinity, habitus and autoethnography sometimes compete rather than cooperate. Some historical claims are also broader than the evidence comfortably supports, and the language surrounding masculinity occasionally reaches further than necessary. Yet these weaknesses are offset by the remarkable honesty of the empirical material. Stenius allows us to watch a researcher become confused, bruised, insecure, accepted and eventually emotionally attached to the community he intended to study. That journey produces the thesis’ most enduring insight. Martial arts are not understood simply by looking at bodies. They are understood by asking what bodies learn to feel, tolerate, fear, enjoy and recognise in one another. Pain becomes meaningful because a culture teaches us how to interpret it. Violence becomes sport because communities establish limits around it. Technique becomes knowledge because another body resists us. Belonging becomes embodied when we no longer have to ask where we should stand. And the instructor, whether consciously or not, helps determine what those experiences come to mean. Perhaps, then, the deepest insight of Stenius’ ethnography is not that the researcher must suffer in order to understand fighting. It is that martial knowledge exists between bodies. No fighter constructs themselves alone. No martial community is produced merely through technique. And neither, ultimately, is the ethnographer. 日本語要約Magnus Steniusの『The Body in Pain and Pleasure』は、MMAを外部から観察するだけでは理解できないと考え、研究者自身が実際にトレーニングへ参加するオートエスノグラフィーを用いた研究である。Steniusにとって、身体は単なる研究対象ではなく、知識を得るための手段でもある。痛み、疲労、恐怖、信頼、タイミング、身体接触といった経験は、言葉だけでは十分に説明できない身体知として蓄積されていく。 本稿では、この身体を「社会的アーカイブ」として捉える。身体は技術だけでなく、失敗、痛み、承認、仲間との関係、そして「自分はここに属している」という感覚まで記憶していく。道場やジムは、単に戦い方を教える場所ではない。身体に対して、何を痛みとして受け入れるのか、誰を信頼するのか、いつ我慢し、いつ止めるのか、そして誰がその共同体に属するのかを教える場所でもある。 Steniusは、MMAにおける暴力を単なる野蛮な行為とは捉えない。そこには規則、同意、技術、自己制御がある。しかし本稿では、「同意」も単純ではないと考える。初心者は、指導者、先輩、忍耐や強さを重視する文化の中で判断している。形式的には自由に止められても、「弱いと思われたくない」という圧力が存在する場合もある。そのため、指導者には技術だけでなく、安全、信頼、限界、所属をどのように形成するかという責任がある。 また、SteniusはMMAの男性性を「ハイブリッドな男性性」やホモソーシャルな関係から分析する。しかし本稿では、男性同士の身体的近さをすぐに性的な枠組みで捉えるよりも、仲間意識、相互依存、信頼、共同的な形成という言葉の方が武道共同体を理解する上で有効ではないかと考える。 最も重要なのは、武道の知識は個人の中だけに存在しないという点である。技術は相手の身体が抵抗することで意味を持ち、成長は仲間に見守られることで認識される。痛みもまた、共同体の中で意味づけられる。 したがって、武道の身体とは孤立した身体ではない。 それは他者との関係の中で作られ、記憶し、変化していく身体である。 そしておそらくSteniusの研究が示す最も重要なことは、武道の知識は身体の中にあるだけではなく、身体と身体の「あいだ」に存在するということである。  Martial Arts Rivalry, Comradeship and the Fear of Being Exposed
Article reviewed: Morgan, Kai (2020), “Martial Arts, Religion and Ressentiment”, script presented at the 6th Martial Arts Studies Conference: Martial Arts, Religion and Spirituality, July 2020. Martial artists speak frequently of respect, humility and fraternity. We bow before entering the dojo, acknowledge our teachers, thank our training partners and repeat the familiar assurance that different traditions are simply different paths towards the same destination. Yet martial-arts culture is also remarkably fertile ground for suspicion, contempt and tribalism. Traditional practitioners dismiss combat sports as crude or spiritually empty. Combat-sport practitioners ridicule traditional arts as theatrical, compliant or delusional. Successful schools are labelled “McDojos”; small schools may treat their lack of students as proof of integrity; practitioners who spar dismiss those who do not, while those who avoid competitive testing sometimes redefine fighting ability as spiritually inferior. Online, technical disagreement rapidly becomes mockery, lineage policing and personal attack. Kai Morgan’s conference paper, Martial Arts, Religion and Ressentiment, offers a useful framework for understanding this behaviour. Drawing upon Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler and Stefano Tomelleri, Morgan asks whether martial-arts rivalry may arise not merely from honest technical disagreement, but from frustrated desire, insecurity and powerlessness. The paper is valuable because it asks us to look beneath martial artists’ stated principles. A declaration of moral, technical or spiritual superiority may not always emerge from confidence. It may instead defend against the disturbing possibility that another practitioner, school or tradition possesses something we desire but cannot attain. Morgan calls this ressentiment. However, the dojo is not merely a place in which ressentiment develops. It is also often a place of comradeship, belonging and mutual support. For many practitioners, martial training provides a community that wider society has failed to offer. The real question is therefore not whether the dojo produces solidarity or resentment, but how one can become the other when leadership fails to understand the social world forming around the practice. Ressentiment and the Inversion of Values Morgan begins with a familiar contradiction. Martial arts and religions may claim to pursue common ethical or spiritual ends, yet both can produce intense hostility towards neighbouring groups that appear, from the outside, remarkably similar. The stronger a tradition’s claim to exclusive truth—whether based upon lineage, effectiveness, authenticity, morality or spirituality—the easier it becomes to portray competing systems as fraudulent or misguided. The issue is not simply why martial artists disagree. Disagreement is inevitable and often productive. The deeper question is why disagreement so regularly becomes contempt. Morgan turns first to Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morality. For Nietzsche, ressentiment develops when people feel unable to act directly against those they envy or resent. Unable to defeat the stronger party on its own terms, the resentful person creates a new system of values in which apparent weakness becomes virtue and the rival’s strengths become moral defects. Power becomes cruelty. Wealth becomes corruption. Confidence becomes arrogance. Physical strength becomes brutishness. Failure, exclusion or weakness may then be reinterpreted as proof of purity. This is Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values: the reversal of an existing value system so that the person unable to succeed within it can nevertheless imagine themselves morally superior. Morgan applies this neatly to martial arts. A financially unsuccessful instructor may condemn a thriving school as a McDojo, not because its teaching is demonstrably poor, but because commercial success threatens an identity built around sacrifice and authenticity. Lack of success is then transformed into evidence of moral seriousness. The same process appears online. A practitioner unable or unwilling to test technical claims physically may seek status through pedantry, terminology, lineage disputes or personal attack. Correcting another person’s Japanese, criticising their body or questioning their credentials becomes a substitute for meaningful embodied exchange. Morgan also considers instructors who redefine martial ability in order to protect themselves from testing. Someone uncomfortable with sparring might declare it crude, ego-driven, or spiritually immature. That judgement may occasionally be sincere. Not every martial art must prioritise fighting or competition. Ressentiment arises, however, when a person privately desires the authority associated with combative competence but, unable to demonstrate it, condemns that competence as morally inferior. The problem is not the pursuit of spirituality, health, aesthetics or personal cultivation. It is the resentful conversion of another person’s capacity into a vice because that capacity exposes a weakness in oneself. Scheler and the Unequal Dojo Max Scheler accepted the importance of ressentiment but rejected Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity was its principal source. For Scheler, ressentiment emerged from the contradictions of modern society. Modern societies proclaim equality while preserving substantial inequalities of power, wealth, education and status. People are told that advancement is open to everyone, yet repeatedly encounter barriers that prevent equal participation. The distance between promised equality and lived inequality produces frustration and humiliation. This has obvious relevance to martial-arts institutions. The dojo often presents itself as a meritocracy. Advancement is supposedly earned through discipline, effort and ability. Rank appears to offer an objective measurement of progress. Everyone begins as a novice and moves through a transparent hierarchy. Yet martial organisations are rarely pure meritocracies. Promotion may also depend upon loyalty, money, proximity to senior teachers, organisational politics, nationality, gender, age, physical capacity or willingness to reproduce the dominant culture of the group. The practitioner is told that the hierarchy reflects ability, only to discover that certain forms of ability are ignored and certain individuals remain institutionally untouchable. This can create a particularly martial form of ressentiment because the hierarchy has been represented as both technically and morally deserved. The black belt therefore becomes more than a marker of training. It is converted into symbolic proof of character, legitimacy and authority. Those excluded from recognition may create rival organisations, invent alternative histories or condemn the ranking system entirely. Those who benefit from the hierarchy may dismiss critics as jealous, disloyal or insufficiently disciplined. Both responses may contain truth. Both may also conceal struggles over status. The Dojo as Comradeship Yet the dojo cannot be understood only as a hierarchy or a site of domination. For many people, it is a community of comradeship. Practitioners do not always arrive simply because they wish to punch, throw or defend themselves. Some come seeking structure, recognition, continuity, friendship, or a place where their life experiences make sense. Others arrive after isolation, displacement, failure, bereavement or personal crisis. Many find in martial practice something wider society has not provided: a place where they are noticed, given responsibilities, challenged and permitted to grow. This is one of the great possibilities of martial arts. The regularity of training, the mutual dependence of partners, and the slow accumulation of shared experience can create bonds unlike those of ordinary friendship. Practitioners struggle, fail and improve together. They learn one another’s limitations and, at their best, protect one another without removing the challenge necessary for growth. The dojo can therefore become a genuine support network: a place of foundation rather than retreat. Hierarchy itself is not necessarily destructive. It may provide stability. Ritual may provide continuity. Rank may recognise effort. Belonging may give people the confidence required to participate more fully in the wider world. The danger arises when the instructor understands technique but not community. A teacher may possess considerable martial knowledge while lacking any real awareness of group formation, vulnerability, dependency or exclusion. Such an instructor may imagine that teaching technique is sufficient, while ignoring the fact that a social world is developing around the practice. In the absence of thoughtful leadership, comradeship can become tribalism. Loyalty may harden into conformity. Shared identity may become hostility towards outsiders. Affection for a teacher may become dependency. The language of family may discourage criticism, while the language of tradition may protect unequal or harmful relationships. The dojo then becomes a place where resentment is not transformed but stored. Individual disappointments are repeated, confirmed and given a collective language. Members reassure one another that outsiders do not understand them, that rival schools are corrupt, that former students are disloyal or that criticism merely proves the group’s special status. What began as mutual support becomes a closed circuit of grievance. This is where the instructor’s responsibility extends beyond technical competence. The teacher is not merely transmitting movement. The teacher is shaping a social environment. From my own experience as a classroom teacher, martial arts student, and citizen, communities do not flourish simply because well-intentioned people gather together. Beneath the formal activity is always another curriculum concerning who is heard, who is trusted, who is corrected, who is protected and who is permitted to change. The same is true in the classroom and the dojo. An instructor who fails to recognise this hidden curriculum may unintentionally allow the dojo to become a place of festering rather than flourishing. A healthy community is not one without jealousy, frustration, disappointment or conflict. These are unavoidable features of human association. The crucial question is whether the community helps its members work through them or converts them into permanent identities and shared enemies. A flourishing dojo does not deny ressentiment. It gives practitioners ways to recognise, articulate and transform it. Foucault and the Production of Martial Truth Morgan largely approaches ressentiment through the lens of moral psychology and social relations. A Foucauldian reading pushes the question further by examining how martial institutions produce the categories through which practitioners understand themselves. For Foucault, power does not simply prohibit. It produces knowledge, identities, norms and truths. Institutions teach people how to classify bodies, recognise expertise and distinguish normal practice from deviance. The dojo is one such institution. Through repetition, grading, etiquette, terminology and authorised history, practitioners learn what counts as correct posture, legitimate violence, proper behaviour and authentic tradition. They also learn who may speak, who may correct whom and whose interpretation carries authority. A practitioner does not enter the dojo with a fully formed understanding of effectiveness. The organisation helps produce that understanding. One school may define effectiveness through competitive sparring. Another may define it through fidelity to kata. Others may prioritise self-defence, internal development, historical preservation, health or character education. Each system produces evidence suited to its own claims. The training method defines the test, the test validates the training method, and those who succeed within it acquire authority to defend the system. Ressentiment appears when competing systems expose the contingency of these truths. The traditional practitioner may resent the combat athlete because competitive success establishes an alternative regime of truth. The combat athlete may resent the traditionalist because lineage, cultural legitimacy and historical depth cannot be acquired simply by winning contests. Each possesses a form of authority the other cannot fully control. The conflict is therefore not reducible to jealousy between individuals. It is a struggle between systems that produce different kinds of martial subjects. Bourdieu and Martial Capital Pierre Bourdieu offers another extension. Martial arts may be understood as a social field in which participants compete for different forms of capital. These include physical ability, technical knowledge, historical and cultural knowledge, relationships with influential teachers, rank, lineage, commercial success and public recognition. No practitioner possesses all these forms equally. A successful fighter may lack historical knowledge. A scholar may lack competitive experience. A gifted teacher may struggle commercially. A senior-ranked instructor may depend heavily upon organisational recognition. A large school may possess resources but little prestige among traditionalists. Ressentiment becomes likely when one form of capital is threatened by another. The traditional teacher may dismiss sporting achievement as undermining lineage-based authority. The fighter may ridicule ritual and scholarship because these produce prestige unavailable through competition alone. The small instructor may condemn commercialisation because economic success exposes limitations in institutional reach. Each group attempts to establish its preferred capital as the legitimate measure of martial worth. This is why debates over the “best” martial art are rarely resolved through evidence. Participants do not simply disagree about techniques. They disagree about the currency in which value should be measured. A karate practitioner, an MMA competitor, a historian and a self-defence instructor may all use the word “effective” while referring to entirely different purposes. Ressentiment enters when one group’s preferred standard is disguised as neutral or universal judgement. Hegemony and the Story of the “Real” Martial Art Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps explain how certain martial values come to appear natural. At different historical moments, legitimacy has been associated with military lineage, national discipline, spiritual cultivation, sporting success, street effectiveness, scientific training or commercial professionalism. These standards are not neutral. They favour particular institutions and marginalise others. The rise of MMA, for example, helped establish pressure-testing and cross-training as powerful measures of credibility. This corrected many unrealistic claims within traditional martial arts. It also produced its own assumptions: that rule-bound competitive success provides the final standard against which all martial practice should be judged. Traditional systems sometimes respond by retreating into claims that cannot be tested. Their techniques are too dangerous for competition; their knowledge is reserved for advanced students; their true purpose is spiritual rather than combative. Some of these claims may be reasonable. A practice should be judged according to its actual purpose. Yet they may also function ideologically, protecting authority from scrutiny. Ressentiment can therefore become organisational doctrine. A group’s insecurity is converted into a narrative of persecution: outsiders do not understand us; modern fighters are merely athletes; scholars lack embodied knowledge; commercial schools have sold out; traditionalists are trapped in fantasy. Such stories bind the group together while ensuring that contrary evidence is not seen as an opportunity for learning but as an attack upon the community. Elias and Civilised Hostility Norbert Elias offers a further complication. Martial arts often present themselves as methods for disciplining violence. Through etiquette, rules, hierarchy and emotional restraint, dangerous encounters are transformed into controlled social practices. Yet the suppression of direct violence does not eliminate rivalry. It relocates it. Where practitioners cannot simply fight one another to establish superiority, conflict reappears through reputation, gossip, exclusion, credential disputes, technical criticism and online performance. The more civilised the external behaviour, the more displaced the hostility may become. A practitioner bows, smiles and speaks of mutual respect while quietly denying another teacher legitimacy. Organisations avoid open confrontation while manoeuvring over recognition, membership and historical authority. Social media turns restrained bodily aggression into largely unrestricted symbolic aggression. This does not make etiquette false or useless. Ritual restraint is preferable to actual violence. But civility should not be mistaken for the absence of conflict. Sometimes the bow conceals the struggle. The Limits of Ressentiment Morgan is careful to distinguish ressentiment from legitimate criticism. This distinction is essential. Not every accusation of fraud is motivated by jealousy. Some schools are exploitative. Some instructors exaggerate their ability, manipulate students or sell rank. Some training methods create dangerous illusions. Technical and ethical criticism are necessary. To diagnose every critic as resentful would itself become a way of avoiding accountability. Nor should commercial success, sporting achievement or institutional prestige automatically be treated as proof of quality. A thriving organisation may indeed be a McDojo. A celebrated fighter may be a poor teacher. An ancient lineage may reproduce ineffective or abusive practice. The concept becomes useful only when it encourages self-examination rather than silencing disagreement. The necessary question is not only: Is this criticism accurate? It is also: What desire, insecurity or threatened identity may be shaping its intensity and form? A claim may contain factual truth while still being driven by ressentiment. Equally, someone accused of jealousy may be identifying a genuine injustice. Motivation does not determine validity, but it helps explain why particular disputes become so emotionally charged. We must also avoid reducing structural problems to private emotions. Practitioners compete for students, recognition, facilities, legitimacy and livelihoods. Marginalised members may reasonably resent organisations that proclaim equality while denying them advancement. Scheler’s insight remains important: resentment grows where formal promises and lived realities diverge. Tomelleri and the Possibility of Fraternity Nietzsche and Scheler largely treat ressentiment as poisonous. Stefano Tomelleri offers Morgan a more constructive possibility. For Tomelleri, ressentiment is not a disease confined to the weak or the morally defective. It is a recurring feature of human relationships. We compare ourselves with others, experience failure and dependency, and discover that our sense of self is never entirely independent. This pain can lead towards hostility and withdrawal. But it may also become transformative. Ressentiment can force us to recognise the fiction of complete self-sufficiency. The rival exposes our limitations but also reveals our dependence on others for recognition, development, and meaning. Tomelleri calls the positive alternative fraternity. Fraternity is not mere kindness or passive tolerance. Benevolence can remain one-sided: I decide to be generous while preserving my position of superiority. Fraternity must be constructed mutually, including with the rival whose actions cannot be controlled. Martial practice is a powerful site for exploring this idea. A training partner is both a helper and an obstacle. The partner resists, frustrates and exposes us. Without that resistance, however, genuine learning is impossible. The Japanese term aite—相手—captures something of this relationship. The other is partner, opponent and counterpart. Technique acquires meaning only through encounter with another body. The rival is therefore not an interruption to self-development. The rival helps make development possible. This does not require eliminating competition. Fraternity without challenge can become sentimental and empty. The point is to transform rivalry from a struggle to annihilate the other into a relationship in which both parties grow. The person who exposes my weakness may also enable me to transcend it. Beyond the Same Mountain Morgan concludes by questioning the familiar claim that different martial arts are simply different paths up the same mountain. The metaphor sounds generous, but assumes that every tradition shares the same destination. In practice, martial arts often ask different questions and pursue different ends. Some preserve cultural heritage. Some prepare athletes for competition. Some teach civilian self-protection. Others cultivate health, discipline, spirituality, performance or community. Treating them as imperfect attempts to reach one universal summit may simply reproduce the observer’s preferred definition of martial arts. Drawing upon Steven Smith, Morgan proposes the alternative image of “bowl climbing.” Rather than beginning on separate paths that converge towards a single summit, traditions may begin within a shared historical or cultural space and diverge in different directions. They retain points of contact, but their purposes diverge. This provides a more honest basis for dialogue. A jūdō competitor and an aikidō practitioner need not decide which art is universally superior. They can instead ask what kinds of body, behaviour and relationship each practice seeks to produce. The aim is not to declare every art equally valid. Some claims remain false, harmful or incoherent. The goal is to establish the terms upon which meaningful comparison becomes possible. Before asking which system is better, we must ask: better for what, for whom, under what conditions, and according to whose values? Closing Thoughts Kai Morgan’s Martial Arts, Religion and Ressentiment gives us a compelling language for discussing something martial artists often prefer not to acknowledge. Behind declarations of authenticity, spirituality, realism, or superiority may lie an uncomfortable fear: that another practitioner, school, or tradition possesses a form of power, recognition, or legitimacy that exposes the limits of our own. Nietzsche identifies the inversion through which weakness may be reimagined as moral superiority. Scheler locates resentment within societies and institutions that promise equality while preserving hierarchy. Tomelleri shows how the painful encounter with a rival might be redirected towards fraternity. Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci and Elias allow us to go further. They show that martial resentment is not merely an individual defect. It is produced through regimes of truth, struggles for symbolic capital, hegemonic definitions of legitimacy and civilised forms of displaced conflict. Yet the dojo is not only a site of ressentiment. It can also be a place where people arrive carrying wounds, disappointments and unfinished lives, and where disciplined comradeship gives them a firmer foundation from which to engage the world. That outcome is not automatic. Without reflective leadership, the same bonds that sustain people may isolate them. Loyalty may become obedience, fraternity may become tribalism, and shared struggle may become a story of superiority and persecution. Perhaps the deepest responsibility of the instructor is therefore not simply to preserve a tradition or produce competent practitioners. It is to cultivate a community in which belonging does not depend upon exclusion, and in which insecurity is not allowed to harden into collective grievance. The mature dojo is not one in which ressentiment never appears. It is one in which ressentiment is recognised, challenged, and gradually transformed through practice, responsibility, and encounters with others. Human flourishing begins when a community no longer asks its members to diminish outsiders to secure their own belonging. 日本語要約 武道は礼節、謙虚さ、相互尊重を重視すると語られる一方、流派間の対立、正統性をめぐる争い、他者への軽蔑も生み出す。Kai Morganは、ニーチェ、シェーラー、トメレリの「ルサンチマン」という概念を用い、自分が得られない強さ、成功、権威を持つ相手の価値を否定することで、自らを道徳的に優位に置こうとする心理を考察する。 しかし、道場は単なる対立や支配の場ではない。多くの人にとって、道場は友情、規律、承認、共同体を得る場所であり、社会の中で居場所を見つけられなかった人々を支える基盤にもなり得る。 問題は、指導者が技術だけを理解し、共同体の形成や人間関係を理解しない場合に生じる。仲間意識は排他性へ、忠誠心は服従へ、伝統は批判を拒む仕組みへと変化する可能性がある。その時、道場は不満を変化させる場所ではなく、不満を蓄積し、外部への敵意を育てる場所となる。 トメレリは、ルサンチマンを単なる毒ではなく、成長の契機として捉える。他者は自分の弱さを暴く存在であると同時に、成長を可能にする相手でもある。成熟した道場とは、対立や嫉妬が存在しない場所ではない。それらを認識し、修練、責任、他者との関係を通じて変化させる場所である。 真の共同体は、外部の人間を劣ったものとすることで内部の結束を保つのではなく、所属する人々がより広い社会へ開かれていくための基盤となる。  Primary Text Under Review Sánchez García, R. & Malcolm, D. (2010). De-civilizing, Civilizing or Informalizing? The International Development of Mixed Martial Arts. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 45(1), 39–58. About FART: it is a series of reflective essays that examine influential publications in the growing field of Martial Arts Studies. Rather than serving as a conventional article review, each FART uses a single publication as a point of departure for broader scholarly reflection. My purpose is neither to determine whether an author is simply "right" nor "wrong", but to explore the explanatory strengths—and occasionally the limitations—of the theoretical framework employed. The article therefore remains the primary text under review, whilst the wider discussion considers what additional insights emerge when the same empirical evidence is viewed through alternative heuristic lenses. Introduction One of the reasons I selected this paper is because it resonates with an experience I continue to encounter within my own professional life. As both an educator and a lifelong practitioner of Japanese budō, I have often found that proposals to introduce budō into educational settings are met with understandable, though frequently unexamined, reservations. At the school in which I currently teach, for example, a proposal to establish a budō programme has thus far failed to gain support because martial arts are assumed to encourage violence. Whilst I fully appreciate the safeguarding responsibilities of schools, I have often wondered whether such concerns reveal as much about our own cultural assumptions as they do about budō itself. Having spent more than three decades living, studying and teaching in Japan, I have come to appreciate that the Japanese conception of budō sits rather uneasily alongside many contemporary Western understandings of violence. Within Japanese budō, violence is neither celebrated nor ignored; rather, it is disciplined, ritualised and ultimately subordinated to the cultivation of character. Kano Jigoro's transformation of jūjutsu into jūdō, discussed in my previous FART through Dario Mazzola's The Gentle Way, remains perhaps the clearest articulation of this philosophy. It was therefore with considerable interest that I approached Sánchez García and Malcolm's examination of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). At first glance, MMA appears to represent the very antithesis of Kano's educational project. Yet the authors ask a far more sophisticated question than whether MMA is inherently violent. Instead, they ask what its emergence reveals about Norbert Elias' theory of the civilising process. My own purpose, however, is slightly different. Rather than asking whether Elias is correct, I wish to explore the explanatory reach of his framework. Does figurational sociology sufficiently account for the evidence presented, or might alternative theoretical heuristics reveal dimensions of the same material that remain comparatively underdeveloped? Summary of the Article Sánchez García and Malcolm challenge the popular assumption that Mixed Martial Arts represents a process of de-civilisation or a return to barbaric combat. Drawing principally upon Elias' figurational sociology, whilst extending it through Cas Wouters' concept of informalisation, they argue that MMA is better understood as a contemporary manifestation of long-term civilising processes than as evidence of their reversal. The authors trace MMA's historical development from early contests between practitioners of different martial traditions to the emergence of highly organised promotions such as the UFC. Although early marketing deliberately emphasised spectacle and brutality, the sport itself became progressively more regulated, technically sophisticated and strategically complex. Rules evolved, safety standards improved and competitors increasingly displayed high levels of tactical awareness and emotional self-control. Public perceptions of exceptional violence, they argue, owe considerably more to media representation than to empirical evidence concerning injury or participant behaviour. Consequently, MMA should be understood not as a rejection of civilisation but as an example of how contemporary societies negotiate excitement, risk and regulation simultaneously. Situating the Article within the Field This paper occupies an important position within Martial Arts Studies because it demonstrates the continuing explanatory power of Elias' sociology in understanding the evolution of combat sports. Rather than abandoning the civilising thesis when confronted with an apparently contradictory phenomenon, Sánchez García and Malcolm refine it through Wouters' concept of informalisation, arguing that modern societies increasingly replace external regulation with heightened forms of internal self-restraint. Read alongside Mazzola's discussion of Kano Jigoro, an interesting convergence emerges. Both papers reject simplistic understandings of violence. Mazzola demonstrates that violence may become educational when disciplined by ethical purpose. Sánchez García and Malcolm similarly argue that visible physical intensity does not necessarily indicate diminished social restraint. In both cases, violence is neither eliminated nor celebrated; rather, it is regulated, contextualised and rendered socially meaningful. Critical Engagement The paper is both thoughtful and persuasive. Nevertheless, it also raises an important methodological question. Is Elias sufficient? Read through Elias, MMA appears as an evolving configuration of behavioural regulation characterised by increasing self-restraint despite apparently relaxed external rules. This is undoubtedly a compelling interpretation. Yet alternative theoretical perspectives illuminate rather different aspects of exactly the same empirical evidence. From a Foucauldian perspective, the central issue is no longer behavioural regulation but the production of knowledge itself. The question becomes not whether MMA is objectively more violent, but how violence came to be constituted as an object of discourse. Medical expertise, political rhetoric, media representation and sporting governance collectively produced particular understandings of MMA that acquired the status of accepted truth. Violence, in this reading, is not merely observed; it is socially constructed through historically contingent regimes of truth. Bourdieu shifts our attention once more. His concern is not primarily with violence but with legitimacy. Why has Olympic judo acquired unquestioned educational authority whilst MMA struggled for decades to achieve comparable social acceptance despite increasingly similar levels of regulation and practitioner discipline? The answer lies not simply in behaviour but in symbolic capital. Different martial arts occupy different positions within social fields, accumulating varying degrees of prestige, legitimacy and cultural authority. Finally, Gramsci encourages us to examine the operation of cultural hegemony. Educational institutions, governments and the media rarely impose understandings of civilisation through coercion alone. Rather, they cultivate forms of common sense that gradually come to appear entirely natural. My own experience within education illustrates this rather well. Resistance to budō has not arisen from hostility towards Japanese culture, but from an inherited Western understanding of violence that has become sufficiently hegemonic to appear self-evident. This observation extends beyond martial arts. Elias associates civilisation with increasing behavioural restraint, yet critical social theorists remind us that the very meaning of "civilisation" is never politically neutral. Modern liberal societies frequently identify civilisation with declining interpersonal violence whilst paying comparatively less attention to structural, symbolic or economic forms of violence. The civilising process, therefore, may itself constitute a culturally situated narrative rather than a universally accepted description of historical progress. The question is no longer simply whether societies become more civilised, but whose understanding of civilisation acquires sufficient authority to become accepted as common sense. None of these perspectives invalidates Elias. On the contrary, they reveal his continuing importance. However, they also demonstrate that figurational sociology does not exhaust the complexity of the evidence before us. Elias explains changing patterns of behaviour with remarkable clarity. Foucault reveals the discursive production of violence. Bourdieu exposes struggles over legitimacy and symbolic capital. Gramsci reminds us that all such understandings ultimately depend upon hegemonic constructions of common sense. Future Directions Perhaps the next stage of Martial Arts Studies lies less in seeking a single grand explanatory theory than in encouraging greater dialogue between complementary theoretical traditions. Elias remains indispensable for understanding long-term behavioural regulation. Yet Foucault illuminates the production of regimes of truth, Bourdieu reveals struggles over legitimacy and symbolic capital, whilst Gramsci demonstrates how dominant understandings of violence and civilisation become culturally normalised. Rather than asking which theory is correct, Martial Arts Studies may benefit from asking what each theoretical perspective enables us to see—and what it simultaneously leaves in the shadows. Concluding Thoughts Sánchez García and Malcolm have written an important paper. Not because they finally resolve the question of whether MMA is civilising or de-civilising, but because they invite us to reconsider how we explain martial practice in the first place. For me, the most enduring contribution of this article lies not in its defence of Elias but in the opportunity it provides to place Elias into conversation with Foucault, Bourdieu and Gramsci. The result is not theoretical competition but theoretical enrichment. The empirical evidence remains unchanged; what changes is our capacity to see its different dimensions. Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of Martial Arts Studies itself. No single theory possesses a monopoly on explanation. Every heuristic illuminates certain aspects of social life whilst simultaneously consigning others to the analytical periphery. The task of scholarship is therefore not to defend a single lens, but to recognise what each allows us to see—and, equally importantly, what each leaves unseen. Hatch thought The measure of a good theory is not that it explains everything, but that it knows where its explanatory reach ends and invites another conversation to begin. 本稿では、Sánchez García と Malcolm による総合格闘技（MMA）研究を取り上げ、その議論を足掛かりに、武道研究における理論的枠組みの説明力について考察した。著者らは、ノルベルト・エリアスの「文明化の過程」と Wouters の「インフォーマライゼーション（非形式化）」概念を用い、MMA は「脱文明化」の産物ではなく、むしろ高度な自己規律と制度化を伴う現代的な格闘文化であると論じている。 本稿はこの解釈を高く評価しつつも、エリアスだけで十分なのかという問いを提起した。同じ事例をフーコーの視点から読めば、「暴力」とは客観的事実ではなく、政治・医療・メディアなどの言説によって構築される〈真理の体制〉として理解できる。さらにブルデューは、柔道が教育的価値を持つ一方で、MMA が長く野蛮視された背景を「象徴資本」と「正統性」の問題として説明するだろう。グラムシは、何が「文明的」で何が「暴力的」であるかという判断そのものが、文化的ヘゲモニーによって「常識」として形成される過程に注目する。 私自身、日本の武道教育に長年携わってきた経験から、武道が学校教育の中で「暴力を助長するもの」と理解される場面にたびたび直面してきた。しかし、それは武道そのものよりも、西洋社会における暴力理解や文明観を反映している可能性がある。 本論文が示唆する最も重要な点は、単一の理論で武道を説明し尽くすことはできないということである。エリアス、フーコー、ブルデュー、グラムシは互いに競合するのではなく、それぞれ異なる側面を照らし出す補完的な分析視角として理解すべきであり、武道研究のさらなる発展も、こうした理論間の対話の中にこそ見出されるのではないだろうか。 Machida, 2026 |
James M. HatchInternational Educator who happens to be passionate about Chito Ryu Karate. Born in Ireland, educated in Canada, matured in Japan Archives
October 2026
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