Craig Colbeck has written a fascinating meditation on the problem of martial arts history.

Labeling karate a tradition relieves it of the obligations of a rigorous historicity; or rather, it establishes a distinct set of historical expectations. The relationship between tradition and history is problematic: by definition, every tradition needs a history, for legitimacy is founded in part on a recounting of origins, yet history is the description of change across time, which threatens the validity of a tradition.

I deal with martial arts history all the time: students who are current practitioners, or just consumers of popular culture, want to write papers and ask questions about it all the time. The main problem, as Colbeck notes, is the really weak quality of the pre-modern sources, leaving us with un-falsifiable myths; Colbeck's litany of questions which aren't really worth his time to answer about Karate is by itself worth the price of admission. His main conclusion, if I can distill it down without doing it great violence, is that Karate is as much of a modern invention as any martial art, at least the Japanese ones, all of which really are late-19c/early-20c inventions. It's much more interesting that I make it sound, and anyone interested in cultural essentialism (nationalism, cultural uniqueness, insider/outsider narratives) should spend the time to read Colbeck.

Jonathan Dresner - 5/20/2005

Don't get me started on ninja, please....

I don't assign research papers anymore if I don't have time for a multi-stage process: topic, bibliography, outline, draft... How did our teachers do it? They just told us to go write a paper on X... I really need to go back through my undergrad papers and figure out how much guidance I used to get. I don't remember it being that much.

Ed Schmitt - 5/20/2005

This is really helpful to hear from an expert in the field. I got a couple of papers in my historical methods class on similar topics (e.g. the ninja in Japanese history), and the sources seemed really pretty lousy, so I was unsure how much the student should be penalized for picking an inherently difficult topic to do solid historical research on (and the fact they didn't recognize that themselves) - another one of those topics which fascinate students and offers lousy sources is the JFK assassination - or whether they just didn't do the digging for better sources. I don't know the field well enough to know what might have been out there, but quick web & database searches seemed to yield little. That's why I've taken to requiring much more consultation at the topic selection stage of the paper assignment.