The Construction of Chinese Martial Arts in the Writings of John Dudgeon, Herbert Giles and Joseph Needham

Gianni, Tommaso 2020. The Construction of Chinese Martial Arts in the Writings of John Dudgeon, Herbert Giles and Joseph Needham. Martial Arts Studies (10) , pp. 51-65. 10.18573/mas.65

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Abstract

In the 16th century, China and its civilization was no longer merely an image – a fantastical country encountered only by travelling merchants such as Marco Polo. It was becoming a reality for increasing numbers of travellers. Some of these were scholars interested in researching Chinese medical and physical culture. Thanks to this scholarly interest, numerous Chinese practices came to be studied by European scholars, including those that would eventually come to be known by such names as kung-fu, or cong-fu. Consequently, it was during this period that both knowledge and misconceptions about ‘Chinese boxing’ as a physical practice spread, initially to Britain and subsequently to other European countries. This essay focuses on these early stages in the establishment of both knowledge and misconceptions about Chinese martial arts in English language writings. It uses both primary texts and critical literature. Specifically, works of the surgeon John Dudgeon will be discussed in the first section; works by the scholar Professor Herbert A. Giles will be considered in the second section; and subsequent work by Joseph Needham will be examined in the third section (although, for reasons of space, to a lesser extent). In focusing on these authors, I explore the ways in which their different backgrounds and differing purposes produced different images of their object of attention. At the same time, however, I argue that the three primary images drawn by Dudgeon, Giles, and Needham share overarching cultural conceptions that are rooted in Greek assumptions about the ‘complete human being’. In the context of this discussion, it will also be useful to discuss some relevant secondary historical and anthropological approaches in order to see the ways that the first wave of critiques approached the same subject.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D890 Eastern Hemisphere D History General and Old World > DS Asia G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure
Additional Information:	Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 International License
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2057-5696
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 November 2020
Date of Acceptance:	30 October 2020
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 05:55
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/136517

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