As I've been sharing Liberation Martial Arts concepts, we've encountered increasing pushback from Westerners, especially white Westerners, who are personally offended by our departure from the master-student model of learning.
However, a non-male Asian political activist left an insightful comment regarding this topic I wanted to share with our readers.
The Western obsession with finding a "master" and rigid top-down instruction is also a consequence of Orientalism! Westerners are led to believe that Eastern practices are a rigid body of traditions that we can never deviate from and that what's traditional is always what's best. Even non-fashy Westerners often revert to an orientalist mindset when they think of the martial arts from Eastern cultures.
What they don't realize is that the master-student relationship is deeply feudal and reminiscent of the days in which a young person was apprenticed to a master who would discipline them and hold a greater authority over them than their own father. In fact, many traditions from around the world are remnants of feudalism and while that doesn't make them necessarily wrong, we need to know this to examine them from a materialist lens.
Though their comments are about Eastern practices, they are relevant to how all martial arts are presented in the West because even non-Eastern martial arts become orientalized in their presentation for Western hegemony. Belts in martial arts are a modern construct, so is lining up and hazing rituals, and for Eastern martial arts, so is teaching outside of the highest caste. However, the belt system replicates the caste system once again.
Many Eastern and non-Eastern arts had no master-student or direct instruction tradition; instead, they were land-based and communitarian. The environment and the community you played with were your teachers. However, orientalization for Western consumers, along with its precursor colonialism, means adopting top-down, rigid, factory/military master-student learning models. Regardless of where the arts are from, in the West, the teaching models become the same: Western standardized.
Why is Japan called the spiritual home for martial arts? Who colonized Asia? As a Korean, I know the impact of Japan's colonialism. It was a one-two punch: Japan spread the industrial/military model with enough momentum that the fire would spread without its occupation, and then the West set the world on fire.
Consider the liberatory martial arts used by enslaved people. How would something like that ever spread if you always needed a certified master? As cultural anthropologist and capoeira researcher Jaclyn Donelle McWhorter has pointed out, capoeira didn't always have rigid hierarchies, ranks, or masters. When your house is on fire, everyone grabs a bucket, and everyone shows each other how to grab a bucket.
Notice how many "ancient" martial arts are run like a US military boot camp. That's not a non-white tradition but the direct influence of the US military that brought many martial arts to the West after their anti-colonial campaigns.
What is "authentic" is often marketing and the Western gaze disguised as culture. Since Western consumers expect an orientalized military boot camp system, only those who replicate that system survive. This is not unique to martial arts; we see this in New Age, consumer "spirituality," and alternative health where appropriated Indigenous, East Asian, Arab, South Asian, and Pacific Island practices are all presented under the same orientalist lens—you can't tell them apart.
The practices are also often fantasies, caricatures, or wholesale made-up. Yet, as they're presented over and over with no alternative presentation, they become a reality that, unfortunately, even non-white and non-Western people buy into and defend. They know what they know and don't know what they don't.
Many martial arts and alternative practices are not ancient; they were invented during the 1970s to 1990s as Western-led globalism and neoliberalism spread. After World War 2, the West went around and quashed anti-colonial movements and destroyed cultures, yet this was when all the ancient native knowledge was unlocked and shared with the West, and the West was culturally informed and sensitive enough to embrace it without change? This does not sound like the Cold War neoliberal period or Western hegemony.
New "ancient" traditions are made up every day. Sometimes, peeling back one layer of white supremacy doesn't mean you're done; it means there are still more layers.
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