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Asia Pacific Journal of Sport and Social Science

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Learning, mastery and ageing: Alternative narratives among British practitioners of traditionalist Chinese martial arts
George Jennings
a a

Universidad YMCA, Mexico City, Mexico Version of record first published: 28 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: George Jennings (2012): Learning, mastery and ageing: Alternative narratives among British practitioners of traditionalist Chinese martial arts, Asia Pacific Journal of Sport and Social Science, DOI:10.1080/21640599.2012.742312 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21640599.2012.742312

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Asia Pacic Journal of Sport and Social Science iFirst article, 2012, 115

Learning, mastery and ageing: Alternative narratives among British practitioners of traditionalist Chinese martial arts
George Jennings*
Universidad YMCA, Mexico City, Mexico Eastern movement forms such as the non-sporting, traditionalist Asian martial arts are important components of everyday Western society that offer alternative philosophical concepts which continue to be modied through cross-cultural diffusion. One signicant notion spreading in some Western body cultures is an alternative narrative of the mind body problem related to ageing based on shared learning and personal development. Such an alternative narrative is supported in various traditionalist Chinese martial arts (TCMA) subcultures and pedagogies, as found within my own life history and (auto) ethnographic project in England. In this paper, I seek to explore this mind body problem via three core, interconnected narratives currently being shared and promoted by British exponents of TCMAs: renementlearning, perfection-mastery and respect-ageing. Consequently, this article contributes to a consideration of the embodied stories of everyday Asian martial arts devotees. At the same time, it offers narrative inquiry as both theory and method to explore these personal, institutional and cultural stories in other Asian body cultures. Keywords: ageing; traditional martial arts; narrative; stories

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Introduction: Traditionalist Chinese martial arts as body cultures in the West

It was an article about a Chinese master . . . he had been doing Taiji [Tai Chi] for over sixty years, but probably only knew 20% of the art. Its a huge thing. Theres so many styles . . . But you can only concentrate on so much. You can do loads and loads and loads of forms, different styles, but if you cant do them well, theyre wasted. You can do four movements, and can spend your whole life just doing those four movements. If you go deeper in, youll get a whole lot more out. (Joe, 33, professional Taijiquan instructor, interview). Terry went on to speak of one of Sifus students, who is 66 years old: Hes so up for it [ghting]. His knees are gone from doing Tang So Do, a Korean martial art known for its kicking techniques, but his hands are great! Hes just waiting for someone to pounce on him when he comes out of the Post Ofce with his pension. Hell be walking out with his wallet hanging out of his pocket come and get it! chuckled Terry loudly. We all joined in laughing, united in the belief in the system. (Terry, 38, unemployed, Wing Chun, training session).

Peoples stories matter. This article builds upon two assumptions common to narrative research: rst, that peoples stories are embodied in the sense that they are often based on embodied experiences and are therefore concerned with an embodied person in wider society and second, that alternative tales told by individuals deserve to be analysed in light of the institutions and cultures that shape (and are shaped by) them. The above quotes from instructors Joe and Terry offer a brief insight into the simultaneously personal and

*Email: george.jennings16@yahoo.co.uk
ISSN 2164-0599 print/ISSN 2164-0602 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21640599.2012.742312 http://www.tandfonline.com

G. Jennings

social stories circulating in traditionalist Chinese martial arts (TCMAs) subcultures in England. They address issues pertaining to learning, personal mastery and a different view on the contentious issue of ageing. The rst aim of this exploratory and data-centred article is therefore to offer generally unheard and unsung stories of learning, mastery and ageing, which connect to a broader spectrum of Eastern movement forms (Brown & Leledaki, 2010) such as yoga and meditation and connected Chinese body cultures (Eichberg, 2008) such as qigong1 and lion/dragon dancing. I thus argue that the TCMA body cultures are quite different to other martial body cultures such as combat sports and modern military (or military-derived) self-defence systems in their philosophy, history, ideology and physical/technical characteristics. Second, from both a broader theoretical and methodological perspective, I aim to promote and utilize narrative inquiry as a way to help us understand these different stories, which I claim to be alternative frameworks to the dominant model of the decline in mental, physical and social capacities with age in contemporary (and by no means exclusively Western) society. Before introducing narrative inquiry and analysing such stories in detail, it is rst necessary to outline the physicality of Chinese martial arts, consider their binding philosophical concepts and discuss how these may contrast with the viewpoints on body problems (Frank, 1995) such as injury and ageing circulating in other martial body cultures in the West. The acronym TCMAs forms a broad umbrella term for the ordinarily non-sporting martial practices originating in China, which range from typically slow moving, esoteric arts such as Taijiquan (Tai Chi Chuan) to more self-defence orientated arts such as Wing Chun. What unites them, however, is an origin steeped in Chinese culture, history and philosophy, alongside embodied principles such as relaxation, sensitivity and the importance of body awareness (McFarlane, 1989; Mroz, 2008). As Brown, Jennings, and Molle (2009) note, they are commonly grounded in specic principles and concepts of Chinese philosophy, such as yin-yang in Taijiquan. Furthermore, as Eichberg (2000) points out, in terms of various Asian body cultures and life cycle sports, all of them are commonly considered as practices for life, with no clear career endpoint as in the case of many Western sports. Indeed, the culture of TCMAs normally promotes lifelong learning, with increased age being equated with superior knowledge, technical prociency and, perhaps most importantly, respect and admiration. This is despite the eventual case of death of a master teacher-practitioner, which poses a real body problem in many traditional martial arts cultures and body lineages in terms of the future course of an art (Brown & Jennings, 2011). Meanwhile, their general non-competitive nature, focus on the preservation/conservations of techniques and training methods and emphasis towards continual practice and lifelong learning makes them somewhat representative of other Asian self-cultivation methods striving for mind body unity and personal development, such as seated meditation (see Yuasa, 1987). As Yuasa (1987, 1993) has pointed out, martial arts can take the form of meditation-in-movement, or, more broadly speaking to take a concept from his student Nagatomo (1992) are about attunement of consciousness through the body for various personal motivations such as self-defence, skill development or an alternative ecological philosophy (see for example Brown & Jennings, in press). Furthermore, there are also socio-political and historical features that make these practices somewhat different to many traditionalist martial arts (TMAs). Unlike their Japanese counterparts, which were the focus of many earlier, historically sensitive sociological writings (e.g. Goodger & Goodger, 1977; Goodger, 1982), these traditionalist self-cultivation arts have only been practised on a wide scale in Western cultures for the past several decades. As Palmer (2007) has noted with specic reference to qigong, due to political and institutional reexivity, the various arts were modied within their native

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China (Theeboom & De Knop, 1997). This has also occurred in Britain, where they now represent a wide diversity of styles and interpretations (see Ryan, 2008 on Taijiquan, for example). Simply put, with little formal regulation, TCMAs can mean many different things to many different people. The original generation2 of Chinese teachers have passed down martial arts systems to new generations of non-Asians, and in Western cultures such as Britain this presents an interesting sociological case in terms of how British practitioners make sense of their arts and apply them in everyday life. This is particularly the case for mind body problems such as ageing, not least because with many TCMAs, such as Taijiquan, the myth of the little old Chinese man (Frank, 2003) continues to pervade the imaginations of outsiders to the art, despite the fact that around the world there are many young instructors from all ethnic backgrounds. Following the work of Henning Eichberg (1998, 2008), it is appropriate to consider such alternative, experiential body cultures alongside more dominant sporting models and government-supported systems. The TCMAs contrast signicantly with the new performance-orientated sport of wushu (see Theeboom & deKnop, 1997). In recent years, social scientic research on martial arts has tended to favour the study of AfroBrazilian Capoeira (e.g. Stephens & Delamont, 2006), mixed martial arts (MMA) (e.g. Green, 2011) and military self-defence systems such as Israeli Krav Maga (e.g. Bar-On Cohen, 2011) in terms of the pedagogical strategies and embodied experiences of their learners, who often seek to attain a high skill level. These athletic martial arts systems are often associated with a young, exible and dynamic body (in the case of Capoeira) or one that can give and receive a great deal of bodily pain (in the case of Krav Maga and MMA). Moreover, within the combat sport of MMA, Spencer (2012) has found an abundance of stories of despair and loss due to the resulting injuries and inevitable retirement from this explosive combat sport. In this sense, such martial arts become conventional life cycle sports, which follow a mind body model of measurable physical decline and loss of athletic identity. Ageing thus connects these themes of learning and mastering a given art through a focus on mind body problems, to adopt and adapt Yuasas (1987, 1992) model of mind body integration alongside Franks (1995) notion of body problems. This article offers a contribution to the literature with a focus on the under-researched topic of ageing in Asian body cultures in the West, while providing voice3 for non-elite, everyday practitioners. More specically, this article attempts to address two interconnected questions: how do British TCMA practitioners interpret and explain the learning, mastery and ageing processes? How do they commonly structure their talk? These complex intergenerational and embodied issues can be addressed by contemporary narrative inquiry, a burgeoning area in physical culture studies. Narrative as theory and method In recent years, narrative has become increasingly important as a theoretical and methodological approach in qualitative research in sport and exercise, where researchers have sought to explore the meanings, experiences and insights of individuals via their stories (Smith, 2010). A narrative, sometimes confused with a story, is often taken to mean the framework with which one can tell stories about ones experiences or those of others, which includes a clear plot (with past, present and future issues), a message, characters and application in social space (Smith & Sparkes, 2009b). It is somewhat different to the notion of discourse in that narratives are frameworks for embodied understanding and action but are not overly concerned with power, images, ideas and

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forms of knowledge originating from institutions and disseminated by texts. Instead, narratives are normally generated through interpersonal and embodied connections between people, although texts have their part to play. As a theory, then, it derives from philosophical discussions on the ontology and epistemology of knowledge, where narratives are seen as a way of knowing and communicating human experience. It is therefore typically linked to interpretivist sociology, which aims to understand social phenomena and help people make sense of their own lives (Bochner, 2002). One of the theoretical forerunners in this area was Arthur Frank (1991, 1995), who promoted the idea that stories come from embodied experiences and exchanges and sociology can explore institutions (one could also consider arts) from the body up. This is quite different from the discursive concerns of many other social theories examining institutions before (or even without) the idea of individual embodiment. At the same time as being very individual or personal, narratives are intensely social, being framed by narrative maps such as in the case of generally negative views on the ageing, Western sporting body between generations within families (see for example Phoenix & Sparkes, 2006, on university athletes). These stories in turn link with broader frameworks from wider society, or in other words have ontological (personal), cultural and meta (social) levels, from the structurationist perspective of Somers (1994). According to this narrative theory, the broader narratives originating in societies such as Britain or China are adopted and slightly modied by smaller cultures such as institutions and pedagogies, where they are subject to total acceptance or even rejection by the members (and of course, the leaders) of these associations. On the other hand, some narratives can have the power to change an institution, group or subculture by reshaping how people perceive and story their experiences. These alternative narratives can be the focus of ones analysis in contrast to more dominant ones. This connects to Atkinson and Delamont (2006), who warn researchers not to privilege certain stories over others. Seen from a different perspective, however, if these stories are so rare, it can be argued that they deserve the special attention I have given them in this study. This is particularly appropriate considering that narrative inquiry has been underdeveloped in the study of Asian body cultures, martial arts and the sociology of sport more generally. Furthermore, it links to other research projects on unusual body cultures that offer alternative ways of living (such as Atkinson, 2009, 2010) that is, a sociology not on what mainstream society is, but on how or what the social world could be. This is particularly important for narrative inquiry, which to date has tended to focus upon dark or negative stories. As Smith (2010) aptly points out, the lighter side of narrative can now come into play. This article stems from a qualitative sociological project investigating the experiences of long-term practitioners of TCMAs (Jennings, 2010). Due to the generally slow progression within the TCMA syllabuses4 (compared with the rapid succession in grades seen in many combat sports such as Taekwondo), a long-term practitioner was dened as one with more than four years regular learning and teaching within a pedagogy. This project included 16 life histories with such experienced practitioners, ethnographic and participant observation strategies within various ideal typical institutions and my own autoethnographic reections as an experienced practitioner-researcher of various martial arts. A major nding of this study was that the TCMAs as practised in the West are open to a variety of positions and manipulations. However, one unifying factor among the participants and institutions was the continual emphasis on an alternative view of ageing in which old age was equated with respect and learning was deemed an attitude for life. The case study participants some of whom feature here were selected from various TCMA institutions representing different styles in the South West and West Midlands

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regions of England, although with an emphasis on Wing Chun and Taijiquan, arguably the two most popular in the Western world. The majority (13) self-dened as English (one being mixed race), but there was one Chinese-British male practitioner originally from Hong Kong, a female practitioner from Zimbabwe and one male practitioner who preferred to be seen as Cornish. This led to the decision to label the practitioners as British (due to their overall nationality and residence), yet also offered a glimpse into the complexities of ethnic, national and regional identities. Given such a regional focus, carrying with it an intimate TCMA community, pseudonyms were used for all participants and associations in order to protect their identity. Furthermore, as I was adopting a life history strategy which brings with it the potential for sensitive topics to arise I provided a copy of the two interview transcripts for each interviewee, and any highly personal data was deleted at their request. Another important aspect of embodied eldwork and narrative research is reexivity. This is particularly important, as many researchers of martial arts are also practitioners or even instructors (for an example of such reection, see Stephens & Delamont, 2006). My position as an active and experienced practitioner aided trust and rapport, although some taken-for-granted information and sensitive data may have raised more difcult issues because of this double-edged vantage point. As a white, British, middle-class man in my 20s, my early understanding of ageing in martial arts was very heavily inuenced by the martial arts and popular media (magazines, cartoons and lms depicting little old Asian men such as Mr Miyagi from Karate Kid) and, later, various body pedagogies that elevated elderly masters of both past and present. However, due to the focus on personal narratives, the TCMA media is not explicitly focused upon here. Moreover, due to the focus on the general structure of the three narratives in this exploratory article, my own experiences are restricted to connections to the participants and how I helped forge the narratives through a process of dialogue or, as Frank (2002) has put it, dialogical narrative analysis. Therefore, the data represented here mainly show the personal narratives of the participants, with supplementary eld notes and reections as an illustration of their (sub)cultural impact. Overall, this representation as a modied realist tale (see Sparkes, 2002) offers an example of how narrative can be used as theory and method for exploring an under-researched topic in Asian body cultures. Overall, as a method, narrative inquiry can be concerned with storytelling5 and story analysis (Smith & Sparkes, 2009a). I was chiey occupied with the latter, as through narrative analysis I was able to explore the interconnected ideas between practitioner transformation and cultural transmission. The big stories targeted within the life histories were supported by observations and informal discussions that revealed little stories, to borrow the terms of Phoenix and Sparkes (2009). The written raw data were read and re-read through a holistic analysis strategy, which was later incorporated into what Smith and Sparkes (2009a) call a structural narrative approach. This involved searching for patterns and structures within and between the individual narratives, resulting in the labelling of the renement-learning, perfection-mastery and respect-ageing narratives presented here. Exploring the three narratives The three narratives explored here can be understood in terms of two elements or processes. The rst is an institutionally dened process based on practitioner-identied terms that also connect to the broader Chinese martial arts culture, e.g. renement. The second consists of the mind body processes which the practitioners are trying to

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control through self- (and, as I have argued previously see Jennings, 2010 shared) cultivation, e.g. learning. Although the three narratives are analysed one by one, it must be pointed out that they work together in the social practice of these martial arts, such as in regular classes and whenever narratives are drawn on by practitioners. This connects to Frank (1995), who contends that an individual will draw upon a range of narratives and will switch back and forth between them at certain points in time, and across their lifetime. Hence, rather than attempting to classify ideal types of stories based on archetypical practitioners, the exploratory analysis here focuses on three of the various and competing types of narratives, on how they are structured according to a time-based plot and, nally, on how they are applied to everyday life. This is in turn coupled with a consideration of how they may offer alternative frameworks to explore these embodied, social and personal topics that are so very central to many Asian body cultures.

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Renement-learning narrative: Cultivating the habit of continual discovery Issues of learning through formal pedagogies have been a concern for numerous ethnographic studies, particularly those focusing on Capoeira. Such studies have been very useful in exploring the pedagogical strategies of specic teachers (de Campos Rosario, Delamont, & Stephens, 2010) and in providing thick description of learning experiences in the eld (Downey, 2005). However, the changing orientations and interpretations of martial arts learners remain to be sufciently interrogated. This is particularly true for the Chinese martial arts, sometimes collectively called Kung Fu a term that denotes a special skill developed over a long period of time and through intense effort (see Frank, 2003). In this subsection I will consider this philosophical notion of Kung Fu by exploring the embodied experiences and narrative interpretations of British practitioners of different Kung Fu systems. Unlike many Western sports, which have a denite career path that includes an inevitable point of retirement (Eichberg, 2000), the TCMA body cultures explored here do not appear to promote such a trajectory. In fact, with the positive appeal of practice until death came the notion of learning over time, with moments of epiphany and revelation at any point within ones life. A core message emerged from these practitioners and from others in the study: a TCMA can be concerned with continuous learning, renement and development, which can continue throughout ones lifetime. This renement and learning is not just individualistic, but is determined by different interactions within and outside the formal pedagogy. Dave, an intermediate Wing Chun student within my own school, recalled his early experiences in the art, which hooked him with constant, personal learning, revelations and epiphanies. This was in turn coupled with his witnessing the skills of senior students. I asked Dave what drove him to continue his Wing Chun training, given its constant physical, nancial and time investment. He responded with a passionate and detailed explanation based on the ideal of personal achievement:
I wanted to go as far as I could go with it, to be as good as I could be, whatever that may mean. I felt a black belt, black sash, an instructor one day, that kind of thing. I wanted to take it to that level and get good . . . At the beginning, theres a steep learning curve where you go from nothing to in a couple of months to knowing quite a lot and you dont realize it until a beginner comes along, and you recognize what you were like and how much youve learned in that time, because things have become so natural to you. You realize how quickly youve progressed . . . And then it kind of plateaus. (Dave, 30, printer, Wing Chun).

The plot of this narrative is one of steady progression combined with later stalling in development, which, with time and effort (Kung Fu), can be overcome. This exciting yet

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uncertain plot was commonly contrasted with those of the drop outs or slackers who typically left the Wing Chun school at an intermediate level during these plateaux, rather than following the Kung Fu ethos of lifetime study. Dave wished to continue because of those of a higher rank and status, who provided an example of advanced skill levels that he could seek out during bouts of partner training. Meanwhile, his teaching experiences thus far had enabled him to relate to both beginners and senior students, as all of them had had to go through the same learning process in order to make the complex set of techniques natural:
You can sympathize with the way they feel, and the discomfort of it is as well. Cause its not something that comes naturally to anybody. Theres no one on this Earth that it just comes [to] naturally, that it just works [for].

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Daves comments were also concerned with the continued honing of basic skills, which, as in boxing (Wacquant, 2004) and MMA (Spencer, 2009), have to be practised thousands and thousands of times in order to progress within the Wing Chun system. Along with being very social, the lifelong narrative was also deemed to be personal and exible across different elds of social life. Kelly, a student in a different TCMA organization elsewhere in the country, had much to say about the mindset of someone continuously learning, even if about a basic technique such as a punch. Like many others, she spoke of rening, tinkering and ne-tuning techniques through varied training methodologies and alternative viewpoints:
Once youve perfected something, you can maybe perfect it that bit more. To make it more effective. Or it can be changed to utilize it in a different area. So you are constantly learning. Ive never found once that Ive been stuck or bored, because if you are bored, you shouldnt be doing it, I reckon. Because there are always different ways of looking at something, applying it . . . So, just doing straight centreline punch. If it gets really, really boring, then you can be like, Hang on. If I just do a centreline punch, and I just drop to the left, and turn my hips, or punch a bit lower, punch a bit higher, then you can always get a different perspective on a single aspect of the martial art. (Kelly, 26, student, hybrid Kung Fu style).

When I pressed Kelly for more details, she added an explanation of how one can apply this philosophy to daily life and sport (she is also a keen hockey player), particularly in other activities pertaining to work. This signied a counter or alternative narrative to the conventional philosophy of what hard work (the simple translated meaning of Kung Fu) entails:
Its absolutely essential. Because if you understand that youre constantly learning in your sport, then you can apply it to life. Sometimes you think, This is the worst job ever. Blah, blah, blah. Just because you are looking at life through that one track, that one frame of mind. But in martial arts, you learn to expand your views. To look at something in different ways. And you adapt it to your life. You nd something . . . actually adapt it and think, OK, its not such a boring job, if I do this.

Much like Bourdieus oft-cited concept of habitus, this implies a transferability of mental and physical (one would be tempted to say mind body) dispositions. This connects to Franks notion of a narrative habitus (in Eldershaw, Mayan, & Winkler, 2007), which involves the repertoire of stories we receive, use and reject in daily life. For Kelly and others such as myself, a narrative concerned with learning and renement is key to our daily lives. This exible, transferable philosophy is normally coupled with an institutional ethos supported by ofcial literature, syllabuses, maxims and codes of conduct that focus on martial arts as a lifestyle practice (see Brown & Jennings, 2011). From the extracts above, we can begin to see how the renement-learning narrative is not told in a smooth, continuous fashion, but as a negotiation between ones willpower or agency and the

G. Jennings

various contingencies within social structures. Rapid acceleration begins with starting an art, but many plateaux and daily practicalities will offer obstacles to the pursuit of total knowledge and technical perfection. It is this striving for perfection that I turn to next, as it can be distinguished by its more predictable and even impossible endpoint. This institutional inuence is explored in the following section, an ethnographic case study of Bridges Wing Chun Association (seen in Jennings et al., 2010).

Perfection-mastery narrative: The striving towards mind body holism Unlike Western sporting terms such as coach and trainer, the word master and the titles grandmaster and disciple form the basis of TCMA terminology in China (Frank, 2003), and the term master was often used within the institutions I visited in England. However, there is no universally agreed denition, and it can even be a controversial label. In fact, with TCMAs being such an unregulated industry within the broad scheme of Eastern movement forms, there exists the possibility of commercialization of such a notion, as some participants reported. Nevertheless, some practitioners within Bridges Association tried to subjectively dene a master as a person who knows technical perfection in whatever they do. The core message of this perfection-mastery narrative is the focus on mastering one art over the course of ones life. This was often sharply contrasted with the idea of mixing styles seen in MMA (for a contrasting perspective, refer to Spencer, 2009), as the founder of the association, Sifu (teacher) John Bridge, emphasized the idea of lifetime practice:
If you put all your time and effort into one martial art, youll be good. Id rather be really good at one thing than crap at loads of things . . . How can you be an expert in everything? I just do one martial art. One martial art, and Im still learning. (John, 44, professional TCMA instructor).

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The inuence of the pedagogy was evident, as these views were shared within regular classes. Dave is a student in Johns association, and he offered similar perspectives on the jack of all trades, master of none ethos that is used with reference to MMA and Bruce Lees philosophy-art of Jeet Kune Do (JKD). Johns students aim to excel at one art, rather than picking at various styles. This again illustrates the relational, interactional element of the narratives presented here. The perfection of a restricted set of body techniques was an important goal for many of the practitioners, who strive for overall technical excellence. In fact, some even used it as point of the narrative and a rationale for existence, such as shamans apprentice and boat ticket seller Tony (44), who quipped during training: If you were already perfect, you wouldnt train every week. Thered be no point living. Youd already be there! Tonys approach adopts a more spiritual approach that blends with his devotion to yoga, qigong, meditation and reiki and which is in turn reinforced by his regular trips to Bolivia, which he nances by returning to the UK for work and Wing Chun lessons (which he aims to deliver to Bolivia). Nevertheless, with Wing Chun being in the realm of self-defence martial arts (see Brown & Johnson, 2000), Tonys senior, Terry, added an important practical endpoint for the narrative with regard to its potential application in a street ght: Thats basically my idea why I am striving for the 100%. I know I will never reach it, but that doesnt mean I wont stop trying. Thats part of the addiction [laughs] (Terry, 38, unemployed). Beyond these long-term goals of eventual mastery was Johns personal (and institutional) emphasis on individual perfection, as based on ones physical capabilities and talents:

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I can never be my teacher. He has his own greatness . . . I can only full my own destiny, be great for myself. Thats how I see it. And I dont put any barriers on that, because I believe I can keep on developing. I dont think theres an end to it.

To my surprise, he explained that he did not wish to be in the small category of Wing Chun practitioners who had truly mastered the art:
I know it sounds strange. Cause once youve got to the zone where youve mastered it completely, and have no more need for it, its what Im saying about youve got to be careful in the way you think about life. And the way you think about Wing Chun itself . . . But the person who thinks they already know, and they can do it; they dont have a need to do it anymore. Unfortunately thats the thing with many things in martial arts, and maybe life. So therefore, I dont need to do that, I dont need to practise that.

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This personal narrative can also be used in ones wider social life in relation to ones different identities and relationships, offering a philosophy of practice for the sake of practice, and not just for the last-resort self-defence scenario that Terry trained for. For example, Tony explained this as a purpose in life that avoids stagnation and connects to other identities and selves. Nevertheless, this is not to split the cultural ideal of mastery from a Western individualistic approach. Indeed, there is a strong pedagogical ethos of shared cultivation of skill between teacher, seniors and juniors, which Terry described as an ongoing circle:
Like what Sifu says, without us, he cant get better. I totally agree with that, now I totally understand what he was saying now. Because without you pushing me, how am I going to get any better? Without having the goal to attain, without trying to reach the standard of John, without getting to the point where I can push him around, and I can hit him at will, like the way he can with me, Ive got nothing to aim for. But, also, without someone just behind me, trying to get to my level, Ive got no one pushing me to get better.

This pedagogical circle offers much to the sociological consideration of martial arts via a narrative of interactive learning between teacher and student. Whereas many studies have focused on teacher strategies of learning methods, the long-term exchange of experiences within specic body lineages is important and often overlooked in relation to TCMA body cultures where, as in Capoeira, one is expected to choose a teacher and stay loyal to him/her. This second narrative is quite unusual in many ways, as it can have no endpoint as acknowledged by several practitioners. It is understood as a gradual movement towards total technical perfection that is again contrasted with the idea of giving up or retiring from an activity. Key characters include masters past and present and practitioners close to the level of technical mastery. The participants used this narrative as a goal in their training and, from a relational approach, as a way to maintain humbleness and respect for ones elders and kinaesthetic ancestors (Joseph, 2008) who have walked the path of martial arts for far longer. Together, the renement-learning narrative and the perfection-mastery narrative help forge a respect for ones juniors and seniors in martial arts communities which, as in MMA, can move across social boundaries (Green, 2011). They also serve to motivate students and give them a framework for lifelong practice which, in TCMA communities, is rewarded with a great deal of respect and, in Bourdieus (1990) terms, symbolic capital. Next I explore the resulting respect-ageing narrative.

Respect-ageing narrative: The virtues of skill and knowledge Lifelong practice and development were seen as important in all of the arts included in the study. As Tony commented, You can practise Wing Chun when youre eighty. If youre

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reasonably t, you can keep going and even get better. Until you die, you can keep on improving, pretty much. This was linked to the hard and soft aspects of the TCMAs, where internal aspects such as embodied sensitivity and correct alignment are commonly deemed superior to external ones like speed, strength and agility. It is beyond the remit of this article to explore the embodied aspects of each TCMA discussed here, but Taijiquan in particular is noted for its accessible physical nature, as reected in the multitude of biomedical, health-orientated studies using frail and elderly populations (e.g. Gallagher, 2003). With a shortage of qualitative and sociological viewpoints on this popular art some, such as Shilling (2008), claim it to be the most practised form of organized physical activity in the world I offer a brief glimpse into the personal narratives of non-clinical practitioners. Besides a strong emphasis on the various (holistic) health benets of Taijiquan, what united many of the practitioners was a philosophy of continued practice into old age. Joe provided an excellent summary of the ageing philosophy in his art health-orientated Taijiquan which was in turn contrasted with sporting approaches:
Its something you dont stop. The idea of Taiji is that something you can do when youre 20, you should still be able to do when youre eighty. And thats another reason why the athleticism of the wushu forms . . . its not necessarily good Taiji because its not holding to the principles of Taiji, why people do it. I respect the people who do it. I cant do it. But then the people who do it knacker their knees up. (Joe, 33, professional Taijiquan instructor).

Much like the contrasts between traditionalist and modern forms occurring among Chinese practitioners of Taijiquan, Joe is providing a point to the narrative in terms of the validity of his health-oriented approach to the art. This framework, like the others, has a degree of social relationship, with key characters and role models. Sometimes, as Will found out, this is outside ones formal pedagogy or body lineage:
It was a 105-year-old bloke on the TV who had a heart attack when he was 80, then took up Taiji, and at 105, was jogging round his local park, getting onto the basketball post, and you stick your whole body forwards horizontally. He was doing that at 105 years old. And he put that all down to Taiji and keeping t, keeping active. And thats what its about. (Will, 27, stop-smoking advisor, mixed TCMAs).

Will, like many others, linked this to an (often Orientalist) imagination of Chinese culture in which there is greater respect for age and the accomplishments associated with it, which is directly contrasted to the narrative of decline that pervades Western societies. I asked Will about the inuence this had on his own training in terms of skill and healthy ageing:
You hear a lot about Chinese martial arts and Taiji, and little old men. Those little tiny guys chucking around all these big people. And its like, yeah, things like that are an inspiration because they help you think beyond our Western culture of age equals decrepitness, decay [laughs]. If you can get older and you can be stronger and you can have more energy as you get older, then yeah, fantastic. Bring it on [laughs].

The cultural narratives are in turn interpreted and applied by the practitioners as personal narratives. The practitioners were often happy to share their own views regarding retirement (from work), which for some, such as Ben due to the nature of his vocation is not far off. He explained his future ambitions, which included setting up Taijiquan coastal retreats:
As I retire and get older, I want to increase my practice rather than stop. At the moment with work, its difcult to do it in the mornings, and especially during the week while Im travelling somewhere else. But I would like to start to do it the mornings and the evenings on a regular basis. So as you get older, it can go the opposite way. (Ben, 50, prison warden, Yang Taijiquan).

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Following Eichberg (2000), we could consider Bens comments as an alternative way of viewing retirement and physical activity during this phase of the life course. Instead of feeling physically restricted and fearful of an uncertain body-self, Ben is encouraged by the possibility of more freedom and respect (as in many Eastern societies) and the different views of leisure time in British society (as was the case for Fred in Phoenix and Sparkes 2009 study). Overall, the respect-ageing narrative avoids the plot of decline and despair that often accompanies the ageing process in contemporary society. It also avoids prioritizing the physical attributes of strength, speed, power and exibility, and instead highlights internal aspects such as sensitivity, timing, correct use of energy and relaxation, which are suggested to improve with age. The teachers and students in this particular study especially within Taijiquan used this narrative as a framework with which to distinguish themselves as traditionalist stylists and distance themselves from Westernized combat sports and body cultures, while at the same time relating this to a wider generational network to provide a pathway to active ageing. Taken together, these three frameworks can be seen as concerned with mind body states and including a social element that is, renement, perfection and respect. This links mind, body and society so that from this perspective, we can learn about TCMAs in two main ways: through the body and through a cultural philosophy. For example, with renement-learning, the mind body process of slow (almost untraceable) development is occasionally coupled with moments of epiphany. At the same time, the body culture of TCMAs encourages a philosophy of learning for life, with continuous self-discovery and new insights about a few techniques. The practitioners thereby know a lot about a little, rather than a little about a lot. Meanwhile, this drive for continual revelation is assisted by a narrative emphasizing the individual according to her/his physical abilities or talents (a typically dismissed and unspoken term in these TCMA body cultures). However, this self-discovery and self-mastery are also both relational and historically situated within a body lineage where dead and elderly masters are revered. A TCMA exponent may work with his or her students, teacher(s) and peers to strive for an unreachable goal (one might be tempted to say dream): that of total technical perfection. The less physically strenuous nature of the styles considered in this study allows practitioners to actively strive towards perfection, knowledge and admiration within their peer group and universal respect within other global body cultures, particularly those of Asian origin. This offers a brief insight into the personal narratives of ageing in the TCMAs in the West, but there is a long way to go with this form of research, as I suggest in the following tentative conclusions. Conclusions: Researching narratives in traditionalist Asian martial arts The aim of this article was twofold: rst, to offer stories from regular Western practitioners of one branch of Asian martial arts, the TCMAs; second, to explore the potential of narrative inquiry for exploring Asian martial arts and body cultures more generally. The aim was not to explore one narrative in depth, although this is certainly a possibility for future work considering the cultural, philosophical and technical complexities connected to the arts in question. I will now explore each of these contributions in turn, and will outline what remains to be done within the currently overlooked area of the sociology of traditionalist Asian martial arts in the West. As there is little empirical research on traditionalist Asian martial arts practitioners stories (compared with accounts of pedagogy and historical change, for example), a main

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contribution of this article was to offer a voice to non-elite practitioners in one Western society, Britain (albeit restricted to certain regions of England). The discussion indicated that narratives can be explored according to a concept (e.g. Kung Fu), an institution or pedagogy (e.g. Bridges Wing Chun Association) and an art (e.g. Taijiquan). Furthermore, the three frameworks of renement-learning and perfection-mastery and respect-ageing share many features, including the idea of continued physical practice until extreme old age or death. It is this embodied dimension that binds these stories and how they work in unison in the practitioners daily lives. With such an exploratory and empirically focused paper there will, of course, remain several questions that are yet to be addressed and which connect to the broader area of research on martial arts (traditionalist martial arts, combat sports and self-defence systems, to consider a broad denition). For instance, there are issues of historical continuity and change (see Krug, 2001 for the example of Karate): how have these narratives altered with the passage of TMAs to the West? There is also the potential for insider/outsider debates (see for example Woodward, 2008 on boxing): How do other people outside the TMA body cultures react to and use them? What do former members and slackers make of this set of narratives? How can these individual stories and the narratives that bind them be used outside the ofcial martial pedagogy? Connecting to broader debates on embodiment in the media (e.g. Brown, Jennings, & Leledaki, 2008), how do documents such as books and promotional literature contribute to their spreading or hiding? Finally, and more specically to the topic of ageing, how do elderly veteran practitioners perform and perceive their role as ageing role models, and how do they interact within the formal pedagogy? At the same time, how do older or elderly beginners address the concept of lifelong practice and interact with their new yet younger instructor? Future studies on a variety of TMAs of different cultural origins could bode well for addressing these issues, which, if approached effectively, could help us understand martial arts academically, and could also assist practitioners and outsiders in navigating their daily, embodied lives. Moreover, with narrative inquiry being in vogue within (the mainly English-language) physical culture studies in the West primarily due to its potential for exploring peoples embodied lives I have demonstrated how one can use this approach to negotiate culturally complex issues such as the social practice of TCMAs in Britain. Narrative research of this kind (in both the West and East) can go hand in hand with other data collection strategies such as analyses of written biographies and practitioner-orientated literature, individual case studies and ethnographies. This could also be conducted in the guise of media analysis (to explore broader societal communications) and autoethnographic approaches, in a genre of research so often dominated by practitioner-researchers and which requires a connection to wider social media, narratives and discourse. Furthermore, this new line of investigation may draw upon data from more informal pedagogical settings, such as the typical talk of men and women in informal pedagogies such as extra-curricular training between classmates. As a theory, it can blend well with concepts from sociology and Eastern philosophy as I have attempted to indicate in this article through reference to Bourdieu, Eichberg, Frank and Yuasa particularly those approaches that pay close attention to embodiment. The blend of contemporary Eastern mind body philosophy and the sociology of the body has been noted for quite some time now (Ozawa-de Silva, 2000), and deserves closer empirical attention. There are also other possibilities in the assimilation of narrative with phenomenology,6 as both can paint different pictures of peoples experiences. Together, this eclectic strategy can offer powerful stories from the West from practitioners of all ages that may be necessary to

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overcome the little old Chinese man myth. Some closing words from Ben illustrate this point perfectly:
You look at the Chinese in the park. Yes, and thats how people have approached it: Oh look, theres old people in the park. In the Western world, a lot of people, including the young, have started to take it up as well. Im sure its not just old people and Chinese. But thats the way that its perceived.

It is my hope, then, that this article has stimulated thought on narrative inquiry in terms of what we can research in Asian martial arts and body cultures and how we may go about studying them as part of a sociology that considers what society could be. Acknowledgements

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I am eternally grateful to the participants who made this study possible through their stories and exchanges. Thanks are due to Alex Channon for his very useful comments on an earlier version of this article. Finally, thanks go to my wife Erika for being a great source of technical and moral support during the writing process.

Notes
1

3 4

5 6

Qigong (chi kung or chi gung) is an umbrella term for a broad set of breathing and movement practices designed to cultivated qi (chi) energy for health, moving meditation or to aid ones practice of martial arts. I am using the romanization of the Chinese terms as used in ofcial documents in the Peoples Republic of China, which has taken a strong interest in these traditions (see Xu, 1999). The idea of generations in TCMAs is not so much about ones chronological age as ones position or rank within the system. Normally generations are calculated from how many teachers have passed down the art within a specic body lineage since the founding of the given art. Hence, a 10th-generation teacher of 30 years of age could teach an 11th-generation student of 60. The idea of giving voice to practitioners within Western body cultures is well established. See the earlier work of Sparkes (1994), for example. The system of gradings and belts is not standardized in the TCMAs, and many associations in my study pride themselves on the fact that they resisted this modern approach to structuring martial arts, which began with Judo (see Inoue, 1998). This storytelling developed from the growth of alternative forms of representation or creative analytic practices such as poetry and ction, none of which are explored in this particular article. Phenomenology is a broad set of theoretical and methodological traditions, and its application with narrative must be considered in light of certain epistemological foundations. For a review in terms of physical culture, see Allen Collinson (2009).

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