Humanity and animality in Chinese martial arts

Abstract

What does it mean to learn from animals in Chinese martial arts? How does the training process emulate natural qualities? What is the relationship between humanity and animality in the Chinese cosmos? To answer these questions, I divide this article into three parts. Firstly, I specify the research problem, referring to my experiences as an Eagle Claw kung fu apprentice and my notes from a performance ethnography on Chen taijiquan. Secondly, I approach the issue of humanity and animality from the perspective of Tim Ingold to investigate how (and if) this distinction operates in Chinese correlative cosmology as defined by Anne Cheng, Cyrille Javary and François Jullien. Thirdly, to clarify the nature of animality in martial arts learning, I establish connections between Ingold’s debate and philosophical concepts from Yuk Hui. In conclusion, I argue that the animal patterns adopted in Chinese martial arts are not imitative but rather emulative of the principles operating in the Chinese cosmos, serving as an integrative path.

Keywords:

• Chinese martial arts
• animality
• corporeal techniques
• ‘cosmotechnics’
• emulation

Notes

1 Here and elsewhere translations from the Portuguese and Spanish are the author’s own.

2 Because Eagle Claw names are usually learned in the form of free transliterations from Cantonese, practitioners may know this word as jau da. For a more detailed explanation, see Schiller (2012).

3 These movements operate as concepts that open up new ontological possibilities. In this heuristic orientation, I choose to speak of various worlds and their ontologies and cosmologies rather than of worldviews, which would refer to alternative interpretations of the unique world proposed by Occidental ontology. On the topic, see Henare, Holbraad and Wastell (2007, 3) and Viveiros de Castro (2003, 5).

4 This was not a theoretical ‘invention’ by the Chens: such terms have widely circulated in scholarly debates since at least the Han Dynasty (Cheng 2008, 331–337). It is possible – although this is not the focus of this article – to trace their textual genealogy among the writings of Chen Wangting (1580–1660). This Master, by citing the Huángting Jing (Chinese: 黃庭經) (Chen 2020, 96), makes explicit contact with the thought composed by the Hans and then continuously re-elaborated by the Confucian and cosmologist lineages, as in the latter Neo-Confucianism. On this, see Cheng (2008, 338).

5 The edition of Cheng’s book in Portuguese was consulted in its French original.

6 There are many translations and versions of Book of Changes available. For this reason, I do not quote any particular one, referring only to its context in Chinese history as detailed by Cheng (2008, 302).

7 It is only during the Han dynasty, through the work of Sima Qian (c. 145 BCE – c. 86 CE) in his Records of the Grand Historian (Chinese: 史記 Shıˇji) that a proposition arose for classifying former thinkers in ‘schools’ or ‘families’. In Chinese, the term used is 家 jiā. See Cheng (2008, 330).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriel Guarino de Almeida

Gabriel Guarino de Almeida is a martial artist (an apprentice and instructor of Eagle Claw kung fu and Chen taijiquan), anthropologist and poet. Currently, he works at the EstetiPop (Research Laboratory in Aesthetics, Anthropology and Popular Culture) at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC-Rio; Pontifical Catholic University) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is writing a PhD in the Education Department of the PUC-Rio and is a research fellow at the CAPES Academic Excellence Programme. He holds a master’s degree in Legal and Social Sciences with a thesis on qualitative research in legal anthropology. He is a former athlete of the Brazilian Kung Fu National Team (2016–2018) who was elected Athlete of the Year in 2018.