Combat, Ritual, and Performance : Anthropology of the Martial Arts

Rating:
Summary: As much stew as you can make from very few oysters
Review: The martial arts, variously defined, are certainly worth scholarly examination. The editor has done his best to provide a survey of the social science literature on the subject. Unfortunately it falls a little short of the mark.
This isn't entirely his fault. There just isn't that much in the scholarly literature on the subject. He had to go pretty far afield in subject matter and in time to fill a volume. And it shows.

Some of the articles are interesting from a social science perspective but have absolutely nothing to do with combatives, hoplology or the like. The piece on Tanzanian dance competition, for instance, is fascinating. But the author demonstrates in the first couple pages that the practice has no martial past.

Others, such as the first article in the book and the two articles by Donohue suffer, I fear from two common sins of anthropology. The authors ignore that which does not agree with their theses, retain a tad too much scholarly detachment when investigating exceptionally personal and transformative practices, make universal statements based on a very limited cultural milieu, and seem to have trouble taking believing that practitioners of cultural practices have insight into their own lives and experience.

Other articles such as the ones on the Ayarrs and somatic nationalism in Indian wrestling hit the sweet spot of hoplology and social science scholarship.

The book could have been better. But given the material the editor had to work with it is a decent effort.