Opening Fields through Aikido: An Embodied Dialogic Practice at a Martial Art Dojo by Jie-Young Kong A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Approved July 2012 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Benjamin J. Broome, Chair Sarah J. Tracy Andrea Ballestero Salaverry ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY August 2012 ABSTRACT The global spread of body techniques, such as Yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Qigong, and non-competitive martial arts have been diffusing into socio-cultural spaces and institutions outside of their native contexts. Despite the ubiquity of cultural borrowing and mixing, the much needed conceptualization and theorization of cultural appropriation is nearly absent within intercultural communication studies. This ethnographic study examines one community of martial artists who practice Aikido, a martial art originating from Japan, in the United States to explore how members negotiate and appropriate its cultural elements in their practice, how the practice binds the dojo community, and how the practice cultivates an embodied dialogic practice. The study takes an ethnographic approach that uses qualitative methods (e.g. participant-observation and interviews). It is also an experiment with methodology comprised of two moment: the first taking an informative and a communicative view of ethnography, and the second, a performative approach. The ethnographic account transposes the Aikido technique - 1) attack, 2) evasion, 3) centralization, and 4) neutralization – onto the chapters as a way to co-produce the world textually rather than extract representations from it. At the dojo Shining Energy, corporeal, material and semiotic components coexist to produce both defined and latent relationalities that open fields and spaces not predetermined by meaning, law, and authority. The transmission of skill takes places through the relational openings in the rich structured environment during practice that each member helps to generate regardless of i their skill level. Aikido practice cultivates a latent form of coping strategy where practitioners learn to flourish in midst of hostile situations while maintaining their own presence and identity. Practitioners persist in the practice of Aikido to submit themselves to the processes to engage their sinews, senses and neural paths to keep up with the particulars of situations so that perception, control, and action to run together like the “flash of lightening” to open up inert reality into a process. The practice of Aikido points to a space and time beyond the movement forms to intimate and reveal new ways of not only moving in the world, but also moving the world! ii DEDICATION To my mother and father, for letting me pursue my twinkling little star, and my sister Sungwon, without whom I would not have known I had one. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Benjamin J. Broome, Dr. Sarah J. Tracy, and Dr. Andrea Ballestero Salaverry for their collective guidance, insightful prodding and willingness to sit and work with me throughout this research project. Individually, Dr. Broome’s confidence in me and wisdom to let my initiatives take their expression made this research possible. When I was visited by self-doubt or became exhausted, his attentive and empathetic pair of ears became a sanctuary to renew my strength to tenaciously explore this new territory. Dr. Tracy’s organizational skill and meticulous attention to detail not only kept my tendency to be wayward in check, but her expertise helped maintain focus and structure to what could have become an unwieldy ethnographic research. It was your qualitative course that opened the universe of inductive research methodology. To Dr. Ballestero, I thank for taking me under her wings all the while gently but firmly pushing me with her keen eyes and supple mind to not only explore the edges of my conceptual tools, research methodology and the subject matter itself, but also to engage one in the other to ‘open fields’. My research became not only an investigation on transculturation but a process of transculturation itself! You were right. Even if my dissertation may be the 258th research on martial arts, there is something new and interesting to be said about it. Next, I would like to thank Terrie Wong, my trustworthy colleague and steadfast friend throughout my doctoral program and beyond. It was her initial suggestion to check out a Japanese martial art dojo (practice hall) that provided iv the impetus for the eventually unfolding of the most challenging yet rewarding dissertation project I could ever wish for! To Amy “Nana” Jung, thank you for your faith and sympathetic ears in late hours of many nights as I’d gripe and struggled to grapple with the research process and its findings. I cannot imagine how I might have survived moments of lonesome work without your late-night dialogic companionship. If anyone were to ask, why a dissertation on the practice of Aikido? My answer in a nutshell would be because of Dr. David Nachman sensei and Dr. Veronica Burrows sensei. Their genuine passion and love of the art and unparalleled mastery encouraged me to pick up the practice and to look beyond the trap of visible forms and tradition. More than anything else, it is their patience, centeredness and depth of wisdom as they engage with each practitioner on the mat that I hope to take away from my two year long training under their instruction. As for an expanded version of that answer, I would include the dojo family, especially the seniors. Rather than intimidating the juniors and novices with their skill and power, each interacted closely with juniors and novices to both pose a challenge as well as guide in their unique and idiosyncratic ways. To each - Maria Angelica Deeb, Chris Burrell, Hung Nguyen, Adam Silkroski, Eric Landis and David Cardon, as well as Reed Hamel and Atsuko Kawakami - I would like to thank for not only enriching the experience and practice of the art for the rest of us, but also the friendship they extended off the mat. Finally, I would also like to thank my colleagues from the Ethnography Studio, especially Katelyn Parady, Tae-eun Kim, Shawn Nikkila and John C. v McKnight, for providing insights, suggestions and comments as I struggled to craft and articulate my project. The Ethnography Studio, spearheaded by Dr. Ballestero, drew in members from a wide array of disciplinary backgrounds and research interests whose individual work in progress and collective interdisciplinarity provided a rare and invaluable space for members to work through their project ideas, research design, and writing while asking each other hard questions. And they were hard indeed! vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES........................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION......................................................................... 1 2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE........................................................ 12 3. METHOD...................................................................................... 31 4. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DOJO.............................................. 58 5. FRAMING AIKIDO PRACTICE.................................................. 92 6. FEELING RELATIONALITIES THROUGH MOVEMENT......140 7. CONCLUSION..............................................................................184 REFERENCES................................................................................................192 APPENDIX 1. INTERVIEW GUIDE: the First Moment......................................203 2. INTERVIEW GUIDE: the Second Moment..................................209 FOOTNOTES..................................................................................................214 vii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Open Coding from the Preliminary Study......................... 38 2. Coding Density from the Preliminary Study..................... 39 viii CHAPTER 1 Introduction “It is also the story of the men and women who encouraged me to see beyond or behind the mask of explicit, learned culture into that much more vast, less artificial world acquired in the deeply personal process of life as it is lived by human beings as they interact naturally with each other with neither thought nor artifice.” - Edward T. Hall (p. xv) Communicating the feeling of ch’i/ki/qi, a concept that has long been associated with life force and energy flow of both human and non-human entities and relations in East Asia (Chung, 2008) , is no longer a phenomenon bound to the social reality of practices and modalities in Asia or of Asians. Global cultural flows are creating a new intercultural communication reality where the expansion and intensification in the multi-directional flows in people, material goods, practices, information, and the social imaginary (Appadurai, 1996) are reassembling the topography of collective lives and human experience. The global spread of body techniques, such as Yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Qigong, and non- competitive martial arts – what Brown and Ledaki (2010) calls ‘Eastern movement forms’ – are diffusing into socio-cultural spaces and institutions outside of their native contexts. They are providing the experiential condition on which the once esoteric and hidebound indigenous concepts like energy flow are acquiring pragmatic significance for their non-native practitioners, but also 1