Opening Fields through Aikido: An Embodied Dialogic Practice at a Martial Art Dojo by Jie-Young

223 Pages·2012·0.88 MB·English

by  Jieyoung Kong

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

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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!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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

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LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1. Open Coding from the Preliminary Study......................... 38
2. Coding Density from the Preliminary Study..................... 39

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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

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