I am not very knowledgeable about the history of jujutsu myself, but it is said that the various martial arts from the Sengoku period, which are considered the roots of jujutsu, were developed on the assumption that weapons would be used. They seem to have been primarily intended for combat at distances closer than the effective range of a sword. In particular, a martial practice known as kumiuchi had as its ultimate objective the decapitation of a subdued enemy warrior with a dagger.
When the Edo period brought an end to large scale warfare, these martial arts began to emphasize their role as forms of spiritual and moral cultivation. During the interwar period, they became intertwined with nationalism, eventually evolving into the various forms of budō practiced today.
In Japan, combat sports still retain strong mystical elements, and as a result, competitive and commercial aspects have not developed as extensively. Professional sumo is an exception, although its organizational structure remains remarkably premodern.
Event today, the belief that traditional martial arts centered on apprenticeship and master disciple relationships are spiritually superior to disciplines such as MMA remains widespread. The idea that mere fighting ability is insufficient can also be seen influencing manga and other forms of popular culture.
I've thought about the tail end of the cycle you sketched out for while under the name of "sportification". This is where a system of fighting that developed to be used in multiple contexts of varying lethality, collapses merely to the least lethal version of sport. Part of the traditions even seem to focus on determining what context your entering into, and escalating accordingly.
My favorite example was and probably always will be french foil fencing as derived from the smallsword tradition which itself is a rather strange offshoot of more generic european swordsmenship. Comparing modern olympic foil to the smallsword is similar to comparing chihuahahas and foxes, and to run away with the metaphore the smallsword compared to the longsword is like comparing foxes and wolves.
The front half of your cycle gives me pause however, that commercialization creates the initial complexity. European swordcraft seemed to be driven by spectacles rewarded by honor rather than gold. Here I'm not only referencing french noblemen dueling with smallswords, where winning meant winning the duel with impressive skill to gather more noteriety, but also german fencing guilds.
I'd love to hear of what books you were going to crack to dive into the subject.
That's an interesting point about aristocratic honor traditions driving techniques just as well as the market, although I wonder if the traditional small sword fencers were actually as skilled as today's foil fencing gold medalists. Speaking as an outsider, I'd guess that today's foil fencers probably are the most technically excellent of all eras, just because the Olympics is a big deal.
But then again, I doubt the Olympics would be profitable for most fencing competitors. Athletes probably have to secure outside funding to compete, and the payout might not exceed training costs. And this lack of profitability means that the best, most skilled professional athletes probably wouldn't be drawn to the activity in the first place.
The best and most skilled pro athletes also probably wouldn't be innovating new techniques in it, even if they were compelled to participate, since it seems that the basics of the sport were already determined long ago.
So I don't really know. Another wrench thrown into all of this is that in the case of carnival wrestling, which I mentioned in the piece, the attraction eventually had to feature "worked" matches between professional competitors to become profitable as a standalone event, and this is what birthed the fake kind of pro wrestling, with the steel chairs and everything. So I suppose if I were a promoter who wanted to make fencing into a profitable sport, I would start to "work" it and feature scripted feuds, which is actually what they did with Roller Derby in the 1950s or 60s, around that time. Doing so would change the sport entirely and turn it into an altogether different discipline.
I'm wondering if there's a way to generalize about the kinds of techniques that aristocratic honor culture can innovate as opposed to marketplace spectacle.
As for books, the main books I was interested in at the time were Lawrence Keeley's "War Before Civilization," which I'm now about halfway through, and Roger Caillois's "Man, Play and Games," since Huizinga's "Homo Ludens" is sort of a mess and completely misrepresents the nature of war. And also just some old historical books on weaponry, like H.S. Cowper's "Art of Attack" from 1906. And Michael Poliakoff's "Combat Sports in the Ancient World."
Years ago, I fenced foil for about a decade in a few different settings and now have stuck my nose into history manuals (mostly Joachim Meyer's treatise) for more than half as long.
To answer whether or not today's gold medalist is more "technical" than yesterday's dualist we'd need some definitions. Today's fencers in the olympic style are no doubt faster and more athlethic, but many techniques of bladework have vanished. Variety of methods is how I understand "technical".
This trend is largely due to a shift from scoring by 5 judges in the turn of thw century to scoring by electronic machines and one judge. Changing the score is to change the goal and so change the art. Even the foil changed radically.
Olympic fencing grew staler to become more objective, which is what that organizatiin craves. The aristocrat was more similar to the carnival act in the sense that both needed to produce a show of their character. The aristocrat obviously is awarded political power, the carnie fame and cash.
Its important to note that german longsword traditions in the 16th century, though popular among nobles was also a middle class responsibily. Many cities in the holy roman empire required citizens to act as guards and militia. Winning a fencing torunament means much more in this context.
I think there should be a bit of a difference between arts using weapons and arts without weapons however. I only know a sketch of boxing and wrestlings history, despite loving kick boxing.
I am not very knowledgeable about the history of jujutsu myself, but it is said that the various martial arts from the Sengoku period, which are considered the roots of jujutsu, were developed on the assumption that weapons would be used. They seem to have been primarily intended for combat at distances closer than the effective range of a sword. In particular, a martial practice known as kumiuchi had as its ultimate objective the decapitation of a subdued enemy warrior with a dagger.
When the Edo period brought an end to large scale warfare, these martial arts began to emphasize their role as forms of spiritual and moral cultivation. During the interwar period, they became intertwined with nationalism, eventually evolving into the various forms of budō practiced today.
In Japan, combat sports still retain strong mystical elements, and as a result, competitive and commercial aspects have not developed as extensively. Professional sumo is an exception, although its organizational structure remains remarkably premodern.
Event today, the belief that traditional martial arts centered on apprenticeship and master disciple relationships are spiritually superior to disciplines such as MMA remains widespread. The idea that mere fighting ability is insufficient can also be seen influencing manga and other forms of popular culture.
I've thought about the tail end of the cycle you sketched out for while under the name of "sportification". This is where a system of fighting that developed to be used in multiple contexts of varying lethality, collapses merely to the least lethal version of sport. Part of the traditions even seem to focus on determining what context your entering into, and escalating accordingly.
My favorite example was and probably always will be french foil fencing as derived from the smallsword tradition which itself is a rather strange offshoot of more generic european swordsmenship. Comparing modern olympic foil to the smallsword is similar to comparing chihuahahas and foxes, and to run away with the metaphore the smallsword compared to the longsword is like comparing foxes and wolves.
The front half of your cycle gives me pause however, that commercialization creates the initial complexity. European swordcraft seemed to be driven by spectacles rewarded by honor rather than gold. Here I'm not only referencing french noblemen dueling with smallswords, where winning meant winning the duel with impressive skill to gather more noteriety, but also german fencing guilds.
I'd love to hear of what books you were going to crack to dive into the subject.
That's an interesting point about aristocratic honor traditions driving techniques just as well as the market, although I wonder if the traditional small sword fencers were actually as skilled as today's foil fencing gold medalists. Speaking as an outsider, I'd guess that today's foil fencers probably are the most technically excellent of all eras, just because the Olympics is a big deal.
But then again, I doubt the Olympics would be profitable for most fencing competitors. Athletes probably have to secure outside funding to compete, and the payout might not exceed training costs. And this lack of profitability means that the best, most skilled professional athletes probably wouldn't be drawn to the activity in the first place.
The best and most skilled pro athletes also probably wouldn't be innovating new techniques in it, even if they were compelled to participate, since it seems that the basics of the sport were already determined long ago.
So I don't really know. Another wrench thrown into all of this is that in the case of carnival wrestling, which I mentioned in the piece, the attraction eventually had to feature "worked" matches between professional competitors to become profitable as a standalone event, and this is what birthed the fake kind of pro wrestling, with the steel chairs and everything. So I suppose if I were a promoter who wanted to make fencing into a profitable sport, I would start to "work" it and feature scripted feuds, which is actually what they did with Roller Derby in the 1950s or 60s, around that time. Doing so would change the sport entirely and turn it into an altogether different discipline.
I'm wondering if there's a way to generalize about the kinds of techniques that aristocratic honor culture can innovate as opposed to marketplace spectacle.
As for books, the main books I was interested in at the time were Lawrence Keeley's "War Before Civilization," which I'm now about halfway through, and Roger Caillois's "Man, Play and Games," since Huizinga's "Homo Ludens" is sort of a mess and completely misrepresents the nature of war. And also just some old historical books on weaponry, like H.S. Cowper's "Art of Attack" from 1906. And Michael Poliakoff's "Combat Sports in the Ancient World."
Years ago, I fenced foil for about a decade in a few different settings and now have stuck my nose into history manuals (mostly Joachim Meyer's treatise) for more than half as long.
To answer whether or not today's gold medalist is more "technical" than yesterday's dualist we'd need some definitions. Today's fencers in the olympic style are no doubt faster and more athlethic, but many techniques of bladework have vanished. Variety of methods is how I understand "technical".
This trend is largely due to a shift from scoring by 5 judges in the turn of thw century to scoring by electronic machines and one judge. Changing the score is to change the goal and so change the art. Even the foil changed radically.
Olympic fencing grew staler to become more objective, which is what that organizatiin craves. The aristocrat was more similar to the carnival act in the sense that both needed to produce a show of their character. The aristocrat obviously is awarded political power, the carnie fame and cash.
Its important to note that german longsword traditions in the 16th century, though popular among nobles was also a middle class responsibily. Many cities in the holy roman empire required citizens to act as guards and militia. Winning a fencing torunament means much more in this context.
I think there should be a bit of a difference between arts using weapons and arts without weapons however. I only know a sketch of boxing and wrestlings history, despite loving kick boxing.