The tradition of invention: on authenticity in traditional Asian martial arts

Discussions of pedagogy tend unsurprisingly to focus in a direct and literal way on the pedagogical scene of the classroom, the teacher-learner relation, or (as in the case of martial arts) the training session (Lefebvre 2016; Nakajima 2018). Without discounting the importance, value and utility of any such approach, in what follows I try to broaden the frames and examine the notions of ‘East Asian pedagogy’ and ‘traditional martial arts’ in two different ways: first, by situating these terms within a broader cultural context than is common in many discussions of pedagogy (Downey 2005; Wacquant 2004); and second, in terms of a principled scepticism about both of these categories themselves (Said 1978)