The seven forms of lightsaber combat: hyper-reality and the invention of the martial arts

Martial arts studies has entered a period of rapid conceptual development. Yet relatively few works have attempted to define the ‘martial arts’, our signature concept. This article evaluates a number of approaches to the problem by asking whether ‘lightsaber combat’ is a martial art. Inspired by a successful film franchise, these increasingly popular practices combine elements of historical swordsmanship, modern combat sports, stage choreography and a fictional worldview to ‘recreate’ the fighting methods of Jedi and Sith warriors. The rise of such hyper-real fighting systems may force us to reconsider a number of questions. What is the link between ‘authentic’ martial arts and history? Can an activity be a martial art even if its students and teachers do not claim it as such? Is our current body of theory capable of exploring the rise of hyper-real practices? Most importantly, what sort of theoretical work do we expect from our definition of the ‘martial arts’

Editorial

What is the meaning of ‘forms’ practice within the traditional Asian martial arts? Were Bruce Lee’s movies actually ‘kung fu’ films? Was the famous Ali vs. Inoki fight a step on the pathway to MMA or a paradoxical failure to communicate? What pitfalls await the unwary as we rush to define key terms in a newly emerging, but still undertheorized, discipline? The rich and varied articles offered in Issue 3 of Martial Arts Studies pose these questions and many more. Taken as a set, they reflect the growing scholarly engagement between our field and a variety of theoretical and methodological traditions. Many monographs, academic articles, book chapters, conference papers and proceedings that have appeared over the last year have been forced to address the question that Paul Bowman raised in the very first issue of this journal in 2015: Is martial arts studies an academic field

Show, don't tell: Making martial arts studies matter

How can we make martial arts studies matter? Returning to the issues of triviality and legitimation raised in the Spring 2017 editorial, in this essay we explore various strategies for conveying the intellectual importance of our work to a scholarly but non-specialist readership. In recent years the field of martial arts studies has made impressive strides in terms of both growth and public exposure. Yet this success suggests that increasingly gatekeepers in the form of editors, funding bodies and promotion committees will have an impact on the development of our field. Appealing to such readers is a critical next step in the creation of martial arts studies. The first draft of this editorial was presented by Benjamin Judkins as a keynote at the July 2017 Martial Arts Studies Conference at Cardiff University. It has subsequently been edited to reflect the opinions of both authors and the current context

Editorial: Is martial arts studies trivial?

Before introducing the articles comprising this issue of Martial Arts Studies, this editorial first undertakes a sustained reflection on the question of whether the emergent field of martial arts studies might be regarded as trivial. In doing so, it explores possible rationales and raisons d’être of the field in terms of a reflection on the legitimation of academic subjects, especially those closest to martial arts studies, from which martial arts studies can be said to have emerged. The first draft of this reflection was originally written by Bowman in response to certain reactions to his academic interest in martial arts (hence the occasional use of the pronoun ‘I’, rather than ‘we’), but Judkins proposed that the piece form part of this issue’s editorial, because of the importance of thinking about what this ‘martial arts studies’ thing is that we are doing, what the point of it may be, and whether or not it may be trivial

Spring 2020 Editorial

This is the editorial for the Spring 2020 issue of Martial Arts Studies

Objective evaluation of expert and novice performance during robotic surgical training tasks

Background - Robotic laparoscopic surgery has revolutionized minimally invasive surgery for the treatment of abdominal pathologies. However, current training techniques rely on subjective evaluation. The authors sought to identify objective measures of robotic surgical performance by comparing novices and experts during three training tasks. Methods - Five novices (medical students) were trained in three tasks with the da Vinci Surgical System. Five experts trained in advanced laparoscopy also performed the three tasks. Time to task completion (TTC), total distance traveled (D), speed (S), curvature (Ƙ), and relative phase (Φ) were measured. Results - Before training, TTC, D, and Ƙ were significantly smaller for experts than for novices (p \u3c 0.05), whereas S was significantly larger for experts than for novices before training (p \u3c 0.05). Novices performed significantly better after training, as shown by smaller TTC, D, and Ƙ, and larger S. Novice performance after training approached expert performance. Conclusion - This study clearly demonstrated the ability of objective kinematic measures to distinguish between novice and expert performance and training effects in the performance of robotic surgical training tasks