1、Sport and Body Culture: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of East and West,Susan Brownell Joint Chair, Departments of Anthropology and Foreign Languages University of Missouri, St. Louis sbrownellumsl.edu,Vesalius, 1543,Hua Shou, 1341,Panel on Sport, the Body and Health: East vs. West 9th World Leisure Co
2、ngress Hangzhou, China 19 October 2006,Concepts of body are culturally relative,Three Traditions of Knowledge about the Body in China:,Medicine: Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Qigong (healing through use of qi). Religion: Taoism (alchemy and the search for immortality); Buddhism (the search for enlig
3、htenment). Martial Arts (kungfu, wushu),meridians (conduits for the circulation of qi, vital energy): twelve regular meridians which form circuits; back and outside of limbs are yang, front and inside of limbs are yin.,Acupuncture Charts,yin/yang Yellow Emperors Classic of Medicine: “The Yellow Empe
4、ror said, The principle of Yin and Yang is the foundation of the entire universe. It underlies everything in creation. It brings about the development of parenthood; it is the root and source of life and death; it is found within the temples of the gods. In order to treat and cure disease one must s
5、earch for their origins. .“Yang, the element of light. Yin, the element of darkness. Water is an embodiment of Yin, as fire is an embodiment of Yang. Yang creates the air, while Yin creates the senses, which belong to the physical body. When the physical body dies, the spirit is restored to the air,
6、 its natural environment. The spirit receives its nourishment through the air, and the body receives its nourishment through the senses.“,Taiji, the Supreme Ultimate,self-cultivation (xiulian): Enhancing the mind or spirit by training the body. Breathing exercises form the center of all self-cultiva
7、tion exercises; meditation in motion, eg. walking, dancing, martial arts, calligraphy, etc.; meditation in stillness.Satori (Buddhism), Dao (Daoism): Inseparable mind-body oneness,cinnabar field (dantian) upper - center of forehead, seat of light residing in humans middle - heart region, abode of th
8、e spiritual soul lower - lower abdomen, the somatic soul (sexual libido).,II. Comparison of Ancient Chinese and Greek Body Culture (see Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, 1999),Blood and pulseFor over 2,000 years, the pulse was of cen
9、tral interest in both China and the West. The main Greek texts are the Hippocratic corpus (450-350 B.C.) and the works of Galen (129-200AD). Galen devoted over 1,000 pages to the pulse. Greeks envisioned arteries as tubes with blood flowing through them, which caused them to expand and contract, pro
10、ducing a pressure on the fingers that was called the pulse. It was a “rhythm.”,As seen in the earliest text, the Mawangdui manuscripts (3rd to 2nd c. BC), mo originally denoted blood vessels. The key foundational texts are from the Latter Han (25-220 AD), the Huangdi neijing and the Nanjing. By this
11、 time, there are differences between Greek and Chinese thought. Mo means both blood vessel and pulse, and can be translated two different ways in English.,Since the Nanjing, Chinese doctors recognized six qiemo sites on each wrist, three “floating” and three “sunken.” But these pulse points were not
12、 used to sense the pulsing of blood through tubes. They felt a streaming underneath the skin. They were like rivers and currents of blood and breath, used to diagnose the twelve organs of the body. They did not recognize the concept of pulse or the rise and fall of arteries toward and away from the
13、body surface.,Greek phlebotomy vs. Chinese acupuncture Greeks let blood from different parts of the body. Excess blood was bad for the health. Greeks and later Westerners practiced bloodletting. Plethora was sometimes considered the root of all disease, depletion was not a problem. Pores were channe
14、ls for letting out excretions. Sweating could be good for you.,Chinese notions of shi, fullness, and xu, emptiness, were different. To be full was to be replete and healthy; depletion was pathological. Bloodletting disappeared after the 2nd century AD. Pores were openings through which illness could
15、 come into the body. Sweating made you weaker.,Greeks considered exercise synonymous with strenuous labor. Sweating was good because it got rid of bad essences. Breathing hard was good. They feared putrefaction (rotting). Chinese feared dispersal and dissipation. Chinese hoarded blood, qi, and semen
16、.,Chinese did not do dissection. The body was perceived from within, not from without; subjective experience was prioritized over objective experience.,Muscles Greek artists depicted muscles even before they knew what they were; they were considered aesthetically pleasing from the earliest Greek per
17、iods and throughout Western art. Greeks considered athletic nudity as a symbol of their identity.The Chinese never developed a word for muscle and were not especially interested in them. They had no tradition of nude art before the twentieth century.,Mawangdui Tomb (168BC),Panathenaic amphora, 333 B
18、C,Terra cotta soldier, tomb of Emperor Qin, 207 BC,Amphora, c. 550-525 BC,Terra cotta soldiers, tomb of Emperor Qin, 207 BC,Parthenon metopes, 5th c. BC,medical text ,1341 AD,Boxer, 336 BC,Why were the Greeks so interested in muscles?1) due to the primacy of sight, an aesthetic impulse.2) due to the
19、 interest in dissection and anatomy.Bodily forms were believed to express a creative purpose, a sense of design in the world.,More Reasons for the interest in the muscular body: 3) the strenuous training of Greek athletes and athletic nudity actually provided examples that could be seen. 4) an emerg
20、ing worldview emphasized the difference between voluntary and involuntary action. Pulse was involuntary, muscles were voluntary. We can see the emergence of what was to become a fundamental split: the schism between between mind and body.,The Greeks became fixated on finding what was the ruling prin
21、ciple, the controller, of the body. They focused on the heart or the brain. Organs were tools, instruments with specific uses, manipulated by the soul. The soul steered the body. A dead body was only a body without a soul. The Chinese body was more of a dynamic system. No one organ (zang and fu) rul
22、ed the others. The Chinese zang and fu werent tools of some controlling source. They were repositories of qi. A dead body was a body with no qi in it. It was useless for doctors to study such a thing.,Western mind/body dualism vs. Eastern Mind-Body SynthesisWe can already see the emergence of mind-b
23、ody dualism among the ancient Greeks, by contrast with the mind-body synthesis in China.,Mind-body dualism is central to modern medicine, modern sports and the Olympic Ideals. “A sound mind in a sound body” reflects the Western view of the body.Is there room for other ways of looking at the body in
24、the Olympic Movement?,III. The Olympic Games as East-West Cultural Exchange, or Western Cultural Imperialism?,In 2008, the Olympic Games will be hosted by the least Westernized nation to host them. It will be only the third time the Olympic Summer Games have been held outside the Western hemisphere,
25、 and it will be the greatest-ever meeting of East and West in peacetime. But will the Olympics involve East-West Cultural Exchange, or Western Cultural Imperialism?,Why is hosting the Olympic Games so important to China?A large part of the answer lies in the history of 19th century Western imperiali
26、sm. Classicism and Orientalism emerged and developed in tandem as complementary opposites; Classicism was the Wests way of defining “who we are,” while Orientalism was the Wests way of defining “who we are not.”,Classicism and philhellenism were the driving forces behind the Olympic revival.,Aristot
27、le: “Europeans are full of spirit but wanting in intelligence and skill; Asians are intelligent and inventive, but wanting in spirit, and so are always in a state of subjection and slavery; but the Hellenic race is situated between them, is intermediate in character, and is high-spirited and intelli
28、gent.”,Furthermore, eighteenth-century revolutionary thinkers, particularly Montesquieu, utilized the stereotype of Oriental despotism in opposition to their ideas of freedom and democracy. Because sports came to be associated with democracy, it was assumed that they were incompatible with Oriental
29、despotism.Of course, a key figure behind the revival of the modern Olympic Games Pierre de Coubertin - was French.,Neoclassicism occupied a central role in the French Revolution. The glory of ancient Greece, including the ancient Olympic Games, inspired new social forms to take the place of the reje
30、cted forms of the Medieval Ages. Thus, in the French Revolution ancient Greek sports were associated with democracy and civil religion (Otto Schantz, “Franzsische Festkultur als Wegbereiter der Modernen Olympischen Spiele,” pp. 66-74),Pierre de CoubertinA Philhellene, andReviver of the modern Olympi
31、c Games (est. 1896),Ernst Curtius, 19th c. Classicist Wetteifernde Tatenlust “competitive lust for action” “before and after the Hellenes there was no people for whom the free and full development of the human strengths was the life goal.” The Greek “agonistic character” was “in opposition to the li
32、fe of pleasure of the Orient, the excessive valuation of possessions and holdings.” (Curtius, Althertum und Gegenwart, 1903, p. 9, 10, 4),The Agonal Spirit and its lack in the Orient,This false view that the Greeks competed for honor, not for material wealth, became one of the foundation myths of am
33、ateurism in Olympic sports, which was debunked by David Young in The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics (1984). Although there were other factors contributing to this myth, such as the British class structure, one of the original sources of the myth was Curtius description of Western civilizati
34、on as above the pursuit of material profit, in opposition to the materialistic Orient.,Marathon Cup, 1904 Olympic Games,Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): the Greeks made everything into a contest: drinking songs, philosophy, legal procedure. For Burckhardt, athletics and the Olympic Games were the quint
35、essence of the agonal principle.,“.In the Asiatic cultures, despotism and the caste system were almost completely opposed to such activities” (The Greeks and Greek Civilization, p. 162).,The Imperial Exams were a kind of competition. The Chinese were as concerned with ensuring the fairness of the ex
36、ams as the Greeks were in ensuring the fairness of their sporting events. But the Western classicists ignored this.,In late 19th- and early 20th-century Western accounts of Chinese sports, the stereotypes of Orientalism are evident: competitive athletic activities were assumed to hardly exist becaus
37、e of the stereotype of the non-competitive, over-intellectualized Oriental who would rather order a subordinate to do physical activity in his place. The story of the British consul who plays tennis for the Daotai (imperial official) in Tianjin.,Herbert A. Giles, “Football and Polo in China” (1906):
38、 “It was on the 9th of November 1905, while watching the Cambridge University team make their splendid stand against the famous All Blacks, that I began to wonder if anyone would take an interest in, or even believe, the fact that football was played by the Chinese several centuries before Julius Ca
39、esar landed in Britain.”,Jin dynasty (1115-1234) porcelain pillow,Mencius: “Those who work with their brains rule; those who work with their brawn are ruled” (laoxinze zhi ren, laolizhe zhiyu ren).The received view is that since the the Song Dynasty (960-1279), written examinations had been the stan
40、dard method for selecting government officials. The Imperial Examinations required memorization of the classics, which occupied many years of study. Zhong wen qing wu, “esteem literacy and despise martiality,” became the elite ideal. But this is elite history which ignores the popularity of sports a
41、mong the common people and among non-intellectual members of the imperial court.,At the turn of the century, the Orientalist stereotype resulted in the notion of the dongya bingfu, or “sick man of East Asia.” The West was personified as a manly athlete, while China was an effeminate intellectual.,Th
42、e first call for China to host the Olympic Games ca. 1907-1908,Mao Zedong “A Study of Physical Culture” (1917):“Exercise is important for physical education, but today most scholars are not interested in sports.” Throughout his political career Mao held to the concept that yundong, “activity” or “mo
43、vement,” was the remedy for the passivity and weakness that ailed China. Yundong also means sport. Yundong also refers to the endless political “campaigns” of the Maoist period. These debates reveal the Orientalist stereotype of the quiet, still (jing) East, which could only become a strong nation b
44、y becoming like the active (dong) West.,Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Revolution and founder of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949,The history of ancient Greek athletics did not spring fully-formed onto the page, but was accumulated through years of analysis of texts and museum artifacts, a
45、nd archaeological excavations. It has been pieced together from different kinds of sources for over 200 years now. 12 nations run archaeological schools in Greece. Archaeology was virtually discontinued in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and is conducted on a much more limited basis i
46、n China.,Sports arguably occupied as important a role in Chinese political systems over the centuries as did the Olympic Games in ancient Greece. Kick-ball and horn-butting were associated with the origin of government in the myths of the Warring States period (403-221BC). Kick-ball playing fields w
47、ere a standard feature of palace complexes as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220AD). Polo was important in the Tang imperial courts (618-906AD), and wrestling was important in the Song (960-1279AD) and all subsequent imperial courts.,Tang dynasty polo player,Dragon boat races were popular througho
48、ut much of China and were held on a large scale in many places, but Western scholars classified them as “religious festivals,” not sports.,Wrestling was important in Mongol and Manchu culture generally, and was also an important form of entertainment and public display for the Qing (1644-1911) court
49、, which maintained a special guard of skilled wrestlers in a system similar to Japanese imperial sumo.,In the sections of any major city devoted to street entertainment, such as the Tianqiao district of Beijing, a spectator could easily observe acrobatics, wrestling, and feats of strength and prowes
50、s.,And of course the martial arts tradition contradicts the stereotype of the effeminate, intellectual Chinese.,There was ample observable evidence that could have contradicted the notion of the intellectualized, effeminized, non-competitive Chinese with no sports of their own, but their pre-existin
51、g views did not predispose Westerners to see them, and, seeing themselves through Western eyes, reform-minded Chinese people echoed the same views. Sports helped to define Western identity, while their lack defined Chinese identity. Chinas desire to erase the “sick man of East Asia” is the result of Chinas seeing itself through the eyes of the West for the past 100 years. Isnt it time to reject a stereotype that was never accurate?,
