Organizer: John Christopher Hamm, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Victoria B. Cass, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussant: David G. Johnson, University of California, Berkeley
This panel brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines in the exploration of a topic hitherto largely neglected: the cultural significance of the Chinese martial arts. For the members of certain groups in Qing, Republican, and modern China, the martial arts and their associated systems of belief have served as central vehicles for the formation of individual and corporate identity. The martial arts' influence and significance, however, extend far beyond these often marginal sub-cultures. For large segments of the population, the martial arts and their practitioners have served as mirrors, as stages for the enactment or contestation of a range of political, social, and psychological concerns. The papers presented here consider both martial arts practices and organizations and the wider public's perception or imagination of the same; they focus in particular on the two-way exchange of meaning between sub-culture and general society, and on the varieties of artistic and social performance through which such exchange takes place.
Chris Hamm's paper examines the milieu of the martial arts as imagined in a popular work of Qing fiction, Lü mudan. He discusses the representation of the world of "rivers and lakes" as a mirror of the orthodox order, and the constitutive roles of gender and violence in this world. Meir Shahar, in his study of late-Qing martial arts fiction, opens the question of the relationship between popular fiction and the actual practice of the martial and magical arts. To what extent do novelistic accounts of practices such as the "Armor of the Golden Bell" reflect the activities and beliefs of contemporary sects; to what extent might the novels have been instrumental in actually promulgating such beliefs? Hugh Shapiro addresses another facet of the interface between narrative and experience. Examining Republican incidents of so-called "feigned madness" in which individuals claimed possession by the heroes of martial opera, he explores the conscious and unconscious dimensions of the assimilation of cultural knowledge.
Taken collectively, then, the papers offered here have a double aim: on the one hand, to elucidate a rich and significant realm of the Chinese cultural imagination; on the other, to inquire into the very processes by which imagination, representation, and social practice continually fertilize one another.
On the Watery Edges of Order: Jianghu in the Fictional Imagination
John Christopher Hamm, University of California, Berkeley
Jianghu, the vagabonds' marginal world of "rivers and lakes," holds a prominent place both among the chronotopes of Chinese fiction, drama and film and in the cultural imagination more generally. Deeply implicated with this world's topographic emblems-waterways, roads, inns, temples, bandit stockades and wilderness-is a characteristic social formation: males joined in a sworn brotherhood independent of orthodox familial and political allegiances. The exact relationship between jianghu's alternate societies and the institutions of hegemony has posed a perennial problem, played out both within the texts' diagetic worlds and (as exemplified by the shifting critical and political fortunes of one of jianghu's most famous fictional portrayals, Shuihu zhuan) in historical society's ambivalent reception of these representations. In this paper I intend to explore the contours of this imagined environment as it appears in Lü mudan, an influential late-Qing chivalric tale, popular in fictional and dramatic forms throughout the l9th century. The novelistic version of this story presents an unusually comprehensive and well-developed thematization of jianghu. Among the topics the text allows us to contemplate are the ways in which the marginal world serves as a mirror and foil to orthodox morality, society, and structures of power; the place of "the female" in defining this aggressively male world, and the nature and function of the adulteresses and warrior-women who make up the female cast; and the defining role of violence here on the watery edges of order.
Magic Warfare in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and History: The Armor of the Golden
Bell
Meir Shahar, Tel Aviv University
The turn of the twentieth-century witnessed a spectacular growth in the popular genre of martial-arts fiction. During this period scores of new novels, celebrating the pugilistic skills and the superior swordsmanship of courageous warriors, were published. What was the relation between this literary development and the actual practice of the martial-arts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Is it possible that the growth of martial-arts fiction mirrors the expansion of martial-arts practice during the period in question? Or, conversely, is it possible that martial-arts fiction shaped the development of the martial-arts themselves by promulgating the practice of specific martial techniques described in novels?
This paper will address the interplay of fiction and history in the practice of Chinese martial-arts by an examination of one type of martial-arts exercise known as the Armor of the Golden Bell (Jinzhong zhao). The Armor of the Golden Bell, which has been widely used both in the actual practice of the martial arts and in the imaginary realm of fiction, demonstrates the interdependence of imaginary practice and social performance in the realm of the martial arts. In addition, the Armor of the Golden Bell illustrates the significance of magic in the practice of the martial arts. The term "Armor of the Golden Bell" covers a spectrum of practices, ranging from physical exercises meant to strengthen the body, to magic techniques intended to make one invulnerable to swords, spears, and even bullets. Thus the Armor of the Golden Bell demonstrates that in the realm of the Chinese martial arts the lines separating fiction from history, and physical exercise from magic, are thin indeed.
Feigned Madness (Yangkuang) and Martial Opera in Early Twentieth-Century China
Hugh L. Shapiro, University of Nevada
In 1934, a weaver was fired from the Yanqing Rug Factory. Returning home, he took to the street, singing an aria from a heroic er huang opera. Two policemen told him to stop, for noisily singing in public was illegal. The weaver grew angry. As a scuffle broke out he shouted: "I am Guan Gong!" The policemen beat him and then admitted the weaver to the Psychopathic Hospital. There, he again sang, telling the staff that the sanguotactician, Zhuge Liang, had entered his brain. The psychiatrists labeled the patient a faker, deciding that the unemployed worker merely pretended to be insane.
This paper seeks to elucidate the connection between martial opera and what Republican era psychiatrists diagnosed as feigned madness. To solve this problem we must look in part at late classical notions of feigned madness, or yangkuang. The idea of yangkuang can already be found in the Analects and in the Shiji . Yet despite this tradition of protest, patients of the asylum rarely emulated such figures as Jie Yu and Ji Zi. Instead, asylum inmates drew from the pantheon of deities and heroes of popular culture.
My aim is to frame this discussion within a central issue in the history of medicine: how is cultural knowledge embodied as disease? Was feigned madness a conscious emulation of social templates or a culturally conditioned expression of mental illness? The answer lies in understanding the process by which, in the words of Arthur Kleinman, social symbols were transformed into visceral ones.