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Kata as part of an oral tradition

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  This way of looking at karate is influenced heavily by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and Lynne Kelly’s Power and Knowledge in Prehistoric Societies (2015) and The Memory Code (2016).  What follows is where my thoughts on kata's purpose and structure have gone, based on the issues and concepts these texts cover.  Kata were created within the context of oral knowledge traditions as a means to retain, recall and transmit knowledge. They are a tool, a vehicle through which knowledge is conveyed, rather than being the knowledge itself.   Having said that, in order to use them effectively, we also need to have knowledge of the kata itself and the ability to recall and demonstrate it/run through it automatically and faithfully. In this regard, kata are a mnemonic device, with particular structure and knowledge features.  They: Are memory prompts - they do not demonstrate/shadow-box complete sequences of movement, just those bits that need recall or are the most important fo
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Random thoughts #2 - kata

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 Kata is not literal; it is indicative. Kata is not comprehensive in its details; it contains the essence. Kata is not linear; but it is cohesive - the different parts of the kata are all inter-related. Kata is not a drill - a drill is not kata; but drills can be incorporated within kata. The trick is knowing which bits of the kata are a drill and which are not.
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Karate and orality - initial thoughts - why kata?

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Last year, in preparation for a unit on Indigenous Knowledge Systems I was to teach to Year 11 students, I read a book by the Australian academic Lynne Kelly called The Memory Code . While I had already known of the concept of orality and how it relates to the transmission and retention of knowledge in pre-literate/non-literate societies, Lynne Kelly's book thrust it right to the forefront of my consciousness. Every chapter I read, I would stop and think (and sometimes say out loud) "but that's what we do/why we do it in karate!"  From reading it, I am now in the midst of a personal paradigm shift in how I view certain aspects of karate, what it is and what it is for; and this blog post is my first attempt at trying to create some order from my thoughts, so I apologise for its disjointed nature.  I think this may be the first of several attempts I make to make sense of how I now view karate, and kata in particular. If you have read many of my other posts, you might ha
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How close to the original is your kata?

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How close to the original is your kata, and how would you know? It is a cliche now that when anyone asks a question about altering/varying a part of a kata they are learning, at least some of the responses will be along the lines of "you should do it the way your sensei teaches you", or "kata are the legacy of past masters' combat experiences - to change them is to lose those experiences", or "you need to do it the same way it has always been done".  All of those responses pre-suppose that the kata you are currently learning is unchanged.  As I've discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on why the kata we are doing are probably not the same as when they first began, this may not be the case. So how can we determine how close to the original our kata is?  I have a number of ideas (be aware this is mostly supposition, although I should be able to rationally justify most of my points - bear with me). I will use the kata Sanseiru and Jitte as ex
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Fetishising stances

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Years ago (30 years ago, now I think about it), I started my martial arts journey in Shotokan karate.  And in that, we did a lot of stance work.  Static stances, moving into stances, kihon-waza while holding or moving into stances, and focus on the stances in kata. I'm not alone - it has been a continual feature of my online interaction with the greater karate community that stances are an important thing to get right and are something that all too often our karate gets judged by.  And there's a lot to be said for a focus on our stances, at least in the initial stages of our development.  How someone stands can tell you a lot about how integrated their skeletal and muscular systems are, whether their core is switched on, how well they understand how to hold their body.  But, the more advanced and competent they become, the less important stances as objects  become. That is because a stance is not an isolated entity (or shouldn't be).  Stances exist as a component of a large
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Why have kata changed?

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This is a follow-up to my earlier post: What was the original kata? We know that kata have changed - even a cursory glance at youtube will show you the huge variety of ways that any given kata can be performed.  This appears to not be just a modern development, as even by looking at books from the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s etc... we can see that there have been changes to kata since then, and even at the time (compare, for instance, the earlier publications of Funkoshi such as Tote-Jitsu (1922) with his later publication, the Karate-do Kyohan (1931) and then with its re-working in the 1950s; or compare the two earlier works and their rendition of naihanchi kata with Motobu's Karate - My Art (1932)).  Even within the students of the same teacher, we can see variance that cannot all have been contained within what was originally taught (see the different schools of the students of Choshin Chibana, for instance - the differences in kata between Kyudokan and Matsubayashi-ryu are a good examp
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Random thoughts #1

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Just a random thought - it's generally held that when turning, or changing direction in kata, the sequence is head-feet-hands.  But, what if the sequence finishes after the turn?  What order should it be then?   Some places where this does occur, or could occur, are in kururunfa with the west and east open-hand soto ukes; sanseru with the 4-directions technique sequences; and in seisan, particularly on the first 180 degree turn.
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