Karate and orality - initial thoughts - why kata?
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