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 have noticed that I have done quite a few around the purpose/interpretation of kata.  This is no accident; I have never really been satisfied with my understanding of why kata exist.  Why is it that they have their particular format?  Why are they a solo form?  Why are they not the literal shadow-boxing variant of actual techniques? Why can they vary from school to school and yet still teach the same thing?  I think I was partway to having satisfactory explanations for some of these questions, but after reading The Memory Code, it all suddenly started making sense.

Kata did not come from Okinawa - neither the concept, nor the origin of some specific kata.  The concept of solo forms (and many of the forms themselves) came from the Chinese martial arts.  But that just pushes the same problem back one level - why should solo forms be the method used to transmit and retain knowledge?  The way that non-literate/pre-literate/restricted-literate cultures construct and preserve knowledge provides the key: rituals, dance and rhythm as memory cues; the additive nature of oral knowledge construction; restriction of key knowledge to a few individuals; knowledge as currency/power; and the use of memory cues to access multiple layers of information and meaning.

Walter Ong, one of the great pioneers of orality, viewed writing as a technological tool that transformed how knowledge was presented, regarded and indeed what was considered as a valid form of knowledge.  He was also interested in how the preservation and transmission of knowledge changed depending on the level of literacy within a society and culture.  It is only in the last 100 years or so that most societies have had the majority of their members being literate.  Qing Dynasty China, for instance was estimated to have had a literacy level in the latter part of the 19th Century of around 45% of men and 10% of women, although the percent of people who were fully literate (as opposed to only literate in the specialties they needed to be literate in) was far lower.  So it is safe to assume that predominantly knowledge in and of the martial arts was preserved and transmitted without reliance on writing -  it should follow the format and structure of an oral knowledge system.

So what are the main features of oral/traditional knowledge?

1. Knowledge is valuable and the having of knowledge confers power.  Therefore, it is not freely shared or made public (unless there is recompense or trade for the knowledge). 
2. Because knowledge is valuable/powerful, when it is transmitted, it is often not taught overtly, but is hidden or coded.
3. From this, knowledge is layered and often covert.  There is a surface meaning or version for public consumption, with different keys/contextual perspectives that when known provide an additional layer of knowledge from the same medium.  Without the key, then the additional meaning lies hidden in plain sight.  The kaisai no genri of Toguchi sensei are an example of one such contextual key - but there is nothing to say that it is the only key that fits goju kata, nor even that it is the key to all the kata collected under the goju umbrella.
4. Who is given the knowledge is controlled and restricted - but for the reason of controlling corruption/alteration of the knowledge via 'chinese whispers'.  A corollary of this is that not only does it take time for the knowledge to be considered as transmitted (to ensure that it has been correctly learned and recalled), but that the qualities of the person the knowledge is given to are first vetted and approved. Another corollary is that periodically, knowledge is checked and reviewed to ensure correct retention.
5. What is preserved/transmitted is not everyday knowledge or common knowledge, but knowledge that is important enough or special enough to require preservation. This implies that we should not be looking at kata as containing everything or representing a conflict from start to finish, but that we should be looking to it for the essence or critical features that it contains.
6. Knowledge is holistic - one of the features that allows large amounts of information to be preserved and recalled without recourse to the written word, are the inter-relationships and linking of different aspects of knowledge.  Information is not just categorised, it is given multiple contexts within which it can be recalled or viewed.  A kata should not just be interrogated in isolation, it needs to be considered in the context of its name, other kata in the system, similar sequences elsewhere in other kata, the stories, sayings and poems of the school etc...
7. In oral cultures, knowledge is recalled/formatted in an additive manner.  The first few chapters of Genesis in the Christian Bible (particularly looking at older, oral-focussed versions such as the King James translation) provide an excellent example of this structure. However, this is just within a particular example of information.  Knowledge overall is structured non-linearly - a story, even though it has a beginning, middle and end, does not necessarily have its additional layers of knowledge in the same order, or even with a fixed relationship to each other.  Kata, if viewed in the same light as a story, have a beginning, middle and end, but should not be viewed as representing a conflict from start to finish.  What is at the start of the kata may not be a beginning, but may be a contextual key, or a fixed point somewhere in a conflict - and what comes after may be variations on a theme, multiple options to deal with the same starting point, or something else entirely.
8. And stories/packets of knowledge are interlinked - one may refer to another, or require knowledge of/from another to make sense.  There is every chance that kata similarly interlink.  Many's the time I have found myself starting one kata, but switching part-way through to another (particularly with Seisan and Shisochin, or Jitte and Jion).  The similarity in enbusen or re-occurrence of techniques across kata may also point to this.
9. The main media for transmission of oral culture are stories, song, poetry, dance, ritual and mnemonic objects.  Each story etc... is multi-layered.  Depending on the individual's level of initiation, they will have additional/multiple meanings compared to someone else.  
10. Mythical/legendary/important people are used as a peg to hang information on.  Either by attaching stories to them that contain desired knowledge, or by appending their name to something in order to associate it with the known qualities/stories of that figure.
11. There are public and private versions of most media - and only the select few know all versions (or know the conceptual keys to unlocking the extra layers of meaning). This is different from 3. where there can be multiple layers of meaning to the same version - here, there is deliberate variance that only some know.
12. Physical objects (message sticks, henges), geographical location (songlines, temples) or ritualised movement (dances, gestures, kata?) are mnemonic devices that knowledge is attached to, based on 1-9 above.  To a degree, what the device is/looks like is not essential to knowledge retention; provided both the transmitter and receiver of knowledge both agree on what the knowledge is, and the person using the device keeps their understanding consistent over time.  The corollory of this though, is that without knowing the knowledge in the first place or the code to read the mnemonic device, the device does not provide its holder with the knowledge they desire.  The device is the prompt for knowledge recall, not the recording of the knowledge.  This is now very much what I view kata as - a mnemonic ritual that is the prompt for knowledge recall, but it does not (at least not always) record the knowledge, and almost never records the context for the knowledge that it is associated with.  Having said that, because the knowledge that is being recorded is body movement, it makes sense for the movements used to record knowledge to generally match what they are trying to retain.
13. By using a fixed memory devices (be it locality, sequence of movements, physical shape etc...), the order in which information in recalled never needs to be remembered, as a journey through that device brings the information forward naturally as you go.  Performing a kata is a physical journey through it.
14. The encoding of knowledge is stylised, memorable, formulaic, with a strong use of rhythm and timing, repetition and balanced patterns (which sounds a lot like the structure of a kata).

All of this post is a way of me trying to make sense of what for me is now the new paradigm through which I view my kata. And it is new for me; I have found/been exposed to no other way of explaining the reason for kata (and indeed karate) to be the way they are, no other way that makes as good sense of the structure of kata, or why they exist in the first place.

Under this new paradigm, I now view kata as having been created as coded mnemonic devices for both the retention and the transmission of martial arts knowledge that was considered important by their creators.  This is similar to, but subtly (yet categorically) different from the hypothesis of kata being mnemonic devices for solo practice of paired techniques - which is just one aspect of the purpose kata were put together for.  Each kata has a particular body of knowledge, which may or may not overlap with those of others.  Some kata may depend on other kata for their conceptual key, or have been designed to be considered in concert with some other.  But yet other kata may have been developed separately, and bear no relation to other katas in their modern assemblage within a school/dojo.  Because of their nature, even though kata were created with a specific/finite body of knowledge in mind, they can be used by their practitioner as a place to accumulate and organise new knowledge.  Thus, with each generation of martial artists, the amount/type of knowledge the kata has can grow or change, independent of the degree/quality of transmission of the original body of knowledge.  It follows then, that "asking the kata" or "referring to the kata" for the answer to a particular self-defense situation, will only provide what is already known to the individual, either through learned experience, their own "mapping" onto the kata's movements, or through application of the particular contextual keys they possess.  Only knowing the form of a kata only confers knowledge of how to do the form - the content that is meant to be attached to it cannot magically appear without either direct instruction, or the conceptual keys that can decipher some of its meaning.

This will be the first of several posts I will make on this topic as I have only begun to scratch the surface of my own understanding of how to make sense of kata structure and more using this new lens to view them through.  I find writing the best way to order and reveal my thoughts, so I will use this blog to help me work out what I think and how it should affect how I approach my own training and how I teach others.