Martial Arts Studies conference

[GrahamB]

http://martialartsstudies.blogspot.co.u ... ynote.html

Video of some of the keynotes from the recent Martial Arts Studies conference in Cardiff. The first ever conference on a new and emerging field of academia.

Warning - these are academics talking to other academics - it's not always easy listening!

(Haven't watched these myself yet).

[GrahamB]

Just started watching this one - Douglas Farrer - Silat/ Southern Preying Mantis/ and more - I think you could say he's a serious martial artists by anybody's standards!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AjvQfrQgIk

[middleway]

Awesome!! some watching to be done! thanks for this

[GrahamB]

Just started watching this one - Douglas Farrer - Silat/ Southern Preying Mantis/ and more - I think you could say he's a serious martial artists by anybody's standards!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AjvQfrQgIk

Just finished this one - it really is superb. Apparently Doug studied clf with my Sifu back in the '80s, too.

[Mr_Wood]

Nice find. Yeah wow, he is serious, surprised he finds time to sleep.

[Mr_Wood]

found this too

The film "Art of Silat" regards Malay culture through dance and martial arts in Singapore, Malaysia, and England and provides a visual accompaniment to D.S. Farrer's ethnographic book Shadows of the Prophet: Martial Arts & Sufi Mysticism (Springer, 2009). The Malay martial art, silat, is enacted through wedding dance, martial arts, violence, magic, film and theater. The film charts initiation into the cult of silat, via divination, where the spirit of an ancestral warrior is summoned into a lime. The lime is cut by a guru silat (master) to decipher the initiate's elemental personality, whether fire, air, earth or water. The following boiling oil ritual sees hundreds of coconuts chopped to extract their milk to be strained into cauldrons. Forty men say continuous prayers as they boil the milk to prevent the oil from burning the initiates later when they plunge their hands into it. In medieval times the oil bath (mandi minyak) was used as a juridical test of veracity. Those who could pass their hands unscathed through the oil (or molten tin, or lead) were pronounced innocent. From trial by ordeal the mandi minyak became an invulnerability rite. In Singapore the rite was stopped due to links with al'Qaeda training camps. In contemporary Islamic Malaysia, however, the bath in boiling oil is billed as a therapeutic exercise, albeit participants husk coconuts with their teeth, split the nuts with their bare hands, and engage in wild ludic sparring. As outsiders travel to Malaysia to learn silat, Malaysians journey to England to stage a show in London. During rehearsals one man loses a finger to a machete. Filmic motifs include lines drawn between this realm—the shadow realm—and the ultimate reality of the afterlife; and magical circles regarded as portals to divine mystical power. A cacophony of machine sounds interspersed with haunting music recorded in situ combines with a bricolage observational style to present a provocative view of traditional arts within Islamic Malay modernity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clWkgY53WXM

[GrahamB]

Doug's book is now free:

https://www.academia.edu/1991078/Martia ... onal_World

[mikemantis]

Douglas Farrer is also a Chow Gar Sifu under Paul Whitrod.

[jim]

Fascinating.

Douglas Farrer is speaking about my old school in Singapore as a secret society and I was always being told the opposite - that WE were the good guys and the Bak Hok people were the criminals! Of course, i was a child - probably not information that needs to be shared with children...

Thanks for posting this - really enjoying it.