Introduction
Greetings! I am currently on the road for a conference and workshop. As such, I will be sharing some papers that were presented at the Martial Arts Studies Research Network’s recent conference in Bath. If you missed the first or second presentation in this series, click here to see the discussion of “Bartitsu and Suffragette Jujitsu of the Early 20th Century” or the “Dissemination of Japanese Martial Arts to Korea.”
While the previous papers have been largely historical, the work of Prof. Hatsuki Aishima is ethnographic in nature. Her presentation looks at Karate’s adoption in Egypt, and asks how middle class identity is enacted through the practice of the Japanese martial arts. While a relative new comer to the Martial Arts Studies community her work suggests some fascinating questions.
Hatsuki Aishima is a social anthropologist specializing in Islam and public culture in the contemporary Middle East. She received her MA from Kyoto University (Area Studies, 2002) and DPhil from the University of Oxford (Oriental Studies, 2011). Before joining Minpaku in July 2016, she worked as Lecturer in Modern Islam at the University of Manchester. In her monograph, Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt (I.B. Tauris, 2016), she explored the roles of mass media and modern education in shaping the public knowledge, scholarly culture and the literary tradition of Islam. She is currently working on an urban ethnography of karate practitioners’ communities in Egypt.
Click here, or on the image below, to see more!
