| dc.description.abstract | It has been an aim of this project to use taiji as a key in to the heart of traditional Chinese culture. My focus has been on taiji practiced by a group in a park in China. The material presented is based on 5-months fieldwork carried out in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in South-West China, summer/autumn 2002.
With an embodiment perspective, in line with Csordas, my goal was to try to elucidate patterns of how Chinese people think about taiji, how they train taiji in to the body, how they behave and also how society is organized by focusing on the Chinese kinship system.
Taiji has a history that goes back over 700 years, starting with the legend Chang San Feng. During this time it has developed many forms, both in China and in the West. From the Chinese context it has more or less colonized the world, and today it is a phenomenon that is very much misunderstood in the West. It is also a phenomena that has been ignored by academics, this despite that it is one of the most visible and widespread cultural traits in China and perhaps the most visible Chinese cultural trait in the West.
The project seeks to enhance the understanding of what happens to taiji movements and concepts when they are transformed to Western bodies and minds. What is interesting here is the flow from basically holistically oriented bodies to dualistically oriented bodies and how these different worldviews affect the movements of the body. My aim is to reach down to the local and traditional in order to say something about the global. What happens in this process when the taiji concept and performance are transformed from the Chinese context to the Western context? To what degree will the Western context and body/mind affect how the taiji movements are performed? In most research on globalization the tendency has been to focus on globalization as a process from "the West to the rest". This project sees the globalization process as something coming from the other direction as well, from "the rest to the West".
One of my methods has been to participate fully in taiji practicing in the park. I have shared both bodily and cognitive processes with my informants. This has been a good starting point, giving me access to the many aspects of taiji and, therefore, also the many aspects of Chinese society I experienced just by being in China. The aspects of interest in taiji can be philosophical, historical, master, student, martial, military, cultural, social, health, cognitive, political, and economical. | nor |