In The Shock of the Old, Edgerton devotes a whole chapter on the innovation of killing. Innovation to Edgerton means something is being changed for the betterment of a society, but he also mentions to careful with what we choose to be innovative or taken into a person’s open-arms. It seems that this sense of…

With bonus video game references!

I find it really interesting how games are used as a display of social and political functions of a State. It is also interesting how the changing nature of the Chinese economy and political system in the 1980s influenced how China was able to compete both on a national and international level. I thought the…

For my final paper I want to do an essay about poetry as a form of explaining games, and connecting them to the idea of love –such as in chess– by looking at the Poem Sachs d’Amour, and also looking at how poetry connects games like wei’qui in China, such as in the poetry we…

Bronwell starts off talking about the early days of exercise in the Qing dynasty, explaining the political heirarchy of sports in China. Sports were a lower class thing, upperclass citizens could exercise in the comfort of their own rooms. They did not need to change out of their long gowns, which were a sign of…

For my final paper, I plan to write about the spread of baseball from America to East Asia. I’ll most likely focus on its spread to Japan, but I’m open to focusing on other readings depending on what I find in my sources. Likewise, I don’t yet have a very specified research question, but will…

Training the Body for China was an interesting read. I’m a fan of anthropology, so reading it was pretty enjoyable. However, I agree with Skye and that my expectation of the book would be more based in Brownell’s firsthand hand experience with sports and Chinese culture. The part about Nike capitalizing on the Chinese sports…

Training the Body for China is an interesting examination of the way cultures influence how bodies, athletics, and physicality in general are viewed, and how these bodies can in turn exert influence on a culture. One interesting element of Brownell’s study is how athletics in China were consistently connected to national interests. To some extent,…