I definitely enjoyed the portion of “Training the Body for China” that we read this week. The reading included many interesting facts about China that I was unaware of. The fact that the Qing dynasty banned martial arts was pretty mind blowing. I have always been under the impression that martial arts have always been…

One big theme I noticed in this week’s reading was the importance of competitive games to the state, at least in the Chinese state. And I can think of other situations where the competitive nature of sports between countries was incredibly important to the countries involved. As someone who mostly understands European and U.S history…

The use of games and/or sports as a nationalistic tool is an interesting topic.  While it is hard to think of a sport that the United States uses to portray national prowess to other nations, excluding the Olympics of course, sports do fit nicely into nationalistic impulses.  While all of the readings for this weeks in some…

I’m having a hard time understanding “body culture”. It feels like there is a bombardment of different terms for different thing about a person’s body. Brownell uses it as meaning, “Body culture reflects the internalization and incorporation of culture. Body culture is embodied culture. (Brownell, pg.11)” It brings to question, what is culture? Everyone has…

This was a very interesting piece and one of my favorites so far. Moskowitz introduced many different aspects of Weigi in China rather than just going over the game and its history. Weiqi is a very important teaching utinsel for children, and its a highly placed game in Chinese society.Moskowitz moves from the importance of…

This weeks reading continued on the focus of Weiqi and Go, two similar games from China and Japan respectively. Whereas last week we covered the Chinese origin of Weiqi, this week the readings focused on the Japanese adoption of the game and how they grew and evolved not the game itself, but the culture surrounding…

Go Nation was a fairly enlightening, but, like with many things China, really depressing to read about. Perhaps the most striking thing to me about weigi‘s use in China was its integral place within the idea of masculinity. In that, weiqi, which reflected certain ideals of culture, was also a major cultural product of China, making it…

I really liked how this book was organized. It started out well by giving me a good perception of how gender roles in Asia –particularly China– work. It is interesting to think of how different cultures portray gender differences. The way women are portrayed in China as the emotional caretakers of the household, while it…

How does a game change with culture? We see this with Weiqi, but what other games follow this context? Chess followed the change from nation to nation. It adapted with the names of the pieces and the way pieces look on the board. Weiqi changes with the tides of change just like chess, but it…