Karate as Global Assemblage

Today I will try to: 1) Complete the entry in my Settings section which I finished the day working on yesterday. I plan to set aside the other eight entries for later and use them as "gap" work: "I have half an hour? That's not nearly enough time to write anything persuasive! ...But I could write a descriptive entry!". 2) Review my working outline for my second findings chapter (dealing with karate organizations as globally-branded, locally-interactive transnational articulations of international organizations. 3) Write the opening paragraph for this chapter on karate organization and global/local actors (This is my stretch goal).

For today, my tasks will be goal-based. I will be working on 1) hacking out the template for a section that details my research settings, and 2) filling in that template for at least one (1) of those settings. By way of an explanation: Sociocultural Anthropology is a discipline that privileges "experience-near" data, so case-studies rather that statistical analysis are preferred and evaluated more kindly. I purposefully set about a multi-sited research project which provided me with over 60 research sites, and well over 500 subjects for observation (public spaces and events, no IRB necessary). Among these 60+ sites and in places in between, I actually interviewed or simply talked to a little over 150 people (IRB approval was duly obtained for this). The advantage of this is that I have a wide range of participants that I have been able to draw from, and in certain cases I even have the power levels required to do certain statistical analyses familiar to some sociocultu...

My name is Noah Johnson and I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa.  My research explores the place of karate, a now quite well-known martial art of Okinawan origin, in the lives of its practitioners in the United States of America.  This page details my dissertation research and writing concerning the ways that karate practitioners in "the West" make use of their martial art in their everyday lives.  By necessity, this study is thus a study of “globalization,” for karate is only available to those in what is termed “the West” (or the developed nations of Europe and of her settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, and of course the United States) through the transnational connections of transport, information, and commerce which make up globalization. But globalization is a slippery concept. Nothing is truly global in its reach and spread, not to mention the fact that every time a seemingly similar form appears somewhere sp...