Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how hierarchies of embodied practice and enskilment are related to relative appropriations of ‘place experience’. Through an analysis of ‘foreign’ aikido practitioners’ reflections on their training with Japanese masters and students I will explore relationships between authenticity, appropriation, place and embodiment.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from multi-sited fieldwork (in Japan, Europe, the US and Australia) with 'foreign' (non-Japanese) martial artists, some of whom have at different times in their lives travelled to Japan to train with Japanese masters in the 'homeland' of the art of aikido, this paper discusses how hierarchies of embodied practice are constructed through discourse that includes the physical and/or metaphorical appropriation of 'place experience'. The joy and enskilment that emerges from rigorous practice for its own sake (ala Sennett's recent tome on craftsmanship) that any aikidoist can indulge in anywhere, is often qualified by reference to personal experience with particular masters and revered sites. Ideas about how practitioners' embodied appropriations affect their own senses of enskilment will be explored through a comparative analysis of these martial artists' discourses of 'being there', 'having been there', and 'virtually being there'.