Body Culture East-West2.ppt

Medicine: Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Qigong (healing through use of qi). Religion: Taoism (alchemy and the search for immortality); Buddhism (the search for enlightenment). Martial Arts (kungfu, wushu) Pierre de Coubertin A Philhellene, and Reviver of the modern Olympic Games (est. 1896) Ernst Curtius, 19th c. Classicist Wetteifernde Tatenlust “competitive lust for action” “…before and after the Hellenes there was no people for whom the free and full development of the human strengths was the life goal...” The Greek “agonistic character” was “in opposition to the life of pleasure of the Orient, the excessive valuation of possessions and holdings.” (Curtius, Althertum und Gegenwart, 1903, p. 9, 10, 4) The Agonal Spirit and its lack in the Orient This false view that the Greeks competed for honor, not for material wealth, became one of the foundation myths of amateurism in Olympic sports, which was debunked by David Young in The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics (1984). Although there were other factors contributing to this myth, such as the British class structure, one of the original sources of the myth was Curtius’ description of Western civilization as above the pursuit of material profit, in opposition to the materialistic Orient. Marathon Cup, 1904 Olympic Games Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): the Greeks made everything into a contest: drinking songs, philosophy, legal procedure. For Burckhardt, athletics and the Olympic Games were the quintessence of the agonal principle. “...In the Asiatic cultures, despotism and the caste system were almost completely opposed to such activities” (The Greeks and Greek Civilization, p. 162). The Imperial Exams were a kind of competition. The Chinese were as concerned with ensuring the fairness of the exams as the Greeks were in ensuring the fairness of their sporting events. But the Western classicists ignored this. In late 19th- and early 20th-century Western accounts of Chinese sports, the