Quote:
Mary Malmros wrote:
I'm not trying to put down your experience. I'm just reacting to the way that some enthusiastic aikidoka seem to want to co-opt everything that is good and useful in the world and re-label it as "aikido". Isn't that disrespectful of all these other things?.
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Yes, it is profoundly disrespectful of all these other things.
And I would hasten to add that privileging the internal norms and doctrines of the art/group/teacher over external reality and systematically constructing and defining external reality in terms of those internal norms is a common pattern in Japanese culture that those engaging in Japanese cultural practices would do well to examine critically. (Which is not to say that the pattern isn't found in other cultures, east and west, simply that it isn't so clearly present or normative as in Japanese culture.)
FL