Week 10 Alesha Byrne

My discipline is three fold. On one account, there is language studies- which I would argue potentially already has a small amount of spirit realm studies in it {knowing the words and cultural connotations for a given belief for a given people, so on}. For cultural studies, I think it, like history, goes about spirit realm knowledge in a very clinical way. A lot of the meat of the topic gets sanitized by academia who disarm cultures by labeling the theological views as a product of “backwards thinking” or “it being a product of its time”. Better yet is the incorrect assumption that because whatever spirit realm study is not the first one to occur in that country/land/etc, that it must obviously be “obsolete” to the more current views {especially if those views follow western indoctrination}. In Taekwondo, spirit realm studies have all but been removed- unless you count the addition of meditation and chi studies. These are relatively mild in their presence, in my experience. While practitioners and instructors use the skills they gain from these beliefs in order to benefit themselves, they rarely ascribe to any associated qualities within those disciplines. Part of what I would like to do- either as an independent study or potentially as a topic for research when I achieve entry into grad school- is to study and catalog these shifts as a part of my study into multiculturalism with Taekwondo. As an art, it takes cultural morality and traditions with it to whichever country it is introduced to, yet not all of those traditions and practices remain in the new version of Taekwondo that occurs once original Korean Taekwondo tradition blends in with the location it ends in. Which parts stay? What localized spirit realm concept enters into the Dojang [martial arts school]?

Perhaps I’ll be able to answer that soon.