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Comment by stryan | Hacker News Reader

Angampora is a fascinating martial art, but while British colonialism is/was a scourge across the world there's little evidence that they actually banned the martial art. While I generally don't like to use reddit posts as sources, this one[0] is well researched enough and includes its (long list of) sources that I figured it counts.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/kh9gfb/the_brit...

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Sri Lankan here. I'm probably going to catch some flak from enthusiasts for this, but what you see in this article is essentially a modern recreation. As far as I know, nothing except the name itself has survived antiquity (if this actually existed, it faded long before Europeans arrived). Enthusiasm in this art form was rekindled due to a fictionalized depiction in a TV show named Dandubasnamaana about 15-20 years ago, if I remember correctly. I've already had a complete Sri Lankan history education by then and I had never heard the word "Angampora" before this TV show. This is true of most Sri Lankans.

Isn't this actually a pretty common phenomenon with martial arts?

i.e. IIRC modern tae kwon do goes no further back than the 20th century, despite some practitioners and nationalists (disclaimer: I'm Korean myself) claiming it goes back hundreds or thousands of years.

>Isn't this actually a pretty common phenomenon with martial arts?

It is. Tae Kwon Do is little more than Shotokan Karate brought to Korea by the Japanese during the WWII occupation, with some fancy kicks later added and a fake history re-created. The vast majority of "ancient Asian martial arts" are at most 100 years old, many are significantly younger. I'm a long time practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and after the publication of Choque had to come to terms with the fact that almost everything I had been told about the early history of the art was complete nonsense.

Yeah, that is my understanding too. I don't doubt that there existed forms of martial arts in ancient Korea, but I doubt there is a straight lineage from back then to modern TKD.

What would you say about the 104 year old practitioner in the article then? Do you think he was he part of modernized version?

Reminds me of neopaganism in the West, where some people in the movement will claim there's an unbroken tradition.

Do you think this is fed by a preoccupation/pride in the culture with their practices and beliefs being incredibly ancient? I think it's pretty well-known that that's a thing in India, but I don't know to what extent it also exists in Sri Lanka.

There's something about martial arts that encourages mythologising. The Reddit post you link to also mentions the uncritical assertion that Angampora is 5000 years old.

Gillian Russell wrote a nice essay about the nature of received wisdom among many martial arts practitioners: Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts.

https://fightsciencesresearchinstitute.wordpress.com/2008/10...

The linked paper doesn’t seem to exist :/

https://web.archive.org/web/20100705171320/https://artsci.wu...

Just getting into this, but already fascinated. Great article.

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