Technique, Manners, and Essence: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Eastern and Western Archery Systems

Abstract

Archery could do a lot more than help people survive or fight in the ancient times. It became a cultural basic transportation tool, by which various societies were able to articulate cosmological structures and structure behavior.Over thousands of years the archery systems in the East and the West were vastly different- not only in the technique or equipments, but also in the rituals and educational systems, and even in the metaphysics.This study investigates such discrepancies through two lenses of analysis: the first adhering to the emerging rationale of the discrepancies, and the second tracing them across cultures, thereby showing how the archery operates simultaneously as both an embodied practice and a semiotic construction based on historically specific sociopolitical structures and worldview assumptions.