Paper short abstract:

This project analyses the meaning and processes of Japanese Ki in Japanese martial arts, or how to make kinship - or relatedness - between Japanese and non-Japanese by ways of martial arts.

Paper long abstract:

In my master's research, I evaluated Japanese fencing as a device of Japaneseness, i.e., a device that sought to "make Japanese" - being descendants or not. In this 'manufacturing' process, the Kendo focused three plans intimately connected: "spirit" [Ki], sword and body. While development of the previous research, my doctoral project seeks to collect data through reports of life of Kendo practitioners and analysis of documents that deal with the concept of Ki - energy - and with ethnographic fieldwork and through interviews in Japan and Brazil. The concept of Ki is presented as an important way of understanding the Japanese Culture in practice, in closest relationship with a culturally Japanese idiosyncratic notion of love. The notion of Ki shows great potentialities - theoretical and analytical - for studies of kinship-relationality and japanese family including cultural recognition processes, still not duly evaluated by an anthropological point of view.

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