Yeah, that makes sense. I appreciate the apologies! I was nervous about how you were going to react to my reply, and I'm glad that you took it well.
For context, I'm a white American woman. I have some martial arts experience, but nothing impressive -- a few years of taekwondo, and I'm not currently in active practice. Still, enough martial arts experience to be real familiar with the fact that Americans assume "karate words" apply to all martial arts. I can't count the number of times I've had to tell folks that it's not appropriate to refer to a taekwondo school as a dojo. That dynamic speaks to the way non-Asian Americans often, and inappropriately, lump all Asian cultures into one big bucket.
In the context of code "katas", the American etymology comes from folks who didn't have deep experience of martial arts, or of Japanese culture. (Here's a blog post about that history from the dude who originated the term.) They were trying to find a word that meant "mindful practice," and so they wanted to evoke the way that they'd seen kata used in martial arts films. They succeeded -- just look at the other comments on this discussion! I think that that decision was shallow and appropriative, though. It didn't come from engagement with Japanese culture, it came from engagement with American projections of Japanese culture. And it came in the context of other attempts by programmers to use Asian cultural signifiers to jokingly evoke tradition.
I also still think that the word "kata" isn't an accurate or useful term for the code exercises people usually call "katas." They're generally intended to be exercises that you come to mindfully, but solve in different ways. To me, using a term for "mold" carries the entirely wrong implication. There may be nuances I'm missing, but... look at folks' confusion in this discussion!
If the term were accurate, it would be way less problematic! But the ways that the term is inaccurate are really revealing of its appropriative origins.
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Yeah, that makes sense. I appreciate the apologies! I was nervous about how you were going to react to my reply, and I'm glad that you took it well.
For context, I'm a white American woman. I have some martial arts experience, but nothing impressive -- a few years of taekwondo, and I'm not currently in active practice. Still, enough martial arts experience to be real familiar with the fact that Americans assume "karate words" apply to all martial arts. I can't count the number of times I've had to tell folks that it's not appropriate to refer to a taekwondo school as a dojo. That dynamic speaks to the way non-Asian Americans often, and inappropriately, lump all Asian cultures into one big bucket.
In the context of code "katas", the American etymology comes from folks who didn't have deep experience of martial arts, or of Japanese culture. (Here's a blog post about that history from the dude who originated the term.) They were trying to find a word that meant "mindful practice," and so they wanted to evoke the way that they'd seen kata used in martial arts films. They succeeded -- just look at the other comments on this discussion! I think that that decision was shallow and appropriative, though. It didn't come from engagement with Japanese culture, it came from engagement with American projections of Japanese culture. And it came in the context of other attempts by programmers to use Asian cultural signifiers to jokingly evoke tradition.
I also still think that the word "kata" isn't an accurate or useful term for the code exercises people usually call "katas." They're generally intended to be exercises that you come to mindfully, but solve in different ways. To me, using a term for "mold" carries the entirely wrong implication. There may be nuances I'm missing, but... look at folks' confusion in this discussion!
If the term were accurate, it would be way less problematic! But the ways that the term is inaccurate are really revealing of its appropriative origins.