ONLINE FIRST
published on November 14, 2018
Jonathan Tuckett
https://doi.org/10.5840/asrr2018111354
Taekwondo
From Nationalistic Pursuit to Private Spirituality
This paper develops an earlier proposal to consider ¡®religion¡¯ in terms of Edmund Husserl¡¯s phenomenological concept of the natural attitude. My overall aim is to argue that ¡®religion¡¯ represents an ideological concept for demarcating deviant modes of naturalisation. In focusing on the case of Taekwondo, I will not be able to give a full exposition to this understanding of ¡®religion¡¯ but, rather, will make a more conservative attempt to give better phenomenological sense to the term ¡®spirituality,¡¯ a concept that will be key for achieving the larger task. To demonstrate this, I will look at Taekwondo in relation to what John Donohue has called the ¡®American warrior hero¡¯ as an aspect of American modes of naturalisation.