Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat SportsRaúl Sánchez García, Dale C. Spencer ‘Fighting Scholars’ offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports. The book’s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of ‘habitus’ is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The book’s most innovative features are its empirical focus and theoretical orientation. While ethnographic research is a widespread and popular approach within the social sciences, combat sports and martial arts have yet to be sufficiently interrogated from an ethnographic standpoint. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Body and Soul’: the construction of a ‘carnal sociology’ that constitutes an exploration of the social world ‘from’ the body. |
Contents
Reflections | 19 |
Identifying Core Dispositions | 33 |
Mental and Physical | 49 |
Reflexive Body Techniques | 63 |
It Is About Your Body Recognizing the Move | 79 |
Some Striking Moments in the Career | 95 |
Two Vignettes | 111 |
Embodied Aesthetics | 125 |
The Gym and | 155 |
Authenticity Muay Thai and Habitus | 171 |
Present and Future Lines of Research | 185 |
| 201 | |
Other editions - View all
Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports Raúl Sánchez García,Dale C. Spencer No preview available - 2013 |
Common terms and phrases
acquired action activity African American aikido anthropology archer arts and combat Bar-On Cohen black belt bodily body techniques Bourdieu boxers boxing Brazilian Brazilian jiu-jitsu capoeira carnal sociology chapter Chicago Chinese martial arts combat sports concept of habitus Crossley cultural dance Daniel Marks dispositions Downey embodied ethnographic experience female field notes fieldwork Fighting Scholars gender ghetto Gracie grapplers guru homology interaction interview Japanese judo kalari kalarippayattu karate kick kung fu kyudo learning Loïc Wacquant male martial artists martial habitus martial practices masculine mixed martial arts mixed-sex movement muay thai observation opponent participants perform personal communication physical Pierre Bourdieu practitioners pugilistic punches RBTs reflexive relation ritual Sánchez García sense skills social sparring specific Stephens and Delamont structures style Sudhakaran tae kwon taijiquan teacher teaching Thai fighters Thailand theory threshold of violence traditional trainer understanding University Press Wacquant wing chun women yawatashi