Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports

ISBN-13: 9781783083466 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 234 str.

Raul Sanchez Garcia

Opis

Fighting Scholars brings to the fore the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts as a means of exploring embodied human existence. 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 different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loic Wacquant s Body and Soul: the construction of a carnal sociology that constitutes an exploration of the social world from the body. The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the editors introduce the field, providing a typology of existing literature. The second section contains the contributions of the authors, discussing their respective approaches to embodied ethnography, their use of the concept of habitus, and ethnographic findings. The third section contains a conclusion by the editors reflecting on existing conceptions of habitus and interdisciplinary possibilities for rethinking the concept and an epilogue by Loic Wacquant critically assessing the whole volume."

Fighting Scholars offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports. The books 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 books 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 Loic Wacquants Body and Soul: the construction of a carnal sociology that constitutes an exploration of the social world from the body.