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

Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports
ISBN-10
1783083468
ISBN-13
9781783083466
Category
Sports & Recreation
Pages
234
Language
English
Published
2014-12-01
Publisher
Anthem Press
Authors
Dale C. Spencer, Raúl Sánchez García

Description

‘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.

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