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

'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.

Author: Raúl Sánchez García
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 12/01/2014
Pages: 234
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.53d
ISBN13: 9781783083466
ISBN10: 1783083468
BISAC Categories:
- Sports & Recreation | Martial Arts | General
- Sports & Recreation | Cultural & Social Aspects

About the Author

Raúl Sánchez García is associate professor in the Department of Theory, Organization and Recreation at the Universidad Europea de Madrid.

Dale C. Spencer is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba.