‘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 Loïc 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 Loïc Wacquant critically assessing the whole volume.

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. 

Key Issues in Modern Sociology

Contributors; Glossary; Chapter 1: Introduction: Carnal Ethnography as Path to Embodied Knowledge – Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer; Chapter 2: Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter – Loïc Wacquant; Chapter 3: In Search of a Martial Habitus: Identifying Core Dispositions in Wing Chun and Taijiquan – David Brown and George Jennings; Chapter 4: Each More Agile Than the Other: Mental and Physical Enculturation in ‘Capoeira Regional’ – Sara Delamont and Neil Stephens; Chapter 5: ‘There Is No Try in Tae Kwon Do’: Reflexive Body Techniques in Action – Elizabeth Graham; Chapter 6: ‘It Is About Your Body Recognizing the Move and Automatically Doing It’: Merleau-Ponty, Habit and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu – Bryan Hogeveen; Chapter 7: ‘Do You Hit Girls?’: Some Striking Moments in the Career of a Male Martial Artist – Alex Channon; Chapter 8: The Teacher’s Blessing and the Withheld Hand: Two Vignettes of Somatic Learning in South India’s Indigenous Martial Art Kalarippayattu – Sara K. Schneider; Chapter 9: White Men Don’t Flow: Embodied Aesthetics of the Fifty-Two Hand Blocks – Thomas Green; Chapter 10: Japanese Religions and Kyudo (Japanese Archery): An Anthropological Perspective – Einat Bar-On Cohen; Chapter 11: Taming the Habitus: The Gym and the Dojo as ‘Civilizing Workshops’ – Raúl Sánchez García; Chapter 12: ‘Authenticity’, Muay Thai and Habitus – Dale C. Spencer; Chapter 13: Conclusion: Present and Future Lines of Research – Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer; Epilogue: Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus – Loïc Wacquant; References