The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India

The Wrestler's Body tells the story of a way of life organized in terms of physical self—development. While Indian wrestlers are competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. Using the insights of anthropology, Joseph Alter writes an ethnography of the wrestler's physique that elucidates the somatic structure of the wrestler's identity and ideology.

Young men in North India may choose to join an akhara, or gymnasium, where ...