Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports
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Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783083466 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2014 |
| Series: | Key Issues in Modern Sociology |
| Pages: | 234 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Dale C. Spencer is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba.
Read an Excerpt
Fighting Scholars
Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports
By Raúl Sánchez García, Dale C. Spencer
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2013 Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer editorial matter and selection; individual chapters individual contributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-332-0
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: CARNAL ETHNOGRAPHY AS PATH TO EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE
Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer
Within Japanese budo lies the pre-modern concept of bunbu ryodo. It refers to the ideal of a double path of development regarding the literary (bun) and martial (bu) skills of the samurai. Far from being uncontroversial, this kind of ideal was not lived up to in a balanced (or symmetrical) way by very many samurai. Normally, either bun ran over bu or conversely the bu dominated the bun. Fighting Scholars tries to catch, in a simple expression, the tension involved in this ostensible opposition between practice and ethos. Contributors to this volume emanate from the academe (bun) but, for varied reasons, they are also interested in the study of combat activities (bu). They are interested not only in the philosophical underpinnings of martial arts, but also in a hands-on, embodied analysis of the craft. They have all been seduced into the practice of martial arts or combat sports and concomitantly apply a social-scientific lens to such practices. This conjoining of thought and practice has been achieved through ethnography. That is also why habitus, best understood through ethnography (see Bourdieu 1977; Crossley 1995; Spencer 2009), is conceptually paramount, as it opens the gates to the promises and perils of what Wacquant calls 'carnal sociology' (Wacquant 2004a xiii; 2005a). The French sociologist defines such an approach as one that:
seeks to situate itself not outside or above practice but at its 'point of production' [and] requires that we immerse ourselves as deeply and as durably as possible into the cosmos under examination; that we submit ourselves to its specific temporality and contingencies; that we acquire the embodied dispositions it demands and nurtures, so that we may grasp it via the prethetic understanding that defines the native relation to that world – not as one world among many but as 'home'. (Wacquant 2005a, 466)
We think this is one of the main reasons why social scientists should be interested in martial arts and combat sports. Martial arts and combat sports are perspicuous settings to study and develop the project of a carnal sociology with 'habitus', 'body techniques' and 'technologies of the self' as key points of research. Studying subject matter that is as essential, deep and personal as physical assault (despite the ritualization or codification that one might have suffered) is especially suitable for understanding the social nature of epistemic, affective and moral dimensions of embodied practice. The concept of 'habitus' also serves as an advantageous epistemic point in two different layers. The first is as a point through which to (re)gain an embodied and situated sociological gaze into the social phenomena. Avoiding the supposed superior objectivity of the academic distance, habitus raises an epistemic claim about the greater adequacy of a carnal sociology generating knowledge from within the phenomena under study. The second is as a point through which to explore the relationship between the social and cognitive sciences, establishing a more robust and comprehensive understanding of embodied social practices.
Social sciences will benefit from the study of martial arts and combat sport at least for three more reasons. First, martial arts and combat sports imply an acute sense of the management of violence. This issue is important as a research topic in itself, but also violence remains considered a differential factor in gender terms. Thus, such activities offer a vantage point for observations regarding gender relations and construction. Second, these activities are preferential sites to study ethnicity and 'race' issues as the development of martial arts and combat sports is sociohistorically linked to migration and cultural interchanges. In such cases, the art is considered as a mark of authenticity in diasporic communities or is re-elaborated by the receptive culture on the other side of the globe. Third, martial arts and combat sports can be understood as certain kind of 'secular religion'. Not only the whole ritualistic aspect of the craft, but also the ascetic regimes surrounding some of these practices and even the potential for self-transformation of the individuals should be taken into account from a religious perspective.
Ethnographic research on martial arts has been conducted at least since the 1970s but remains an underdeveloped area receiving only scattered attention. Fighting Scholars is the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts. It is interdisciplinary in scope and contains contributions from leading international figures on martial arts and combat sports. The most innovative features of Fighting Scholars 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 investigated from an ethnographic standpoint. In addition, the present volume shows how the discussion of different theoretical traditions regarding the 'habitus as a tool to conduct research' is best analysed in combat sports and martial arts in a corporeal fashion: that is, through flesh-and-blood observation within social-carnal activities. Fighting Scholars is aligned with the project of developing a carnal sociology motivated and inspired by Loïc Wacquant's ethnographic account of boxing as a body trade in the ghetto of Chicago, reported in Body and Soul (2004) and a string of related publications tying together 'the body, the ghetto, and the penal state' (see Wacquant 2009b for an overview). Body and Soul is a milestone and model for the study of martial arts and combat sports, not only because of its conceptual precision and empirical depth, but because its author apprenticed as a means of elucidating the production of pugilistic competency. Thus Wacquant deploys and elaborates Bourdieu's pivotal concept twice, first as an object of inquiry and second a means of investigation. Many of the contributions in the present volume spring from, extend, as well as challenge Wacquant's analytic strategy.
As a way of depicting the existing literature on martial arts and combat sports, we have chosen two different lines of development – bu over bun and bun over bu – each of them representing a predominant element of the bun-bu dichotomy. More attention is paid to bun over bu, as it is embedded in the scholarly tradition of analysis and offers a more fecund basis for the present volume. We offer the following overview as a way of showing how Fighting Scholars fits into and contributes to the extant literature on martial arts and combat sports.
Bu Over Bun
Ethnographic research of fighting activities is not a novel endeavour in itself. In fact, there is a long tradition of field studies of the fighting arts. Linked to the field of anthropology, such studies of fighting arts became an academic subfield through the work of Sir Richard Burton, a nineteenth-century English explorer-soldier-academic who travelled throughout Asia and Africa, spoke more than 25 languages and co-founded the Anthropological Society of London. He was also the developer of hoplology: the science of human combative behaviour and performance (deriving from the Greek root hopl, meaning armed and armoured). Embedded in his travel notebooks and studies of the cultures in which he was living, hoplological field notes were collected but were not translated into a coherent systematic study.
The systematic study of combat behaviour and performance would have to wait until the 1960s, when Donn F. Draeger resumed the task of hoplology. His research centred on the study of Asian fighting arts, specifically Japanese martial-art styles. A former major in the US Marine Corps and class judo contender, Draeger placed the old Japanese martial traditions (koryu) under scholarly analysis. Being part of the tradition (for example, katori shinto ryu), he engaged in ethnographic field research, encouraging his colleagues to do the same in other martial arts, in order to study and preserve as many traditions as they could. He also expanded his research in several hoplological-oriented trips to countries such as Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia.
Draeger founded the International Hoplology Society and started the publication of the journal Hoplos. He also tried, with not much success, to establish hoplology as an academic field in its own right. While Draeger's hoplological project never progressed to the point of being an academic subdiscipline, his work has continued outside of academia. The International Hoplology Society remains active, through the work of Hunter B. Armstrong and a group of collaborators who keep alive the analysis of koryu and other fighting traditions. A remarkable work that sums up the different characters around and within the field of hoplology can be found in three volumes edited by Diane Skoss: Koryu Bujutsu (1997), Sword and Spirit (1999) and Keiko Shokon (2002). Apart from this kind of scholarly approach to the fighting disciplines, there are also myriad autobiographical works by practitioners recounting their personal journeys into the world of martial arts (for example, Powell 2006; Polly 2007; Lowry 1995, 2005).
Bun Over Bu
The second tradition of ethnographic research into the martial arts emerged within academia. Historically parallel to the previous line of literary writing are forms of writing that mirror informal ethnographic traditions. One of the most famous literary antecedents was Jack London. A writer and a boxing aficionado with an adventurous passion for travelling – Burton's twin image – he produced extremely beautiful and interesting descriptions of boxing that, in a certain sense, could be understood as works of ethnographic literature. London's The Game (1905), A Piece of Steak (1909), The Mexican (1911a) and The Abysmal Brute (1911b) are fours outstanding examples of such a work. Another acclaimed writer interested in martial arts was the Nobel Prize winner Yukio Mishima. As a process of late awakening to his corporeal self, Mishima eagerly took part in bodybuilding and martial arts (especially kendo) during his forties. In his essay Sun and Steel ([1968] 1970), Mishima offers a first-person description of this experience; he also wrote a fictional short story called Ken ([1968] 1998) on the practice and ethos of kendo. More recent iterations of the literary form include first-person journalistic accounts of the world of boxing (Matthews 2002; Anasi 2002), mixed martial arts (Sheridan 2007), judo (Law 2008) and aikido (Twigger 1999), which offer insights and qualitative material to understand these martial arts and combat sports.
Beginning in the 1980s, ethnographic research on martial arts and combat sports can be found scattered across social science disciplines. For example, George Girton's (1986) analysis of kung fu from an ethnomethodological perspective serves as a groundbreaking work in this respect. From the point of view of a participant, he offers a basic understanding of the craft embedded in the different 'animal styles' (tiger, crane, monkey etc.) that are part of the kung-fu curriculum. Girton's analysis avoids the disembodied study where values, ideas and structures rule out any chance of reporting the naturally occurring activity between flesh-and-blood human beings. Drawing from the ethnomethodological tradition, he delves into the building of 'members' competency'. As a practitioner of kung fu, Girton acquired a command of the art in order to understand the activities going on around him. Nevertheless, his analysis remains at the level of praxeological analysis of the ethnomethods used by the practitioners and remains silent on the morality embedded in kung fu.
During the late 1980s an ethnographic study on boxing was being carried out that would change and energize the study of martial arts and combat sports, as well as exert a more lasting effect on the general practice of ethnography. The embodied, practical know-how of the craft that Girton utilized was applied in another sociological tradition, with fruitful results and consequences. Here we are referring to Loïc Wacquant's (1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 2004d, 2005c) pioneering work on boxing, reported in a string of essays leading to the book Body and Soul (2004a). Wacquant's work revolutionized urban ethnography and, in particular, the way to approach field studies of physical activities (such as sports) as privileged points for understanding not only that activity itself, but the lives and social milieu of its practitioners, in their full sensuous, moral and aesthetic aspects. Wacquant's approach to ethnography builds on and extends Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' (see Wacquant 2004a), a set of 'durable and transposable disposition' that is structured by the social conditions of the subjects and that, in turn, structures the perception and action of these subjects.
In Wacquant's chapter included in this volume, he recalls how he took up boxing in order to get a vantage point to study the everyday life of young men in the black ghetto of Chicago. As he progressed in the craft, acquiring the skills, wits and sense of the art – the boxing habitus – he became more immersed in the lives of boxers and made the craft itself a second focus of his research, along with the structural transformation of the black ghetto and the rise of the penal state (Wacquant 2009b, 2013). Thus, the habitus became a potent tool with which to pry into the boxing world, a privileged concept to decipher action and meaning from the body and with the body. It also became a topic of investigation in itself: how do pugilists acquire the boxing habitus; what are the social and moral forces, the pedagogical practices, and the cultural constructs that enter into its fabrication; and what does this acquisition entail in terms of the boxers' relation to self and society?
Wacquant documents the ordinary routines and technical learning of which the gym is the site, but more importantly he captures the suffering and joy, the pain and ecstasy that intermingle in the mutual- and self-production of boxers. With a unique mix of social theory, close-up observation and experiential detection, he illuminates all that constitutes the boxing universe and that is customarily undetected or opaque to a distant observer. This is the main lesson embedded in the concept of habitus as a research tool. Rejecting the false dichotomy between distant observation and 'going native', Wacquant proposes that we 'go native but armed' with the theory of habitus in order to capture the production of the skilled, sensitive and desiring body by undergoing the process studied. This position is grounded in the fundamental and indissoluble fact of human existence taught by phenomenology (see Merleau-Ponty [1962] 2002, 1968): we live and learn about reality through our embodied condition. That is why 'observant participation' offers a methodological launching pad and habitus is the touchstone for access to the promises of 'carnal sociology' (Wacquant 1995a, 2005a; see also Crossley 1995), which Wacquant characterizes as 'a sociology not only of the body, in the sense of object, but also from the body, that is, 'deploying the body as tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge' (Wacquant 2004a, xiii). For the French sociologist, such an approach is can help us take 'full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life' (Wacquant 2005a, 446).
Wacquant proposes that
carnal sociology fully recounts the fact that the social agent is a suffering animal, a being of flesh and blood, nerves and viscera, inhabited by passions and endowed with embodied knowledges and skills – by opposition to the animal symbolicum of the neo-Kantian tradition, refurbished by Clifford Geertz and the followers of interpretive anthropology, on the one hand, and by Herbert Blumer and the symbolic interactionists, on the other – and that this is just as true of the sociologist. This implies that we must bring the body of the sociologist back into play and treat her intelligent organism, not as an obstacle to understanding, as the intellectualism drilled into our folk conception of intellectual practice would have it, but as a vector of knowledge of the social world. (Wacquant 2009b, 120-21; emphasis in the original)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting Scholars by Raúl Sánchez García, Dale C. Spencer. Copyright © 2013 Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer editorial matter and selection; individual chapters individual contributors. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
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; ReferencesWhat People are Saying About This
‘“Fighting Scholars” is a groundbreaking contribution, combining empirically illuminating explorations of combats sports with methodologically innovative insights into embodiment and social research. With an acute sensitivity towards the social role of violence, gender relations and the cross-cultural transmission of leisure forms, this book underscores the transformative potential of both sports participation and the ethnographic experience.’ —Dominic Malcolm, Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport, Loughborough University
‘“Fighting Scholars” presents a fresh, rich and inspiring look into the sociology and carnal ethnography of martial arts. Solidly founded on the deep academic knowledge and wide field experiences of thirteen contributors, it is a unique piece in the vast bibliography of the martial arts.’ —Carlos Gutiérrez-García, University of León, Spain, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Revista de Artes Marciales Asiáticas’
‘“Fighting Scholars” certainly extends in powerful fashion the martial arts / social science conversation, but it also does much more. Its movement across cultural, disciplinary and theoretical traditions of embodied knowledge invites profound refigurations of concepts like habitus and the cultivation of a real cumulative research program for carnal social science. Bravo.’ —Michael Kennedy, Professor of Sociology and International Studies, Brown University