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 books 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 books 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 Wacquants Body and Soul: the construction of a carnal sociology that constitutes an exploration of the social world from the body.