Fighting Scholars

‘Fighting Scholars’ offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports from the viewpoint of a ‘carnal sociology’.

'Fighting Scholars' presents insightful ethnographic research on several different martial arts and combat sports, taking the habitus as a central theme of analysis. Interdisciplinary in its approach, it contains contributions from leading international figures on 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.