10101 Fighting Scholars : Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports

Dr. Anu Vaittinen is a qualitative sociologist of sport, health and physical culture. She holds a position of a research associate for the Institute of Health & Society at Newcastle University (UK). Anu is a lifelong sports practitioner and is a recreational MMA and wing chun practitioner and a novice triathlete. Fighting Scholars is an edited collection of ethnographic scholarship on martial arts and combat sports (hereafter referred to as MACS [Channon and Jennings 2014]). This volume is the first of its kind; it brings together a selection of empirical studies that demonstrates the fecundity of ethnographic research on the one hand and of Loïc Wacquant’s notion of ‘carnal sociology’ [Wacquant 2004, 2014] on the other. This volume is also quite timely when considered in relation to the wider context of the ‘bodily turn’ in the social scientific and anthropological study of sport and physical culture [Shilling 2007].