Conditioning Weapons: Ethnography of the Practice of Martial Arts Training

Lorenzo Domaneschi

doi:10.3390/soc8030080

Abstract

Drawing on the inspiring work by Wacquant about apprenticeship in boxing, I present data generated from a five-year ethnographic study of one Wushu Kung Fu Association in Italy. Drawing on a Bourdieusian version of theories of social practice, the aim is to investigate in depth the relationship between habitus and materials, as it seems an underestimated issue both in Wacquant’s presentation and in most martial arts studies developed from his work. The aim is to explore the relationship between the practitioner and the set of weapons—a chief part of the martial art training—as an endless work of conditioning. To this aim, according to what Wacquant calls “enactive ethnography”, I completely immersed myself inside the fieldwork in order to be able to explore the phenomenon and to personally test its operative mechanism. The challenge here is to enter the theatre of action and, to the highest degree possible, train in the ways of the people studied so as to gain a visceral apprehension of their universe as materials and springboard for its analytic reconstruction. Drawing on the difference between the cognitive, conative, and emotive components of habitus through which, according to Bourdieu, social agents navigate social space and animate their lived world, I show how conditioning works not only on the conative or cognitive components (learning techniques and incorporating kinetic schemes), but how a deeper psychological form of conditioning also comes into play, which aims to neutralize the shock due to the fear generated by the threat of a contusion. It is at this point, therefore, that the affective component of the habitus becomes crucial in constructing a sort of intimacy bond with the tool. The detectable transformation in the habitus of the practitioner, eventually, can be deciphered, starting from the characteristics of the tool that produces, in the ways and limits given by its material features, such a transformation. In the end, I stress the relevance of recognizing the active role of objects in transforming the habitus and I briefly discuss the potentiality of enactive ethnography in analyzing social practices.

Highlights

In order to do this, I will begin with a brief methodological note where I explain how I got access to the field and what materials and methods I have selected for this purpose; I will proceed by illustrating the theoretical framework from which I developed the research question, starting from the recent debate around the so-called theories of social practice [12,16]; I will present and critically discuss the main findings of my field experience, to conclude with some more general reflections on the heuristic potentialities of a combination of the social practice approach and the enactive ethnography [13]
An eminently social and quasi-scientific practice, even as it might seem to involve only those individuals who risk their bodies in the ring in a singular confrontation that appears rough and unbridled; and the pugilist emerges as the product of a collective organization, which, while not thought out and willed as such by anyone, is “ objectively coordinated through the reciprocal adjustment of the embodied expectations and demands of the occupants of the various positions within the space of the gym.” [1] (p. 149). This claim summarizes the results of his renowned work, which was intended to begin “a re-reflection on initiation into a practice of which the body is at once the seat, the instrument, and the target” [1] (p. 27) and which aimed, in this way, to give an account of the practice of boxing, to “suggest what his specific logic, and in particular that of his learning, can teach us about the logic of every practice”
During my 5 years of ethnography in a school of wushu kung fu, I experienced many of the training practices of which Wacquant and many other scholars described as peculiarities of the martial arts as social practices

Summary

Introduction

The research presented here has been organized according to the approach suggested by Löic. In order to do this, I will begin with a brief methodological note where I explain how I got access to the field and what materials and methods I have selected for this purpose; I will proceed by illustrating the theoretical framework from which I developed the research question, starting from the recent debate around the so-called theories of social practice [12,16]; I will present and critically discuss the main findings of my field experience, to conclude with some more general reflections on the heuristic potentialities of a combination of the social practice approach and the enactive ethnography [13]

Materials and Methods

Beyond Habitus

Weapons at Work

The Effects of Materials over Habitus

The Effect of Habitus on Materials

Concluding Remarks