Abstract
This paper responds to calls across the sociological, philosophical and psychological dimensions of Sports Studies to attend to the promise of phenomenology as an approach to understanding the complexities and nuances of embodied athletic experience. The work of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn upon to elucidate expertise through a non-dualist framework for understanding skill acquisition and bodily knowledge in sport and movement cultures. In particular, I explore how theoretical concepts about practice might actually play out in practice by bringing the notions of tacit practical knowledge and the sedimentation of habit that Merleau-Ponty emphasises in his theorisation of the corporeal schema into conversation with qualitative data from in-depth interviews with dance practitioners. The paper engages with dancers’ accounts of learning, remembering and performing patterns of movement and, in particular, with the dancers’ notions of having or getting a movement ‘in/into the body’, exploring resonances between these experiences and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of the habit-body and of incorporating behaviours into the corporeal schema.
Highlights
The importance of understanding skill and skilled movements in philosophical terms has been recognised in the field of Sports Studies since the 1970s, with much new work emerging in the 2000s
Data Analysis The analysis presented in this paper is focussed on ideas or concepts that arose in the data from my interviews – those around ‘getting’ movements ‘into the body’; and those around movements being embodied differently by different dancers – that I have brought into conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) philosophical theorisation of the corporeal schema and body subjectivity
The work of this paper has been to contribute to existing critical development of the phenomenological model of skill acquisition in sport and physical cultures by bringing a sustained empirical engagement with the situated lived experience of dancing embodiment into conversation with the non-dualist phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty
Summary
The importance of understanding skill and skilled movements in philosophical terms has been recognised in the field of Sports Studies since the 1970s (for example, Wertz 1978), with much new work emerging in the 2000s (for example, Brevik 2007, Moe 2005, Hopsicker 2009, Torres 2000). 3 For more on this topic in relation to dance see: Purser 2011 picture which reduces movement without conscious thought to an unintentional response to environmental stimuli (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 2002, Crossley 2001, Reuter, 1999) This means that we can potentially use Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical concepts to look beyond the mind-body and subject-object dualism that is so pervasive in Western thought and culture to consider a non-dualist framework that can account for phenomena such as embodied intuition or tacit practical knowledge (Crossley 2001, Leder 1990, Grosz 1994, Williams and Bendelow 1998)
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