Quantities of Qualia: Stone Athletes and the Ethnography of Intensity

Sociology, 2018

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social ‘production’ of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of ‘endurance work’. Data emanate from in-depth interviews with 18 high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The article responds to Shilling’s (2016) call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing.

Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2017

We are witnessing an unprecedented interest in and engagement with extreme sport activities. Extreme sports are unique in that they involve physical prowess as well as a particular attitude towards the world and the self. We have scant understanding of the experience of participants who engage in extreme activities such as BASE jumping, big wave surfing, extreme skiing, waterfall kayaking, extreme mountaineering, and solo rope free climbing. The current study investigates the experience of people who engage in extreme sports utilizing a phenomenological approach. The study draws upon interviews with 15 extreme sports participants across three continents to explicate three unique themes: extreme sports as invigorating experience, inadequacy of words, and participants' experience of transcendence. The findings provide a valuable insight into the experiences of the participants and contribute to our understanding of human volition and the range of human experiences.

Sport in Society

This paper is a call to scholars working within the sport studies researching the Paralympic communitas, to embrace the use of reflexive ethnography. The nature of ethnographic research places the social scientist in a privileged position. On the one hand there is a need to transfer knowledge to the academic community but on the other this should not occur as a result of the exploitation of the people under investigation. Using a reflexive historical ethnographic vignette as a starting point this paper highlights how our past embodied interactions, with the lifeworld can impact upon the shape and colour of the lens in which we view it. Ultimately this paper argues that by adopting a phenomenological stance we can gain a better understanding of the degree to our body as a vessel for data collection can enhance our understand of the cultural milieu surrounding the Paralympic movement.

International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 2009

Whilst in recent years the sociology of sport has taken to heart vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to analyses of sporting activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ signalled by Kerry and Armour (2000), remains under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Surprisingly, given the focus of study, relatively few accounts are truly grounded in the corporeal realities of the lived, sensuous sporting body. Phenomenology offers us a powerful framework for such analysis and has been adopted and utilised in very different ways by different social science disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to consider how existential phenomenology in particular might be utilised in the study of sport and physical activity, and we draw upon data from a collaborative autoethnographic project on distance running to illustrate this. The use of existential phenomenology and autophenomenography offers, we contend, fresh insights in portraying the ‘essences’, sensuosity, corporeal immediacy and richly-textured experiences of sporting embodiment. Keywords: Existential Phenomenology, Sporting Embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, Autophenomenography, Autoethnography

2018

Conference presentation at 13th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Granada, Spain, July 25-27. Youtube version at: https://youtu.be/hAhf8bjA3WQ

M Giardina and M Donnelly (eds), Physical Culture, Ethnography and the Body: Theory, Method and Praxis, Abingdon: Routledge , 2017

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed.

Societies

This paper illuminates the potential of diversely embodied sporting cultures to challenge ableism, the ideology of ability. Ableism constructs the able body as conditional to a life worth living, thus devaluing all those perceived as ‘dis’-abled. This hegemonic ideology develops into a ‘logic of practice’ through a cultural appropriation of body’s lived complexity, by reducing it to symbolic dichotomies (able/disabled). The path to challenge ableism is then to restore body’s complexity, by turning attention toward its lived embodied existence. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of a sitting volleyball (SV) community, we condense multiple data sources into a sensuous creative non-fiction vignette to translate the physical embodied culture of the sport. In exploring SV physicality through the ethnographic vignette, it is our intention to activate the readers’ own embodiment when interpreting and co-creating this text. By placing the reader in the lived reality of playing SV, we hope t...

Drawing on findings from an in-depth qualitative study of 19 women climbers, this chapter explores climbing subculture in relation to gender and identity. Whilst the data suggests that some structural boundaries relating to gender persist in this ‘alternative’ sporting space, the women’s experiences evidence that multiple and fluid identities were being lived. Therefore this chapter will draw on post-structural and third-wave feminist ideas of difference to consider the increasing fluidity of gender and sports identities.

Anthropology Today 23(6): 3-7., 2007