George Jennings

‘It can be a religion if you want’: Wing Chun Kung Fu as a secular religion

Drawing on data generated from a six-year ethnographic study of one Wing Chun Kung Fu Association in England, this article explores the ways in which this martial art is constructed as a form of religion and functions as a secular religious practice for core members of this association. Two key features of this process are identified. The first involves the ways in which Wing Chun evolves from an everyday secular practice into something that takes on sacralized meanings for participants while the second focuses on the development of a Wing Chun habitus over time. The article closes with a discussion of how the findings relate to broader discussions of martial arts practices, religion and spirituality in Western cultures.

Exploring embodiment through martial arts and combat sports: a review of empirical research.

Since the late 1970s, social scientists have turned considerable attention to investigating martial arts and combat sports (MACS). In particular, this broad range of fighting disciplines has been shown to offer numerous avenues for scholarly enquiry into social change and personal transformation via processes of embodiment. Adopting a thematic structure, we assess the empirical literature in this area via four interconnecting categories pertaining to MACS and embodiment: (1) body cultures; (2) body pedagogies; (3) the embodiment of gender; and (4) bodily harm. Following this review, we identify several gaps in the existing literature, suggesting potential new topics and strategies for research connecting to the social world of physical culture more generally.

The changing charismatic status of the performing male body in Asian martial arts films

This essay is driven by foregrounding the performing body in Asian martial arts films. This focus leads to the emergence of three simple but important categories of performing body within the genre: the martial-artist-as-actor, the actor-as-martial-artist and the ‘enhanced’ martial-artist-as-actor. These emergent categories are then explored by focusing on a few celebrated Asian martial arts films and martial artists/actors. The analysis draws upon a range of sociological perspectives of the body including the construction of body charisma, ideas of a martial habitus as legitimate schemes of dispositions, modes of body usage and the positioning of forms of masculinity within the global gender order that the predominantly male bodies in Asian martial arts films must negotiate. It is concluded that the charismatic performing body provides a fertile yet hitherto under explored point of departure for the study of martial arts films, martial culture and the gendered bodies that inhabit them.

Exploring Lived Heat, “Temperature Work,” and Embodiment: Novel Auto/Ethnographic Insights from Physical Cultures

This article was published in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography on 1 December 2016 (online early) available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891241616680721

Weather-wise? Sporting embodiment, weather work and weather learning in running and triathlon

Weather experiences are currently surprisingly under-explored and under-theorised in sociology and sport sociology, despite the importance of weather in both routine, everyday life and in recreational sporting and physical–cultural contexts. To address this lacuna, we examine here the lived experience of weather, including ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, in our specific physical–cultural worlds of distance-running, triathlon and jogging in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and the findings from five separate auto/ethnographic projects, we explore the ‘weather-worlds’ and weather work involved in our physical–cultural engagement. In so doing, we address ongoing sport sociological concerns about embodiment and somatic, sensory learning and ways of knowing. We highlight how weather work provides a key example of the phenomenological conceptualisation of the mind–body–world nexus in action, with key findings delineating weather learning across the meteorological seasons that contour our British weather-related training.