‘Being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’: the dancing body-subject and inhabited transcendence (original) (raw)
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Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2021
This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that rese...
Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2017
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 which 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.
Bodies in Skilled Performance: How dancers reflect through the living body
Synthese, 2021
Dancers and dance philosophers report on experiences of a certain form of sense making and bodily thinking through the dancing body. Yet, discussions on expertise and consciousness are often framed within canonical philosophical world-‐views that make it difficult to fully recognize, verbalize, and value the full variety of embodied and affective facets of subjectivity. Using qualitative interviews with five professional dancers and choreographers, I make an attempt to disclose the characteristics of what I consider to be a largely overseen state of consciousness: embodied reflection. Dancers are familiar with this attentive bodily presence, which constitutes their work mode and heightens their abilities as experts. Detailed descriptions of their daily work at the theatre help us grasp the qualities and understand the enigmas of the absorbed state of bodily thinking. Husserl’s theories on reflection and Merleau-‐Ponty’s work on motoricity support our understanding of the structures behind embodied reflection. I believe it is a common human resource, and that whether we are experts or not, we all have the ability to reflect non-‐conceptually through bodily and/or affective activity.
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.
Ian Wellard (ed.), Researching Embodied Sport: Exploring movement cultures, Routledge: London, 2016;
A body and its predisposition, embodiment and embodied knowledge each play a crucial role in the field of sport. However and paradoxically, as pointed out by Hockey and , there are few social studies that focus on its 'fleshy' and 'carnal' nature. In the sociology of sport, a body is more often considered a representation or an element of discourse. The emergent interest in the sociology of body (embodiment) has not taken hold within sports studies. Researching Embodied Sport, edited by Ian Wellard, fills this gap, if only partially.
2016
This article considers the integration of arts-based representations via poetic narratives together with artistic representation on dancing embodiment so as to continue an engagement with debates regarding multiple forms/representations. Like poetry, visual images are unique and can evoke particular kinds of emotional and visceral responses, meaning that alternative representational forms can resonate in different and powerful ways. In the article, we draw on grandparent-grandchild interactions, narrative poetry, and artistic representations of dance in order to illustrate how arts-based methods might synergise to offer new ways of 'knowing' and 'seeing'. The expansion of the visual arts into interdisciplinary methodological innovations is a relatively new, and sometimes contentious approach, in studies of sport and exercise. We raise concerns regarding the future for more arts-based research in the light of an ever-changing landscape of a neoliberal university culture that demands high productivity in reductionist terms of what counts as 'output', often within very restricted time-frames. Heeding feminist calls for 'slow academies' that attempt to 'change' time collectively, and challenge the demands of a fast-paced audit culture, we consider why it is worth enabling creative and arts-based methods to continue to develop and flourish in studies of sport, exercise and health, despite the mounting pressures to 'perform'.
2009
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 is also critically addressed. Keywords: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis; sporting embodiment; the lived body; Merleau-Ponty
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