'Fighting Scholars' presents insightful ethnographic research on a range of different martial arts and combat sports. Taking the habitus as a central theme of analysis, the different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to crystallize in Loïc Wacquant's 'Body and Soul': the construction of a 'carnal sociology' that constitutes an exploration of the social world 'from' the body.

Contributors; Glossary; Chapter 1: Introduction: Carnal Ethnography as Path to Embodied Knowledge - Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer; Chapter 2: Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter - Loïc Wacquant; Chapter 3: In Search of a Martial Habitus: Identifying Core Dispositions in Wing Chun and Taijiquan - David Brown and George Jennings; Chapter 4: Each More Agile Than the Other: Mental and Physical Enculturation in 'Capoeira Regional' - Sara Delamont and Neil Stephens; Chapter 5: 'There Is No Try in Tae Kwon Do': Reflexive Body Techniques in Action - Elizabeth Graham; Chapter 6: 'It Is About Your Body Recognizing the Move and Automatically Doing It': Merleau-Ponty, Habit and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu - Bryan Hogeveen; Chapter 7: 'Do You Hit Girls?': Some Striking Moments in the Career of a Male Martial Artist - Alex Channon; Chapter 8: The Teacher's Blessing and the Withheld Hand: Two Vignettes of Somatic Learning in South India's Indigenous Martial Art Kalarippayattu - Sara K. Schneider; Chapter 9: White Men Don't Flow: Embodied Aesthetics of the Fifty-Two Hand Blocks - Thomas Green; Chapter 10: Japanese Religions and Kyudo (Japanese Archery): An Anthropological Perspective - Einat Bar-On Cohen; Chapter 11: Taming the Habitus: The Gym and the Dojo as 'Civilizing Workshops' - Raúl Sánchez García; Chapter 12: 'Authenticity', Muay Thai and Habitus - Dale C. Spencer; Chapter 13: Conclusion: Present and Future Lines of Research - Raúl Sánchez García and Dale C. Spencer; Epilogue: Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus - Loïc Wacquant; References