Alex Dincovici

If the absence and disappearance of the body have enjoyed considerable attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said about its appearance, other than during dysfunctional states such as pain and illness. The present article draws from a large array of phenomenological studies and presents a situation in which the body comes to the fore in one’s consciousness during the learning of combat sports, a seemingly destructive practice The argument that I will develop, starting from extensive ethnographic research in two distinctive combat sports, is that every type of bodily practice develops a specific type of reflective body awareness that has a significant impact upon both the way we feel our bodies and the way we feel the world. In other words, what we do with and to our bodies shapes the way we see and experience the world.

Pain has usually been the realm of medical anthropology, a discipline that has focused mostly on specific categories of pain, resulting either from illness or from injury and involving a great amount of suffering. This widely researched pain has almost become the norm in anthropology research, its main characteristics being its world destructive effects and impossibility to be communicated and thus understood. In this article I discuss a different, almost opposite type of pain: controlled, positive, communicable and, most of all, devoid of suffering. This is how pain looks in the modern combat sport of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a bodily practice that, by its dissemination through instructional videos and forums on the internet, can create a worldwide community of practitioners that share the same experiences of pain. Drawing on an extensive ethnographic study, the article looks at how the sport has entered the Romanian scene and brought technical knowledge that created corresponding pain related knowledge, as well as at the role of pain in the learning process and its importance for the practitioners.

If the absence and disappearance of the body have enjoyed considerable attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said about its appearance, other than during dysfunctional states such as pain and illness. The present article draws from a large array of phenomenological studies and presents a situation in which the body comes to the fore in one’s consciousness during the learning of combat sports, a seemingly destructive practice The argument that I will develop, starting from extensive ethnographic research in two distinctive combat sports, is that every type of bodily practice develops a specific type of reflective body awareness that has a significant impact upon both the way we feel our bodies and the way we feel the world. In other words, what we do with and to our bodies shapes the way we see and experience the world.

Bogdan Iancu 126 „Nici cal, nici măgar”: Instituţii, antreprenoriat etnic şi identitate în comunitatea italienilor de la Greci Andrei Boţeşteanu Alex Dincovici Răzvan Ionescu-Ţugui Preambul În anul 2007, în cadrul proiectului „Dobrogea–zonă de convieţuire etnică”, au fost editate opt ...

Physical violence is a widely analyzed topic, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, most of the studies tend to focus on the behavioral and psychological aspects and neglect the most important party involved: the body. However, the body is the one that provokes violence and it is also the one that  suffers from it, as physical violence is a deeply
embodied phenomenon.  To understand the embodied aspect of violence and the relationships it creates with one’s body, we need to address the issue in a place where its presence is not questioned, as most of the research done so far concerns violence as rule-breaking behavior, and tends to ignore sanctioned violence and the places where violence is legitimate, and even encouraged, and where direct body contact is present on a regular and constant basis. 
In such areas, physical violence did not emerge as  such a poignant issue, its legal sanctioning  making it, socially speaking, less of a concern. Legal approval of a certain behavior does not make it disappear, but can, at most, contain it into certain limits. Nevertheless, the phenomenon remains. 
The focus of the present research lies on the manner in which contact sports athletes experience and define violence through their bodies, as well as on the relationships between particular sports  and violence. A better understanding of the fighting sports’ violent bodies would improve our understanding of violence, and its analyzing as an embodied phenomenon is a long needed shift of perspective in the field.

Beyond the usual feeling of soreness, muscle fever is an ambiguous sensation with an ambiguous role vis-a-vis the body. Sometimes seen as pain, some other times seen as pleasure, muscle fever is not only embodied but also embodying, as it brings parts of the body or even the entire body right into the realm of consciousness. The present paper, based on an extensive ethnographic study in two brazilian jiu-jitsu and kickboxing gyms as well as in two fitness gyms, looks at muscle fever in sites where it is an inescapable presence, questioning its effect on the body and on the individual.