Body culture studies

Body culture studies describe and compare bodily practice in the larger context of culture and society, i.e. in the tradition of anthropology, history and sociology. As body culture studies analyse culture and society in terms of human bodily practices, they are sometimes viewed as a form of materialist phenomenology. Its significance (in German Körperkultur, in Danish kropskultur) was discovered in the early twentieth century by several historians and sociologists. During the 1980s, a particular school of body culture studies spread, in connection with – and critically related to – sports studies. These studies were especially established at Danish universities and academies and operated in collaboration with Nordic, European and East Asian research networks. Body culture studies include studies in dance, play and game, outdoor activities, festivities and other forms of movement culture. It floats towards studies in medical cultures, working habits, gender and sexual cultures, fashion and body decoration, popular festivity and popular culture studies. These were made useful when it made the study of sport enter into a broader historical and sociological discussion – from the level of subjectivity to civil society, state and market. Since early 20th century, sociologists and philosophers had discovered the significance of the body, especially Norbert Elias, the Frankfurt School, and some phenomenologists. Later, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and the Stuttgart Historical Behaviour Studies delivered important inspirations for the new body culture studies. The sociologist Norbert Elias (1939) wrote the first sociology, which placed the body and bodily practice in its centre, describing the change of table manners, shame and violence from the Middle Ages to Early Modern court society as a process of civilisation. Later, Elias (1989) studied the culture of duel in Wilhelminian Prussia, throwing light on particular traits of the German sonderweg. Elias' figurational sociology of the body became productive especially in the field of sport studies (Elias/ Dunning 1986; Eric Dunning et al.