The pain of ethnographic action: skinning to go between the ropes

Abstract

In this article I try to make a methodological reflection on the importance to develop a practical knowledge ("embodiment") in the fieldwork of sociologists, anthropologists and other researchers of social reality. This reflection is connected with different approaches that insist on the body's value as object and subject of knowledge. To do this, I put various authors and theoretical approaches in touch, using as excuse the Wacquant's work ("Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of An Apprentice-Boxer"), which seems to have passed, at the moment, unnoticed for spanish-speaking academicians, despite the wealth of its efforts both in the methodological level as in the more purely 'ethnographic'. In the incursion into the world of sport as a privileged arena for carrying out this type of analysis, I will focus on the notions of time, sacrifice and discipline, applicable both boxers as any other type of athlete (and obviously also to the researchers).