Raul Sanchez Garcia

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | UPM · INEF

Sociología del Deporte surge en 2020 en el seno de la Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla con el propósito de crear un espacio de reflexión y debate en torno al fenómeno deportivo desde la perspectiva de las ciencias sociales. Pretende conectar desde el rigor científico las principales teorías y corrientes de la sociología con el debate intelec...

This paper uses primary and secondary sources to provide a process-sociological analysis of the relationship between religious practices and Japanese martial arts. It problematises the taken for granted role of Zen Buddhism as the sole influence on the development of Japanese martial arts. Such essential connection is inaccurate and anachronistic....

Monográfico de etnografías deportivas Special issue on ethnographies of sport

Este artículo propone una etnografía sensorial crítica sobre la experiencia vivida al ir subido a un minicruiser (pequeña tabla de skate para pasear) por las calles de Madrid. De modo más específico, la etnografía ha tratado de registrar a partir de las propias sensaciones corporales los distintos ritmos y las atmósferas afectivas que se van experi...

En este monográfico encontramos distintos estudios que aplican el método etnográfico a investigaciones que tienen que ver con la actividad física y deportiva. El número está compuesto por dos artículos de la sección especial, seis artículos de investigación y una reseña de libro sobre etnografía deportiva. Cabe destacar que los artículos de investi...

Editorial del Volumen 3, Número 2, de Sociología del Deporte (SD)

World Athletics (formerly known as IAAF) has recently published the eligibility regulations for female classification that apply to running events from 400 meters up to the mile. The regulations have prevented some elite women athletes with DSD (Difference of Sexual Development) to compete or have made some of them to change their preferred running...

La cuestión del juego arriesgado en niños y niñas está tomando gran importancia tanto en el ámbito académico como en el de las políticas públicas dentro del entorno europeo. Debido a que gran parte de la actividad física que realizan los pequeños/as se desarrollan en áreas de juego tales como los parques infantiles, es necesaria una investigación s...

This article addresses the specific issue of rules and turn-taking in surfing from an ethnomethodological approach. The naturally occurring coordination of turn-taking of surfers riding ocean waves permits us to examine the nature of organizing local orderlinesses. Operating without officials or external supervision, surfers find ways to enhance sa...

This paper considers the study of driving skill and performance of human drivers as a key domain to improve the design and the "expertise" of self-driving cars. Concerted driving with others in roundabouts is a special kind of social expertise-understood as competence in ordinary, mundane activities-deployed by members of society. We illustrate our...

This paper presents a cognitive ethnography on the variability of interpersonal coordination in defense against direct screens during basketball games. We collected data through observation of ten games of Estudiantes U18 Team during the 2014/2015 season in Madrid. We filmed the game and showed clips of specific direct screens to players while cond...

This paper presents an application and a further development of Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning’s (2008) Quest for Excitement thesis through the analysis of the recent phenomenon of the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) in USA. The research method is based on qualitative data analysis of different digital sources concerning bare-knuckle figh...

El presente artículo forma parte de la sección de debate "Deporte y COVID-19" del Volumen 1, Número 1, de Sociología del Deporte (SD).

Desde su origen en la modernidad, el cuerpo deportivo se ha constituido dentro de unas relaciones de poder que privilegiaban la práctica de hombres sanos, de clase alta y blancos. Sin embargo, el cuerpo deportivo actual está atravesado por una geneaología de luchas que han logrado emanciparlo de su jaula primigénea. Precisamente, lo que pretende es...

This article presents the development and current situation of the sociology of sport in Spain. It begins with a brief description of its origins and development as an academic field, which can be divided into three stages: birth, growth, and consolidation and internationalization. It then describes the theoretical and methodological traditions as...

This article examines Spanish press coverage of boxing upon its entry into Spain’s ‘media space’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our analysis highlights how the mix of fascination, repugnance, and admiration displayed toward the sport were shaped by the broader context of imperial rivalry and anxieties about the purported...

El objetivo de este artículo consiste en aplicar la teoría de la informalización de Cas Wouters –que amplía las teorías sobre el proceso de civilización de Norbert Elias– al análisis de la actividad deportiva del running tal y como se desarrolló desde la segunda mitad del s. xx en EE.UU. y desde mediados de los años 2000 como tendencia deportiva gl...

This paper analyzes how professional wrestling expanded stereotyped race, national, and class images toward the Spanish public in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The professional wrestling circuit of music halls, theaters, and circuses helped connect a myriad of grappling practices spanning different national traditions. Nonetheless...

In order to analyse the origins of modern gyms in Spain, it is crucial to look to the mid-nineteenth century, focusing particularly on those cities that experienced the greatest urban and economic growth. These cities witnessed the creation of new spaces related to the different gymnastic disciplines (artistic, medical, orthopaedic, recreational, h...

Esta presentación oral inicia de forma tentativa un análisis sobre la persistencia del discurso de la raza y estereotipos raciales en deporte. A pesar de la desacreditación del concepto de raza por parte de los avances científicos en genética, el discurso sobre la raza sigue acep-tado como parte del sentido común para diferenciar poblaciones hu-man...

El presente artículo analiza los recientes cambios que ha sufrido la gimnasia artística a través del concepto de equilibrio de tensiones, vinculado a la sociología de Norbert Elias. Para que la actividad deportiva ofrezca una estimulación adecuada debe existir un equilibrio entre la intensidad/descontrol emocional y la seguridad/control emocional....

Se realiza la traducción del Capítulo Seis de El Programa de la Etbometodología por Harold Garfinkel.

This chapter deals with the application of informalisation theory to sports. More specifically, it explores the informalising and reformalising phases occurring in the development of jogging/running in the USA (1960-2000). A spiralling fashion of informalising and reformalising trends was observed in the changes of jogging/running during three diff...

This chapter deals with the application of informalisation theory to sports. More specifically, it explores the informalising and reformalising phases occurring in the development of jogging/running in the USA (1960–2000). A spiralling fashion of informalising and reformalising trends was observed in the changes of jogging/running during three diff...

This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process. The book trace...

How do expert trainers and athletes instruct and attend to new moves? The objective of this paper is to analize communication patterns in sports settings. We propose a pragmatic view on cognition through an integrated theoretical model. We claim that communication modalities cannot be reduced to individual minds but must be understood as distribute...

Research in sport and skill acquisition is monopolized by psychology-based analysis, not taking into account explanations about cognition coming from the social sciences. In social activities such as sports, cognitive processes cannot be reduced to individual minds and must be understood as part of the complex and dense embedded interactional work...

This chapter deals with the application of informalisation theory to sports. More specifically, it explores the informalising and reformalising phases occurring in the development of jogging/running in the USA (1960-2000). A spiralling fashion of informalising and reformalising trends was observed in the changes of jogging/running during three diff...

This chapter analyzes the development of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) from a figurational perspective. It presents a brief introduction to MMA and its international development, then a theoretical discussion on the figurational concepts of ‘quest for excitement’ and ‘informalization’ which are latterly applied to understanding the development of UFC (U...

This volume presents hitherto unpublished manuscripts by Norbert Elias (1897–1990). In the introduction the editors explain how and why these texts are made accessible now in a new volume. They describe how the material fits into the broader context of Elias's life and work, and point to the relevance of these new perspectives for discussions in so...

The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to relate the analysis of duelling in the ‘Boxing and Duelling’ (BD) manuscript with other Elias’s works where duelling is discussed; and second, to expand Elias’s analysis on the specific development of duelling and fencing in the French case. Combat activities performed by ruling classes in civil society...

The book focuses on major aspects of Norbert Elias's social theory through research on supposed “minor” topics, such as manners, sports, leisure and cultural practices. While many of his publications became essential for scholars in the different disciplines concerned, the development of the figurational approach towards these fields was not always...

According to Norbert Elias, any social process unfolds within a shifting balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces. Elias identified such balance on the civilizing-decivilizing relational axis. Nonetheless, expanding Cas Wouters discussion on informalization, this oral presentation states that a formalizing-informalizing relational axis mu...

Whereas Natural User Interface technological devices, such as tablets, are bringing physical interaction back into mathematics learning activities, existing educational theory is not geared to inform or interpret such learning. In particular, educational researchers investigating instructional interactions still need intellectual and methodological...

The recent proliferation of technological devices with natural user interfaces (e.g., touchscreen tablets) is regenerating scholarship on the role of sensorimotor interaction in conceptual learning. Some researchers of mathematical education have adopted views from constructivism, phenomenology, enactivism, and ecological dynamics to interpret impl...

This article analyzes the influence of the new civilizing sensitivity of the Spanish regenerationists in the introduction of sport, in place of bullfighting, during the first third of the twentieth century. Following the colonial collapse of the late nineteenth century and the subsequent demoralization of the country, the regenerationists saw in ph...

Learning scientists have been considering the validity and relevance of arguments coming from philosophy and cognitive science for the embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended nature of individual learning, reasoning, and practice in sociocultural ecologies. Specifically, some design-based researchers of STEM cognition and instruction have been e...

This paper analyses the complex development of judo from the figurational approach of Norbert Elias. Judo was not the creation of a sole genius, Jigoro Kano, but was progressively developed within a social blind process of whole figurations affected by specific balances between civilizing/decivilizing trends. Jigoro Kano systematized judo in order...

Whereas emerging technologies, such as touchscreen tablets, are bringing sensorimotor interaction back into mathematics learning activities, existing educational theory is not geared to inform or analyze such learning. In particular, educational researchers investigating instructional interactions still need intellectual and methodological framewor...

People face many situations in which their emotions are deeply intertwined with their ability to act intelligently in richly context sensitive ways. Western and Eastern philosophical traditions have long considered the development of emotional responsiveness in performance to be a matter of cultivating embodied virtues. Yet knowing how to cultivate...

This paper claims that situated normativity is part of the task constraints which affect the dynamic process of decision making. Situated normativity is mainly defined by behavioural modes and levels of expertise, expressed in and as eth-nomethods. 12 Krav Maga participants (five novices, five intermediates, two experts) were distributed into two e...

This article states that research in skill acquisition and execution has underestimated the relevance of some features of attention. We present and theoretically discuss two essential features of attention that have been systematically overlooked in the research of skill acquisition and execution. First, attention alters the appearance of the perce...

El objetivo del artículo es desarrollar de forma teórica una herramienta didáctica para mejorar la adquisición de habilidades motrices. Se trata de las cadenas hápticas (CH), que representan gráficamente la conexión de puntos hápticos clave. El sentido háptico (tacto dinámico) es de vital importancia en habilidades que implican distancia nula, sien...

RESUMEN Este artículo ofrece una reespeci del análisis sobre los distintos tipos de normatividad en los juegos deportivos a partir de la etnometodología. En el mundo de la competición deportiva se habla generalmente de dos tipos de reglas: el reglamento y las leyes éticas o fair play. El análisis etnometodológico nos per-mite además discernir un te...

Sin haber sido reconocido públicamente en su biografía por su contribución al estudio social del deporte, Pierre Bourdieu es uno de los padres teóricos de la disciplina sociológica que se ocupa de este fenómeno. Como cuerpo disciplinar institucionalizado, no cabe duda que la corriente británica liderada por Elias ha sido la más relevante. Pero igno...

Qué signiica ser activo en una sociedad sedentaria? Paradojas de los estilos de vida y el ocio en la juventud española What does it mean to be active in a sedentary society? Paradoxes on lifestyle and leisure of Spanish youth RESUMEN El sedentarismo constituye una de las principales preocupaciones sociales de nuestro tiempo. La mayoría de las perso...

People face many situations in which their emotions deeply intertwined with their ability to act intelligently in richly context sensitive ways. Western and Eastern philosophical traditions have long considered the development of emotional responsiveness in performance to be a matter of cultivating embodied virtues. Yet knowing how to cultivate emb...

This paper presents an ethnoethodological reespecification on the analysis of the different kinds of normativity in sport. In sports competition two kinds of rules are normally differentiated: rules of the game and ethical rules or fairplay. The ethnomethodological analysis affords us to distinguish a third kind of normativity, referred to what can...

On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of e...

Sedentarism has become one of the major concerns of our times. Nowadays people spend most of the time sitting down and moving by mechanical means instead of exercising themselves. Younger generations do only a little more sport today than their counterparts did a decade ago. In other words, sedentary habits have become common in our society, especi...

Resumen: El objetivo del artículo es desarrollar de forma teórica una herramienta didáctica para mejorar la adquisición de habilidades motrices. Se trata de las cadenas hápticas (CH), que representan gráficamente la conexión de puntos hápticos clave. El sentido háptico (tacto dinámico) es de vital importancia en habilidades que implican distancia n...

This paper presents the results of a research on cultural trends in the abandonment of sports and physical activity among the Spanish youth. The study was funded by the Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD) (Ref. 007/UPB10/12), on the Call for Aid to Universities, Public and Private, Governmental & Not-Profit, for realization Research Projects, Studie...

The many and divergent ways in which Fighting Scholars has engaged with the concept of habitus provides a solid ground to develop further research. In this concluding chapter, we first deal with the boundaries or possible limitations of the volume. Afterwards, we advance some present and future lines of research in order to encourage further resear...

ABSTRACT Multisensory perception and action in 3-ball cascade juggling was investigated in intermediate-skilled performers by manipulating vision (full or lower field restricted) or ball weight (equal or different). There were main effects for both independent variables but no interactions. Manipulation of ball weight had a more pervasive effect on...

El artículo propone una detallada descripción etnometodológica de una Master Class de Life Management como ejemplo de profesión referida a audiencias cautiva(da)s. Tras presentar la sucesión ordenada de eventos (chistes, teatralizaciones, presentación de videos etc…) mediante los alternos etnometodológicos sobre la sesión, se propone una clasificac...

This paper presents a detailed ethnomethodological description of a Life Management Master Class as an example of a profession related to captivated audiences. Firstly, the ordered succession of events (jokes, dramatizations, videos etc.) through the ethnomethodological alternates of the session is expounded. Then, an analitycal classification of s...

‘Fighting Scholars’ offers the first book-length overview of the ethnographic study of martial arts and combat sports. The book's main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of...

Introduction In this chapter I bring in Norbert Elias's notion of habitus applied to ethnographic settings (the boxing gym and aikido dojo). Complemented by other conceptual tools such as ‘tension balance’, ‘thresholds of violence’ or ‘double-bind process’, I try to contribute in the advance towards the possibility of a real ‘carnal sociology’ (Wac...

Within Japanese budo lies the pre-modern concept of bunbu ryodo. It refers to the ideal of a double path of development regarding the literary (bun) and martial (bu) skills of the samurai. Far from being uncontroversial, this kind of ideal was not lived up to in a balanced (or symmetrical) way by very many samurai. Normally, either bun ran over bu...

The many and divergent ways in which Fighting Scholars has engaged with the concept of habitus provides a solid ground to develop further research. In this concluding chapter, we first deal with the boundaries or possible limitations of the volume. Afterwards, we advance some present and future lines of research in order to encourage further resear...

Sports started to gain relevance in Spain around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as a leisure and health option of the upper classes imported from Britain. Its early development was intertwined with the spread of other kinds of physical activities with much more tradition on the continent: gymnastics and...

Este artículo pretende establecer una crítica epistemológica de la disciplina científica desarrollada por Pierre Parlebas: la praxiología motriz. Principalmente se dedica a señalar las limitaciones que encuentra esta en la delimitación del objeto estudio (la acción motriz), considerado fundamental en las actividades físico deportivas. La ausencia e...

The purpose of the paper is twofold: (1) to contribute to the analysis of the origins of modern European female PE and sports from a power perspective, inspired by Foucault's work; and (2) to present a detailed analysis of female PE and sport in Spain (1883–1936) as a specific European case study. It is argued that these physical activities could b...

Two recent polemic cases in the world of athletics (Pistorius and Semenya) will help us to show how posthumanism can be applied to sports in a fruitful way. The sport subjectivity of Semenya and Pistorius, far from being a given essence, is going to be built through the re-assembling of human and non human actors (Latour, 2005); the notion of tecno...

Two recent polemic cases in the world of athletics (Pistorius and Semenya) will help us to show how post-humanism can be applied to sports in a fruitful way. The sport subjectivity of Semenya and Pistorius, far from being a given essence, is going to be built through the re-assembling of human and non human actors (Latour, 2005); the notion of tecn...

La presentación de dos recientes y polémicos casos en el mundo del atletismo (Pistorius y Semenya) va a permitirnos mostrar de forma específica el modo en que los enfoques post-humanistas pueden ser aplicados de modo fructífero al análisis de lo deportivo. Veremos como la subjetividad deportiva de Semenya y Pistorius, lejos de ser una esencia dada,...

This article contributes to ongoing debates about trends in violence in sport through an examination of the emergence of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). The article counters suggestions that the rise of MMA is indicative of a decivilizing and/or de-sportizing process, arguing instead that the development of MMA can best be explained with reference to the...

Las metodologías en primera persona tratan la descripción y utilización de experiencias tal y como aparecen al ejecutante de la acción durante la práctica de una actividad físico-deportiva. Su interés estriba en el ofrecimiento de herramientas útiles a los propios participantes de esas actividades corporales, ayudándoles a fomentar su propia y autó...

En este artículo se realiza un análisis sobre el pensamiento práctico o en acción, propio de lo que son las actividades físico-deportivas. La diferenciación de un pensamiento teórico –entendido en nuestra tradición cultural como único y verdadero pensamiento– de uno práctico proviene no de la materialidad de la actividad (si es física o mental) sin...

En el presente artículo, realizamos una aplicación empírica de algunos elementos del concepto de habitus en Bourdieu; en concreto, se trata la relación con lo corporal en la realización de unas prácticas deportivas, relación que está inscrita en el habitus. Para ello, nos serviremos del análisis de la trayectoria de las posiciones y de los habitus...

El artículo introduce una lectura etnometodológica del concepto de habitus en Bourdieu y Elias. Pretende mostrar la relación existente entre la generación de procesos de adquisición práctica (etnométodos) de ciertas actividades corporales y el desarrollo de cierto sentido práctico (al que hace referencia el habitus bourdieuano) y cierta economía af...

This paper introduces an ethnomethodological reading on the concept of habitus in Bourdieu and Elias. It aims at showing the relationship between the generation of practical acquisition processes (ethnomethods) of some body activities and the development of a practical sense (the one that Bourdieuan habitus refers to) and certain affective economy...

Two recent polemic cases in the world of athletics (Pistorius and Semenya) will help us to show how post-humanism can be applied to sports in a fruitful way. The sport subjectivity of Semenya and Pistorius, far from being a given essence, is going to be built through the re-assembling of human and non human actors (Latour, 2005); the notion of tecn...