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.
Earlier studies in body and culture
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. 2004). His concept of the "process of civilisation" received, however, also critique from the side of comparative anthropology of bodily practices (Duerr 1988/2005).
The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory turned towards the body with Marxist and Freudian perspectives. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1947) described the Western "dialectics of enlightenment" as including an underground history of the body. Body history lead from the living body to the dead body becoming a commodity under capitalism. A younger generation of the Frankfurt School launched the Neo-Marxist sports critique (Rigauer 1969) and developed alternative approaches to movement studies and movement culture (Lippe 1974; Moegling 1988). Historical studies about the body in industrial work (Rabinbach 1992), in transportation (Schivelbusch 1977), and in Fascist aesthetics (Theweleit 1977) as well as in the philosophy of space (Peter Sloterdijk 1998/ 2004) had their roots in this critical approach.
Philosophical phenomenology (→Phenomenology (philosophy)) paid attention to the body, too. Helmuth Plessner (1941) studied laughter and weeping as fundamental human expressions. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) placed the body in the centre of human existence, as a way of experiencing the world, challenging the traditional body-mind dualism of René Descartes. Gaston Bachelard (1938) approached bodily existence via a phenomenology of the elements and of space, starting by "psychoanalysis of fire".
Based on phenomenological traditions, Michel Foucault (1975) studied the configurations of knowledge in the post-1800 society, launching the concept of modern panoptical control (→Panopticon). The body appeared as object of military discipline and of the panopticon as a mechanism of "the biopolitics of power". Foucault's approach became especially influential for studies in sport, space, and architecture (Vertinsky/ Bale 2004) as well as for studies in the discipline of gymnastics and sport (Vigarello 1978; Barreau/ Morne 1984; Vertinsky/ McKay 2004).
While Foucault's studies focused on top-down strategies of power, Pierre Bourdieu directed his attention more towards bottom-up processes of social-bodily practice. For analysing the class aspect of the body, Bourdieu (1966/67) developed the influential concept of habitus as an incorporated pattern becoming social practice by diverse forms of taste, distinction and display of the body. Some of Bourdieu's disciples applied these concepts to the study of sports and gymnastics (Defrance 1987).
In Germany, influences of phenomenology induced body culture studies in the historical field. The Stuttgart school of Historical Behaviour Studies focused from 1971 on gestures and laughter, martial arts, sport and dance to analyze changes of society and differences between European and non-European cultures (Nitschke 1975, 1981, 1987, 1989, 2009; Henning Eichberg 1978).
These approaches met with tendencies of the late 1970s and 1980s, when humanities and sociology developed a new and broader interest in the body. Sociologists, historians, philosophers and anthropologists, scholars from sport studies and from medical studies met in talking about "the return of the body" or its "reappearance" (Kamper/ Wulf 1982). The new interest towards the body was soon followed up by the term "body culture" itself.
The word and concept of "body culture" – alternative practice
The word "body culture" first appeared around 1900, originating from the German Körperkultur. Initially, it signified a specific form of physical practice and well-being. The so-called "life reform" (German: Lebensreform) aimed at the clothing reform and nurtured new bodily activities, creating a new sector alongside established gymnastics and sports. The third sector of movement culture included Freikörperkultur (FKK, free body culture, also known as naturism), rhythmic-expressive gymnastics, expressionist dance, yoga, and bodybuilding (Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2004), and a new type of youth wandering (Wandervogel). Despite their diversity, these activities were collectively termed Körperkultur in German, physical culture (→physical education) in English, culture physique in French, and kropskultur in Danish. Inspirations from the body culture movement led to early studies in the history of bodily positions and movements (Gaulhofer 1930; Marcel Mauss 1934).
In German Socialist workers' sport, the concept of Körperkultur (body culture) held a prominent place. This concept also entered into Russian Socialism, where fiskultura became an alternative to bourgeois sport, uniting the revolutionary fractions of the more aesthetic Proletkult and more health-oriented "hygienism" (Riordan 1977). Later, Stalinism forced the contradictory terms under the formula "sport and body culture," a trend that continued in the Soviet bloc after 1945. When the 1968 student movement revived Marxism, the concept of body culture—Körperkultur in West Germany, "somatic culture" in America—re-entered sports-critical discourse with new analytical dimensions. Quel corps? (Which body?) was the title of a critical review of sports edited by the French Marxist educationalist Jean-Marie Brohm in 1975 to 1997. In Germany, a series of books titled "Sport: Kultur, Veränderung" (Sport: Culture, Change) marked the body cultural turn from 1981, featuring works of Rigauer, Elias, Eichberg, and others.
Body culture studies – a new critical school
In Denmark, a particular school of Body Culture Studies – kropskultur – developed since around 1980 in connection with the critique of sport (Korsgaard 1982; Eichberg 1998; Vestergård 2003; Nielsen 1993 and 2005). It had its background in Danish popular gymnastics and in alternative movement practices – outdoor activities, play and game, dance, meditation. In Finland, the concept ruumiinkulttuuri found a similar attention (Sironen 1995; Sparkes/ Silvennoinen 1999).
In international cooperation, "body anthropology" became the keyword for French, Danish and German philosophers, sociologists and educationalists who founded the Institut International d'Anthropologie Corporelle (IIAC) in 1987. They undertook case studies in traditional games as well as in "scenes" of new urban body cultures (Barreau/ Morne 1984; Barreau/ Jaouen 1998; Dietrich 2001 and 2002).
Body culture studies found a particular interest in East Asian countries. In Japan, the sociologist Satoshi Shimizu from the University of Tsukuba established in 2002 a Centre for the Study of Body Culture, publishing the review Gendai Sports Hyôron (Contemporary Sport Critique, in Japanese, since 1999). In Taiwan, Hsu I-hsiung from the National Taiwan Normal University founded in 2003 the Taiwan Body Culture Society (Taiwan shenti wenhua xiehui), publishing the reviews Sport Studies (in Chinese, since 2007) and Body Culture Journal (in Chinese, since 2005). And in Korea, Jong Young Lee from the University of Suwon published since 2004 the International Journal of Eastern Sport & Physical Education, focusing on body culture and traditional games.
These initiatives were connected with each other both by contents and by personal networks. In the English and American world, Allen Guttmann (1978, 1996, 2004), John Hoberman (1984), John Bale (1996, 2002, 2004), Susan Brownell (1995, 2008) and Patricia Vertinsky (2004) contributed by opening the history, sociology and geography of sports towards body culture studies.
While the concept of body culture earlier had denoted an alternative practice and was used in singular, it became now an analytical category describing body cultures in plural. The terms of physical culture (or physical education) and body culture separated – the first describing a practice, the second a subject of theoretical analysis.
Questioning the "individual" body
Studies in body culture have shown that bodily existence is more than just "the body" as being an individual skin bag under control of an individual mind. Bodily practice happens between the different bodies. This questions current types of thinking "the individual": the epistemological individualism and the thesis of 'late-modern individualization'.
The methodological habit of counter-posing "the individual" and "the society" is largely disseminated in sociology. It was fundamentally criticized by Norbert Elias who underlined that there was no meaning in the separation between the individual as a sort of core of human existence and the society as a secondary environment around this core. Society was inside the human body. In contrast, the epistemological solipsism treated human existence as if the human being was alone in the world – and was only in a secondary process "socialized" (Peter Sloterdijk 1998 vol. 1).
Another current assumption is the historical-sociological individualism. Sociologists as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have postulated that individualization during "high" or "late modernity" had replaced all earlier traditions – religion, nation, class – and left "the individual" alone with its body. The body, thus, got a central position as the only fix-point of "self-identity" left after the dissolution of the traditional norms. The individual chooses and makes its own body as a sort of "gesamtkunstwerk Ego".
Body-cultural studies have challenged this assumption (Henning Eichberg 2010: 58-79). They throw light on inter-bodily relations, within which the human individuality has a much more complex position.
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