Twelfth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Scholarship and scholarly inclination towards sports, effectively to develop a sociology/anthropology of sports, becoming more and more pronounced do not necessarily mean that the enquiries into the same are becoming any more nuanced than before. Drawing from sociological and anthropological studies of boxing (among other martial arts and combat sports), this paper demonstrates that “race” and “class” have come to be naturalized in the context of boxing as essential systems of domination that mark the sport and the sport practitioners, falling prey to the very trope that a sociological and anthropological vision had aspired to eradicate. There is also a systemic lack of consideration, within the scholarship on sports, to look at boxing vis-a-vis contexts where race does not function as the highest cutting point of human segregation. How do bodily dispositions come into play where subordination and segregation are marked by a conscious attempt to expand the physical distance between the contending groups through a naturalized disposal of the caste system? How is organized, formalized body-to body contact sport understood by practitioners within a political context that calls for the facilitation of violence rather than self-control? Moreover, how can Indian pugilists negotiate their embodied identities within the growing neoliberal socio-economic platform with regards to employability and vocation in the face of institutionally acknowledged but not famous Indian boxing champions? Navigating through these questions, this study shows how boxing itself is discursively constructed and culturally mediated, varying in its imagined character within the city itself.