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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. The significance of the body and of body culture (in German ''Körperkultur'', in Danish ''kropskultur'') was discovered since 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. Body Culture Studies were especially established at Danish universities and academies and cooperated with Nordic, European and East Asian research networks. Body culture studies include studies of dance, play (play (activity)) and game, outdoor activities, festivities and other forms of movement culture. The field of body culture studies is floating towards studies of medical cultures, of working habits, of gender and sexual cultures, of fashion and body decoration, of popular festivity and more generally towards popular culture studies. Body Culture Studies have shown useful by making the study of sport enter into 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 gymnastic 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「body culture studies」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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