ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the keyconcepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book highlights the work of Chris Shilling, whose scholarship on the body has figured decisively in the field since the publication of his landmark text The Body and Social Theory in 1993. In their Introduction to Physical Culture, Power, and the Body, Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky remind us that sport historians and sociologists were some of the first academics outside of anthropology. In 2017, Michael Atkinson rightly points out that both realist and critical ethnographic methods in which the researcher embeds him- or herself in the cultural world of those being studied for extended periods of time - "have been employed quite extensively in studies of sport, exercise, and physical culture over the last thirty years". The book presents the work of Rebecca Olive and Holly Thorpe, who have been at the forefront of feminist analyses of action sport culture.
