ABSTRACT
Within this chapter I discuss my reading of Elias’s approach to understanding the production of knowledge. I use this as a basis from which I explore the development of my long-term ethnographic involvement in boxing. After briefly exploring Elias’s writings, which reconceptualize ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ methodologies, I use extracts from my personal diary and recent interviews to detail my shifting immersion within the sport. The goal here, is to highlight, without fetishizing, the methodological strengths of occupying a relatively involved position in a given research setting. I do this by exploring the process of ‘becoming’ a boxer, while also highlighting the fundamental differences that remain between my experiences and those of the people I research. In providing detailed examples, from sparing and interviews, my aim is to bring Elias’s work to life in the light of contemporary social science and provide readers with ‘ways in’ to help consider their own explorations of how, and in what ways, their embodied and subjective positions shape the co-production of knowledge.
