ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses methodological challenges involved in the practice and production of what is often termed “insider ethnography.” Following in this ethnographic vein, I researched field sites patronized by professional boxers located in and around London, England, over a 5-year period. As an experienced and still active competitive boxer prior to my scholarly endeavor, I assumed that my entrée and presence in the field would be unproblematic. I also presumed that my background experience would afford a somehow more empathetic, culturally nuanced, and thus intuitive position of knowing that would credibly add to existing discourse. Whatever suppositions I may have harbored at that time, however, it is safe to say that as a neophyte researcher I had little appreciation of the procedural and analytic challenges yet to unfold. This chapter outlines the always evolving and perpetually messy fieldwork processes undertaken as I reflexively grappled with issues of over-identification and strangeness necessary to add “insider” analytical rigor to the final representation of culture presented, namely, the ongoing requirement to manage and re-negotiate my boxer/researcher identity as I moved between the disparate social worlds of pugilism and academia, collecting a mixed bag of qualitative data, historiography, scholarly analysis, and writing.
