ABSTRACT
The notion of embodiment has been used widely across social science and humanities disciplines in recent decades. This increasing scholarly commitment to the idea of embodiment represented an important step towards the end of the twentieth century because it dissolved the distinction between the sensuous experiencing body and the rational mind. For sociologists a notion of embodiment has allowed a shift of focus from social structures and/or interactions towards the recognition of other factors including materiality, and biological processes. Hockey and Allen-Collinson bring the sporting environment more clearly into focus, by turning to the recent anthropology of the senses as an analytical route through which to understand the phenomenology of the sporting body. Moving from a theory of embodiment to one of emplacement, that recognises the competing/performing body as part of an ecology of things in progress offers a series of analytical advantages. It locates the performing/competing body within a wider ecology.
