Introduction: ‘Hand-to-hand sports and the struggle for belonging’

This special issue on hand-to-hand sports aims to analyse how collective identities and forms of group and community belonging are defined, strengthened, built, ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1991) or even denied in the sportive and social contexts in which hand-to-hand combat or wrestling disciplines are practiced.

Technical movements are more than simply the most effective way of achieving a given goal. They also represent learnt, culturally defined gestures that acquire specific meanings in the contexts in which they are enacted. Sporting and athletic techniques can rightly be viewed as ‘techniques of the body’ or cultural gestures (Bruant, 1992; Mauss, 1973; Robène and Léziart, 2006; Vigarello, 1988). Sports and physical activities thus not only represent the cultural and historical products of the societies in which they are practiced but they also contribute to producing culture (Bausinger, 2006). They offer practitioners both a set of technical/athletic skills and a system of values and orientations that practitioners themselves contribute to developing through their active involvement in the practice.

From this perspective, hand-to-hand combat and wrestling practices acquire particular interest by virtue of the symbolic references they make. In fact, through specific sets of rules, codified gestures and the more or less developed level of ritualization of the fight, such activities symbolically enact a confrontation between participants that each of them interpret differently. As such, they offer highly productive sites for analysing some of the constitutive values of the cultures and societies in which they are practiced, from physical confrontation, violence, strength and aggression to processes of gender-role construction.

Beyond discipline-specific differences, a comparative analysis of the ethnographic literature in this specific field (most of it published recently) ¹ shows that these activities endorse, transmit and display a true sense of belonging to a collective group or identity. The empirical manifestations of this sense of belonging vary in terms of size, structure, intensity and exclusiveness in relation to other kinds of identification that might coexist in practitioners’ lives. Nevertheless, such belonging characterizes most of the disciplines analysed by ethnographers, whether they be ‘traditional’ and local (the ‘vernacular’ styles of wrestling that are practiced in different localities and societies, such as Turkish oil wrestling or Yağlı güreş [Krawietz, 2012; Stokes, 1996], Senegalese wrestling [Chevé et al., 2014; Hann, 2018], Indian pehlwani [Alter, 1992] and Breton gouren [Epron, 2008; Nardini, 2016], for instance) or global and ‘sportified’ (such as boxing [Beauchez, 2014; Scandurra and Antonelli, 2010; Wacquant, 2006], capoeira [Delamont et al., 2017; Downey, 2005], and mixed martial arts [Green, 2016; Spencer, 2009]).

In this variable panorama, the sense of belonging, identity or ‘communitas’ (Turner, 2011) triggered by individual activities in their specific contexts of practice range from practitioners’ participation in defining a ‘community of practice’ (Adell et al., 2015; Lave and Wenger,1991) around a shared, common ‘passion’ ² (a boxing gym and a wrestling club) to constructing and transmitting a coherent and pervasive moral system, even to the extent of formulating actual cosmologies as well as forms of nationalism (as it has been shown, among others, by Alter, 1992, for pehlwani in India; by Cohen, 2009, for a martial arts school in Israel and by Petrov, 2014, for the Post-Soviet States). In her piece ‘A Japanese Sumo Hero’, for example, Einat Bar-On Cohen discusses the representativeness of Sumo in Japanese society as the expression of a more general tendency of Japanese culture to incorporate external cultural features in the process of building national character. From a different perspective, in his article on Xilam, a developing Mexican martial art, George Jennings shows how this art is made ‘Mexican’ through specific accompanying practices and philosophy surrounding the techniques.

Between these poles, however, there is also a range of other possibilities researchers might observe. For example, hand-to-hand practices may constitute ways of strengthening or displaying the ethnic identity of diasporic minorities in urban contexts: in this issue, Sara Delamont and Neil Stephens describe the ritualized and deeply symbolic process of inclusion enacted by Capoeira practitioners in the United Kingdom.

Through these activities, people also affirm and promote political and/or ideological attitudes which may actually overturn the cultural representations associated with these sports or fighting styles in the specific local context where they are practised. This is the case, for example, of the Italian Boxe popolare studied by Lorenzo Pedrini, David Brown and Gianmarco Navarini. According to the authors, in this particular conjugation, boxing works through the body to explicitly and implicitly epitomize the values and attitudes associated with a far-left, anti-fascist identity in Italy.

Moreover, hand-to-hand practices sometimes epitomize responses to marginalization in migration contexts or alternative ways of living in indigent and marginal neighbourhoods. In this issue, Giuseppe Scandurra investigates a boxing gym in a peripheral area of Bologna as a complex social field in which immigrants and marginalized people may not feel the same exclusion they experience in daily life, or may find motivation precisely in the marginal space they inhabit.

Finally, these activities often represent powerful symbolic means of acting on a local basis to rediscover (or continue to affirm) bonds with a ‘traditional’ culture in globalized Western society; at the same time, they can also make space for the emergence of a new socio-cultural ethos, in dialogue with traditional traits and values. For instance, Dario Nardini and Aurélie Epron interpret Breton wrestling as a way to feel Breton in a world in which Breton culture and values are challenged by globalization and the interconnection of Western cultures. From a different perspective, Dominique Chevé, Cheikh Tidiane Wane and Mark Hann explore the complex, multifarious dimensions of contemporary Senegalese wrestling, in which (male) wrestlers invest their energy and expectations in pursuing reputation and money, building their sporting identities around the contrasting values of tradition, performance and neoliberalism in a post-colonial society.

Overall, these processes of building or strengthening a sense of belonging tend to follow two general patterns. On one hand, the style, form, methods and way of interpreting rules characterizing ‘global’ sports (such as boxing, judo, and the recent explosion of mixed martial arts) reveal the ‘character’ or ‘spirit’ (to use emic terms) of practitioners; in other words, they are ‘localized’ – or ‘indigenized’ (Appadurai, 1995). On the other hand, practices that are already characterized by local, emblematic or ‘traditional’ aspects take on some of the formal features of ‘modern sports’ (competition, institutionalization, standardization of rules and techniques, establishment of age, weight- and seniority-based categories, etc.) in order to avoid becoming dated, anachronistic and musealized. In both cases, the outcomes tend to converge and physical activities that by definition set practitioners against each other in a hand-to-hand clash actually promote social exchange between opponents, offering them a common framework for collective identification.

This special issue adopts a comparative perspective to offer in-depth, theoretically informed ethnographic analysis of some of the different empirical trajectories through which such processes occur in the heterogeneous sportive contexts in which hand-to-hand combat and wrestling disciplines are practiced. The essays aim to explore key question including, do hand-to-hand and wrestling activities always promote a sense of belonging? What kinds of communities/groups do these physical disciplines define and strengthen, thereby fostering their transmission to new participants? What kinds of shared values, virtues, and symbols are asserted in such processes? How do these features interrelate with the inherent question of physical opposition and concepts and representations of aggression, strength, power, proxemics and gender? How do these groups/communities/forms of belonging interrelate with the broader social and cultural contexts in which they are affirmed and performed (opposition, reflection, critique and support)? Is there a link between the kind of activity being ethnographically analysed and the type of belonging promoted by its actors?

Considering the wide-ranging cross-cultural distribution of combat and wrestling practices in very different cultures and societies across the contemporary world (Bromber et al., 2014), this issue intends to provide a (not-exhaustive) comparison of practices originating in highly heterogeneous geographical, social and cultural contexts. Indeed, comparisons focus on specific practices (combat and wrestling activities) and their relationship with belonging. Restricting the analysis to a specific environment would have limited the special issue’s potential to reveal new, productive and relatively unexplored horizons of anthropological knowledge and intelligibility. Therefore, the contributing scholars represented here have studied and reflected on a particular style of wrestling or combat practice and its links to social belonging and identity, whether it be expressed on regional or national, local or global, social or ethnic, institutional or ‘counter-cultural’ and symbolic or concrete levels. The analysis might have benefited from a more extensive comparison of activities throughout the world, but these articles do not pretend to offer a thorough understanding of the complex – and ethnographically varied – processes of identification through hand-to-hand and wrestling disciplines. Rather, the aim of this issue is to introduce and open discussion on this topic in the social, cultural and human sciences instead of concluding it.