Paper short abstract:

This paper scrutinizes the corporeal challenges that people face in embodied zones like disaster-torn Japan and in Euro-American martial arts communities—and among clusters of ethnographers who drag their weary bodies to conference venues in search of inspiration, stimulation and gourmet gluttony.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographers frequently find themselves on the front lines of bodily disjuncture as they enter varied communities and subject their stooped, stiff, under-exercised, insomniac, or otherwise neglected frames to the rigors of dirt floors, tatami mats, un-ergonomic office furniture, rickety transport, and other arenas of cross-cultural discomfort. For this reason, anthropologists are well qualified to comment on embodied struggles of various kinds and the uncertainties and adjustments that these can present. This paper scrutinizes the corporeal challenges that people face in embodied zones as varied as toxic, irradiated, disaster-torn Japan on the one hand and Euro-American martial arts communities on the other—as well as among clusters of ethnographers in departments and in the field who drag their weary bodies to conference venues in search of inspiration, stimulation and gourmet gluttony.

Injured or contaminated bodies present familiar but important challenges to movement, health, and fitness. The paper highlights the struggles of victims of environmental illness recorded ethnographically for over a decade, but it also includes ruminations from the author's long experience as an injury-prone athlete, internal arts practitioner, desk-bound academic laborer, jetlag zombie, and ethnographic journeyman. This narrative blend of experiences and subjectivities, while messy, will hopefully lend perspective to an account that ultimately concerns us all as inveterate users and abusers of our bodies in a range of fieldsites and cultures.