Honorata Jakubowska - Skill Transmission, Sport and Tacit Knowledge

First published 2017

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Since the 1980s, a somatic or corporeal turn (Sheets-Johnstone 2009) has been observed in the social sciences related to the criticism of the Cartesian dichotomy between the mind and the body and the perception of individuals and their knowledge as being disembodied (Turner 1984; Csordas 1990; Shilling 1993). As a consequence, in the last few decades the number of studies focused on the body and embodiment has grown significantly. These studies can be divided into four categories: (1) social theories of the body, (2) histories of the body, (3) analyses of bodily techniques and (4) studies of the embodied experience (Brown et al. 2011: 494). At the same time, and as noted by Parviainen and Aromaa (2015), representatives of the social sciences have become increasingly more interested in the body as a source of knowledge and as a tool for its acquisition. Notions such as embodied knowledge, bodily knowledge, body knowledge or somatic knowledge have been used to describe this new kind of knowledge. The term embodied knowledge is defined, among others, as knowledge incorporated not just by the material body but by a being comprising mind, body and environment (Gieser 2008: 303); it can also refer to the product of bodily enculturation (Downey 2010: 23), developed in bodily practices and acquired through imitation (Parviainen and Aromaa 2015: 2).

The body and embodied knowledge play a crucial role in the field of sport. However, paradoxically, as was pointed out by Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2007), social studies have ignored the bodys fleshy and carnal nature for a long time. The common use of Foucauldian theory, although enriching the sociological analysis of sport, has resulted in the body being considered mainly through its visual representation, as an element of discourse or as a site of disciplinary practices (Hockey and Allen-Collinson 2007; Sparkes and Smith 2012). Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, beyond the continuation of studies using this theoretical approach, one can observe a growing number of studies focused on embodiment and embodied knowledge, which remain, nevertheless, marginalised in some areas, such as physical education analysis (Brown and Payne 2009).

Sports skills acquisition has been analysed by representatives of social sciences mainly from the phenomenological perspective. Initially, the majority of publications had a theoretical nature, but in the last few years, although theoretical considerations are still common, more empirical studies have been conducted (Allen-Collinson and Hockey 2001, 2011; Brown and Payne 2009; Martnkov and Parry 2012; Standal and Engelsrud 2013). Regardless of the differences, all authors assume that skills are acquired through practice and experience, and their embodiment. Therefore, this perspective is focused rather on the incorporation of skills than on the process of teaching them. Transmission of sports skills has largely been studied in the physical sciences, such as physiology, biomechanics and psychology, but they have not gained much attention in either sociology or anthropology (Snchez Garca and Spencer 2014: 188). This omission can be explained by the fact that the social sciences have for a long time favoured propositional knowledge, that is, knowledge that can be codified, verbalised and easily transmitted (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 3). In sociology, a reflection on knowledge and its creation has been strongly developed (different forms of the sociology of knowledge), but only a small role has been attributed to embodied or tacit knowledge. As a consequence, skills understood as ways of knowing have been ignored (Moe 2004; Samudra 2008).