Introduction

Norbert Elias is recognised today as a major contributor to the development of the sociological tradition over the past century. This chapter introduces readers to the broad oeuvre of figurational research on sport and leisure, produced by Elias in collaboration with Eric Dunning in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Elias and Dunning 2008 [1986]). Matters of the human body and excitement processes were also outlined in Elias's (2009a) work on the sociology of knowledge where he eschewed the dichotomy between ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Here, we examine some of the creative seams in their work that have been taken up by successive generations. As we have noted elsewhere (for example, Liston 2011; Maguire 2005), there is now a 50-year corpus of figurational research on sport and leisure forms throughout the world. This has been ambitious in scope and precise in conceptual development: all the while being open to empirical verification and testing. Taken as a whole, it confirms Elias and Dunning’s (2008) basic contention that these phenomena could not be understood without reference to the overall social standards of conduct and sentiment because knowledge about sport and leisure was knowledge about society. To illustrate this, we outline the main ideas set out by Elias and Dunning on sport, leisure and the quest for excitement/exciting significance (Elias and Dunning 2008; Maguire 1992). This is a necessary precursor to appreciating the contribution of figurational work to understanding violence and sport and the social roots of football hooliganism conducted by the Leicester School. Thereafter we explore matters of identity, embodiment and power relations that are revealed in figurational research on medicine and health, and on gendered and national identities. Initially, we provide an overview of the theory of civilising processes as it applies to sport, leisure and the human body. This is important because ‘sociologist of sport’ is too limiting a descriptor for many of the researchers mentioned here, including Eric Dunning most notably.

Civilising Processes, the Body and the Quest for ‘Exciting Significance’

People do not just have an embodied self, a ‘body’: it is more correct to think of people's ‘bodies’ and ‘bodies of people’ as living formations of people acting out their lives in cultural and structural contexts.