Introduction

By concentrating on the significance of two gestural vignettes that bookended my fieldwork on and study of the indigenous South Indian martial art kalarippayattu, this chapter surfaces both the gaps and the gains in undertaking study in another cultural setting, as well as the longing and the frustrations inherent in fieldwork. My experience as a Western female body-based researcher in South India underscores the complex ecologies of somatic learning. The very media of teaching and learning in this psychophysical form – attention; talk and silence; gesture, touch and stillness – show off Wacquant's notion of habitus as a ‘methodological device’ (2011, 7).

The focus of the present chapter is a cross-cultural, cross-gender guru–student relationship in kalarippayattu. I argue that both learning and the teacher–student relationship of the form are inevitably coloured by learner's and teacher's expectations, beliefs and common practices within embodied social structures surrounding appropriate gender, culture and class behaviour. Such a recounting of the complexities of cross-cultural, embodied learning and teaching bridges the literatures on the teacher-student relationship, international education and the anthropology of the body. It also asserts the centrality of embodiment in both international and American contexts of teaching and learning (Classen 1993; Cooks and LeBesco 2006; Freedman and Holmes 2003; Geurts 2002; Lave 1977; Light 2001; Ness 1992).