I am gratified that Body and Soul served as stimulus and inspiration for the studies gathered in Fighting Scholars, since it was always my intention to make a case for, and to attract others to, the incarnate study of incarnation by practical example — rather than by theoretical expostulation or methodological supplication, which would have contradicted that very case. I am doubly pleased that its contributors have extended the reach and refined the arguments of my book in manifold new directions, connecting them with theoretical perspectives and empirical agendas beyond the one I pursued in my ethnography of the social springs and lived magnetism of prizefighting as plebeian bodily craft in the black American ghetto (Wacquant 2004a).

Fighting Scholars gathers lush materials and precise analyses of interest not only to sociologists of practice and embodiment within the narrow province of sport, but also to generalist students of discipline, violence, gender, religion, emotions, reflexivity, field methodology and social epistemology insofar as inquiring into martial arts and combat sports via apprenticeship inevitably raises these issues.