Fighters who Don’t Fight: The Case of Aikido and Somatic Metaphorism

Abstract

Practitioners of martial arts and combat sports are motivated to train their bodies to dispense and manage violence, in part, to prepare for competitions or for “on-the-street” altercations. Fighting practices that prohibit competitions and whose practitioners are unlikely to encounter violence in their everyday lives challenge existing research on the motivations for training one’s body to be “fit to fight.” This article investigates one such fighting practice: aikido. Drawing from in-depth participant observation of the practice and interviews with its mostly white, middle-class practitioners, I show that aikido’s unique bodily deployment, while rarely used in “real” situations, is an effective metaphor for practitioners to make sense of and overcome non-martial challenges in their everyday lives. I call this process “somatic metaphorism” and argue that it helps explain the value of a well-trained body beyond the context of the training center.