Abstract:
The shift in body movement research from a traditional positivist paradigm to an ontological paradigm has positioned sports ethnography as an emergent framework for the study of body movement. Conventional research on body movement, largely shaped by natural-scientific positivism, has prioritized quantitative measurement and variable control while marginalizing subjective experience and sociocultural context. Theoretical interventions from body sociology and phenomenology have propelled an "ontological turn" in body studies, conceptualizing the body as a meaning-generative field that integrates both biological and social dimensions.The paradigmatic characteristics of sports ethnography are grounded in ontological body perception, through which the dynamic processes of movement situations are reconstructed via behavioral narratives. Core analytic elements — including the narrative production of the body schema, the perceptual logic of bodily presence, and the expression of behavioral authenticity through situational reconstruction — emphasize the revelation of the subject's logic of action through the "embodied, first-person language" of bodily presence within movement contexts. The value of this new research paradigm lies primarily in its critique of factor-based approaches to body movement and its challenge to the limitations of scientific reductionism. Behavioral narratives centered on embodied experience thus become a viable methodological means for exploring the meaningful worlds of human social life and identifying shared cultural patterns. Moreover, because sports ethnography documents bodily behavioral processes as they are grounded in the subject's own corporeal sensations, it enables forms of self-reflection within body movement practices. Through behavioral narratives, this process reveals the awakening of subjective consciousness inherent in modern bodily movement. Meanwhile, when confronted with the operational challenge of grounding inquiry in the lived, embodied experiences of agentive subjects, the sports ethnography paradigm continues to face several practical dilemmas, including the epistemological problem of representing the authenticity of action, the issue of non-autonomous recollection in oral histories of sporting practice, and the embodied responses elicited through technological mediation, etc.