August 4, 2026 FART - Beyond Civilising? Mixed Martial Arts Through Elias, Foucault, Bourdieu and Gramsci

​Primary Text Under Review
Sánchez García, R. & Malcolm, D. (2010). De-civilizing, Civilizing or Informalizing? The International Development of Mixed Martial Arts. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 45(1), 39–58.

About FART: it is a series of reflective essays that examine influential publications in the growing field of Martial Arts Studies. Rather than serving as a conventional article review, each FART uses a single publication as a point of departure for broader scholarly reflection. My purpose is neither to determine whether an author is simply "right" nor "wrong", but to explore the explanatory strengths—and occasionally the limitations—of the theoretical framework employed. The article therefore remains the primary text under review, whilst the wider discussion considers what additional insights emerge when the same empirical evidence is viewed through alternative heuristic lenses.

Introduction
One of the reasons I selected this paper is because it resonates with an experience I continue to encounter within my own professional life. As both an educator and a lifelong practitioner of Japanese budō, I have often found that proposals to introduce budō into educational settings are met with understandable, though frequently unexamined, reservations. At the school in which I currently teach, for example, a proposal to establish a budō programme has thus far failed to gain support because martial arts are assumed to encourage violence. Whilst I fully appreciate the safeguarding responsibilities of schools, I have often wondered whether such concerns reveal as much about our own cultural assumptions as they do about budō itself.

Having spent more than three decades living, studying and teaching in Japan, I have come to appreciate that the Japanese conception of budō sits rather uneasily alongside many contemporary Western understandings of violence. Within Japanese budō, violence is neither celebrated nor ignored; rather, it is disciplined, ritualised and ultimately subordinated to the cultivation of character. Kano Jigoro's transformation of jūjutsu into jūdō, discussed in my previous FART through Dario Mazzola's The Gentle Way, remains perhaps the clearest articulation of this philosophy.

It was therefore with considerable interest that I approached Sánchez García and Malcolm's examination of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). At first glance, MMA appears to represent the very antithesis of Kano's educational project. Yet the authors ask a far more sophisticated question than whether MMA is inherently violent. Instead, they ask what its emergence reveals about Norbert Elias' theory of the civilising process. My own purpose, however, is slightly different. Rather than asking whether Elias is correct, I wish to explore the explanatory reach of his framework. Does figurational sociology sufficiently account for the evidence presented, or might alternative theoretical heuristics reveal dimensions of the same material that remain comparatively underdeveloped?

Summary of the Article
Sánchez García and Malcolm challenge the popular assumption that Mixed Martial Arts represents a process of de-civilisation or a return to barbaric combat. Drawing principally upon Elias' figurational sociology, whilst extending it through Cas Wouters' concept of informalisation, they argue that MMA is better understood as a contemporary manifestation of long-term civilising processes than as evidence of their reversal.

The authors trace MMA's historical development from early contests between practitioners of different martial traditions to the emergence of highly organised promotions such as the UFC. Although early marketing deliberately emphasised spectacle and brutality, the sport itself became progressively more regulated, technically sophisticated and strategically complex. Rules evolved, safety standards improved and competitors increasingly displayed high levels of tactical awareness and emotional self-control. Public perceptions of exceptional violence, they argue, owe considerably more to media representation than to empirical evidence concerning injury or participant behaviour. Consequently, MMA should be understood not as a rejection of civilisation but as an example of how contemporary societies negotiate excitement, risk and regulation simultaneously.

Situating the Article within the Field
This paper occupies an important position within Martial Arts Studies because it demonstrates the continuing explanatory power of Elias' sociology in understanding the evolution of combat sports. Rather than abandoning the civilising thesis when confronted with an apparently contradictory phenomenon, Sánchez García and Malcolm refine it through Wouters' concept of informalisation, arguing that modern societies increasingly replace external regulation with heightened forms of internal self-restraint.

Read alongside Mazzola's discussion of Kano Jigoro, an interesting convergence emerges. Both papers reject simplistic understandings of violence. Mazzola demonstrates that violence may become educational when disciplined by ethical purpose. Sánchez García and Malcolm similarly argue that visible physical intensity does not necessarily indicate diminished social restraint. In both cases, violence is neither eliminated nor celebrated; rather, it is regulated, contextualised and rendered socially meaningful.

Critical Engagement
The paper is both thoughtful and persuasive. Nevertheless, it also raises an important methodological question.

Is Elias sufficient?
Read through Elias, MMA appears as an evolving configuration of behavioural regulation characterised by increasing self-restraint despite apparently relaxed external rules. This is undoubtedly a compelling interpretation.
Yet alternative theoretical perspectives illuminate rather different aspects of exactly the same empirical evidence.

From a Foucauldian perspective, the central issue is no longer behavioural regulation but the production of knowledge itself. The question becomes not whether MMA is objectively more violent, but how violence came to be constituted as an object of discourse. Medical expertise, political rhetoric, media representation and sporting governance collectively produced particular understandings of MMA that acquired the status of accepted truth. Violence, in this reading, is not merely observed; it is socially constructed through historically contingent regimes of truth.

Bourdieu shifts our attention once more. His concern is not primarily with violence but with legitimacy. Why has Olympic judo acquired unquestioned educational authority whilst MMA struggled for decades to achieve comparable social acceptance despite increasingly similar levels of regulation and practitioner discipline? The answer lies not simply in behaviour but in symbolic capital. Different martial arts occupy different positions within social fields, accumulating varying degrees of prestige, legitimacy and cultural authority.

Finally, Gramsci encourages us to examine the operation of cultural hegemony. Educational institutions, governments and the media rarely impose understandings of civilisation through coercion alone. Rather, they cultivate forms of common sense that gradually come to appear entirely natural. My own experience within education illustrates this rather well. Resistance to budō has not arisen from hostility towards Japanese culture, but from an inherited Western understanding of violence that has become sufficiently hegemonic to appear self-evident.

This observation extends beyond martial arts. Elias associates civilisation with increasing behavioural restraint, yet critical social theorists remind us that the very meaning of "civilisation" is never politically neutral. Modern liberal societies frequently identify civilisation with declining interpersonal violence whilst paying comparatively less attention to structural, symbolic or economic forms of violence. The civilising process, therefore, may itself constitute a culturally situated narrative rather than a universally accepted description of historical progress. The question is no longer simply whether societies become more civilised, but whose understanding of civilisation acquires sufficient authority to become accepted as common sense.

None of these perspectives invalidates Elias. On the contrary, they reveal his continuing importance. However, they also demonstrate that figurational sociology does not exhaust the complexity of the evidence before us. Elias explains changing patterns of behaviour with remarkable clarity. Foucault reveals the discursive production of violence. Bourdieu exposes struggles over legitimacy and symbolic capital. Gramsci reminds us that all such understandings ultimately depend upon hegemonic constructions of common sense.

Future Directions
Perhaps the next stage of Martial Arts Studies lies less in seeking a single grand explanatory theory than in encouraging greater dialogue between complementary theoretical traditions. Elias remains indispensable for understanding long-term behavioural regulation. Yet Foucault illuminates the production of regimes of truth, Bourdieu reveals struggles over legitimacy and symbolic capital, whilst Gramsci demonstrates how dominant understandings of violence and civilisation become culturally normalised.

Rather than asking which theory is correct, Martial Arts Studies may benefit from asking what each theoretical perspective enables us to see—and what it simultaneously leaves in the shadows.

Concluding Thoughts
Sánchez García and Malcolm have written an important paper. Not because they finally resolve the question of whether MMA is civilising or de-civilising, but because they invite us to reconsider how we explain martial practice in the first place.

For me, the most enduring contribution of this article lies not in its defence of Elias but in the opportunity it provides to place Elias into conversation with Foucault, Bourdieu and Gramsci. The result is not theoretical competition but theoretical enrichment. The empirical evidence remains unchanged; what changes is our capacity to see its different dimensions.

Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of Martial Arts Studies itself. No single theory possesses a monopoly on explanation. Every heuristic illuminates certain aspects of social life whilst simultaneously consigning others to the analytical periphery. The task of scholarship is therefore not to defend a single lens, but to recognise what each allows us to see—and, equally importantly, what each leaves unseen.

Hatch thought
The measure of a good theory is not that it explains everything, but that it knows where its explanatory reach ends and invites another conversation to begin.

本稿では、Sánchez García と Malcolm による総合格闘技（MMA）研究を取り上げ、その議論を足掛かりに、武道研究における理論的枠組みの説明力について考察した。著者らは、ノルベルト・エリアスの「文明化の過程」と Wouters の「インフォーマライゼーション（非形式化）」概念を用い、MMA は「脱文明化」の産物ではなく、むしろ高度な自己規律と制度化を伴う現代的な格闘文化であると論じている。

本稿はこの解釈を高く評価しつつも、エリアスだけで十分なのかという問いを提起した。同じ事例をフーコーの視点から読めば、「暴力」とは客観的事実ではなく、政治・医療・メディアなどの言説によって構築される〈真理の体制〉として理解できる。さらにブルデューは、柔道が教育的価値を持つ一方で、MMA が長く野蛮視された背景を「象徴資本」と「正統性」の問題として説明するだろう。グラムシは、何が「文明的」で何が「暴力的」であるかという判断そのものが、文化的ヘゲモニーによって「常識」として形成される過程に注目する。

私自身、日本の武道教育に長年携わってきた経験から、武道が学校教育の中で「暴力を助長するもの」と理解される場面にたびたび直面してきた。しかし、それは武道そのものよりも、西洋社会における暴力理解や文明観を反映している可能性がある。

本論文が示唆する最も重要な点は、単一の理論で武道を説明し尽くすことはできないということである。エリアス、フーコー、ブルデュー、グラムシは互いに競合するのではなく、それぞれ異なる側面を照らし出す補完的な分析視角として理解すべきであり、武道研究のさらなる発展も、こうした理論間の対話の中にこそ見出されるのではないだろうか。

Machida, 2026

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