ABSTRACT
All too commonly, pain and injury constitute integral components of participation in many sports and physical cultures, even those not usually constructed as dangerous or ‘high-risk’. This was highlighted in the news in 2014 by the untimely death of the young Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes, who was struck on the neck by a ball from a pace bowler while batting in a domestic game, and died two days afterward, never regaining consciousness. Gone. Killed playing the game he loved. While such a catastrophic injury is thankfully rare in cricket, nevertheless, pain, injury and bodily disruption are widespread and often normalized within sport and physical cultural domains, where a ‘culture of risk’ can be argued to prevail. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach commensurate with PCS, this chapter explores some of the extant sociological, anthropological and social-psychological research on active embodiment in relation to injured, pained and disrupted bodies. From the myriad different approaches available in researching this area, here I focus upon the impact of identity disruption and the role of ‘identity work’ in dealing with the injured body in the physical-cultural context of distance running, drawing on data from two automethodological projects. The concept of ‘identity work’ has been utilized within various disciplines, and here is theorized from a symbolic interactionist perspective specifically. This sociological theoretical framework investigates the relational, processual and subjective elements of identity and embodiment, and thus coheres with the PCS enterprise. It offers powerful analytic insights in examining the injured and pained body as experienced within physical cultures, including within the normative structures of those cultures.
