Interviews as embodied interaction: Confessions from a practitioner-researcher of martial arts

Martial Arts and Combat Sports (MACS) are now a major area of qualitative inquiry in physical culture studies. As part of this subfield, reflexive accounts of ethnographic methods are contributing to knowledge of qualitative methods and embodied interactions. Within this article I seek to add to these growing contributions by considering a relatively understudied strategy in martial arts research – that of face–to–face interviews – from a physical and reflexive dimension. Drawing from case studies of British practitioners of Traditionalist Chinese Martial Arts (TCMAs), this confessional tale calls for a reflexive look at the embodied dimension of face–to–face interviews alongside the more conventional analysis of language.