Listening to the body? How phenomenological insights can be used to explore a golfer’s experience of the physicality of her body

Abstract

Based on a single case study of a Danish elite golfer, this article focuses on describing the different ways in which the golfer experiences the physicality of her body during training. The aim of the article is to explore how phenomenological insights concerning self-consciousness can be used actively in the analyses of the golfer’s descriptions to better understand how the embodied expertise is practised in her training. The descriptions of the elite golfer’s daily practice were generated using a combination of participant observations and interviews. Drawing on phenomenological insights, we suggest that the golfer’s experience of the physicality of her body can be considered in relation to three possible dimensions of self-consciousness: a pre-reflective subject-related dimension, a reflective object-directed dimension and a pre-reflective performative dimension. The pre-reflective performative dimension is to be understood as a non-objectifying dimension of subjects experience and, in the present case, appears central to how the golfer adjusts and reshapes her technical skills. The golfer exemplifies how a possible pre-reflective performative dimension reflects the overall ‘feeling’ of the moving body. From a methodological perspective, the analysis of the single case study also exemplifies how phenomenological insights might concretely influence the analysis of an actual practice and how the achieved understanding can be important to the further development of elite athletes’ expert training.

Keywords:

• movement expertise
• self-consciousness
• dimensions of experience
• pre-reflective
• reflective

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Line and her coaches who kindly gave their time to participate in the study. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for providing us with constructive comments and suggestions. The single case study was conducted as part of the larger research programme ‘From Talent To Expert’ (2009–2012) with the support of research grants from the Danish Council for Independent Research Humanities (DFF|FKK). Ravn acknowledges the support from The Ministry of Culture Committee on Sports Research, Denmark.

Notes

1. In accordance with Gallagher and Zahavi’s descriptions, we understand proprioception as ‘the innate and intrinsic position sense that I have with respect to my limbs and overall posture. It’s the “sixth sense” that allows me to know whether my legs are crossed, or not, without looking at them’ (2008, p. 143).

2. We use the concept ‘participant observation’ as we realise that the athlete’s experiences as well as the actual process of generating observation notes (empirical data) of these experiences are interactively shaped in several ways (Legrand and Ravn 2009, Ravn and Hansen 2012).

3. Line’s and the two coaches’ descriptions have been translated from Danish to English by a professional translator.