Abstract

My research is an ethnographic study of ballet and taijiquan lesson situations. The study’s central issue is to consider how moves are made in a deliberately ambiguous sense, following, on the one hand, the movers and the issues that they face when actually making these moves with ‘their bodies,’ and on the other hand, the moves-in-the-making studying how the bodily practice of moving leads to social phenomena of a perceived concreteness and systematicity that is otherwise reserved for languages and their grammars. A central resource for the study’s methodical implementation is my ‘own body’ that was previously trained and utilized in a professional ballet capacity and for the purposes of this research participated autoethographically in taijiquan lessons, thus, offering the opportunity for in-depth analyses of the attempted transition between these two ways of making moves. The study aims to contribute especially to discussions on the sociology of the body and theories of practice, with the ultimate aim, to (ab)use Wittgenstein's topos, of inquiring to what extent the limits of our movements are the limits of our world.

• Ethnomethodology
• Sociology of the Body
• Theories of Practice
• Methodology of the Social Sciences