UC San Diego

This dissertation presents a person-centered ethnography of the lived-experience of Parkinson’s Disease and the use of boxing as a healing modality to slow illness progression and empower a positive aging experience. Specifically, it explores how elements of agency, relationality and embodied experience are implicated in processes of the self and paradigms of personhood in the United States. By entering the world of a San Diego, California boxing gym that trains people with Parkinson’s, this work advances an anthropological understanding of how individuals employ cultural affordances to reckon with inconsistencies in self experience. Through aligning biographical narratives with the culturally popular metaphor of the fighter, individuals are able to embody an ethical subjectivity that encourages engagement in physical, mental, and social health despite the trajectory of degeneration that their illness proposes. Ritualized embodied learning actively binds the feelings of exhausted effort, and fatigued muscles to a sense of ideal personhood, and accomplishment; while the ethos of the gym and community of fighters create a meaningful sense of normality and belonging that enriches daily life.