case studies in traditional games as well as in "scenes" of new urban body cultures (Barreau/ Morne 1984; Barreau/ Jaouen 1998; Dietrich 2001 and 2002). Body culture studies found a particular interest in East Asian countries. In Japan, the sociologist Satoshi Shimizu from the University of Tsukuba established in 2002 a Centre for the Study of Body Culture, publishing the review Gendai Sports Hyôron (Contemporary Sport Critique, in Japanese, since 1999). In Taiwan, Hsu I-hsiung from the National Taiwan Normal University founded in 2003 the Taiwan Body Culture Society (Taiwan shenti wenhua xiehui), publishing the reviews Sport Studies (in Chinese, since 2007) and Body Culture Journal (in Chinese, since 2005). And in Korea, Jong Young Lee from the University of Suwon published since 2004 the International Journal of Eastern Sport & Physical Education, focusing on body culture and traditional games. These initiatives were connected with each other both by contents and by personal networks. In the English and American world, Allen Guttmann (1978, 1996, 2004), John Hoberman (1984), John Bale (1996, 2002, 2004), Susan Brownell (1995, 2008) and Patricia Vertinsky (2004) contributed by opening the history, sociology and geography of sports towards body culture studies. While the concept of body culture earlier had denoted an alternative practice and was used in singular, it became now an analytical category describing body cultures in plural. The terms of physical culture (or physical education) and body culture separated – the first describing a practice, the second a subject of theoretical analysis. Questioning the "individual" body Studies in body culture have shown that bodily existence is more than just "the body" as being an individual skin bag under control of an individual mind. Bodily practice happens between the different bodies. This questions current types of thinking "the individual": the epistemological individualism and the thesis of 'late-modern individualization'. The methodological habit of counter-posing "the individual" and "the society" is largely disseminated in sociology. It was fundamentally criticized by Norbert Elias who underlined that there was no meaning in the separation between the individual as a sort of core of human existence and the society as a secondary environment around this core. Society was inside the human body. In contrast, the epistemological solipsism treated human existence as if the human being was alone in the world – and was only in a secondary process "socialized" (Peter Sloterdijk 1998 vol. 1). Another current assumption is the historical-sociological