Georges Favraud is a research associate at Centre d'anthropologie sociale du Laboratoire interdisciplinaire sociétés, solidarités, territoires (LISST -CAS, UT2J) and at  Institut français de recherches sur l'Asie de l'est (Axe 3 - IFRAE, IN ALCO). He is founder and director of Institut des arts chinois du corps (IN ACC, UT2J), whose aims are to help structure this field of fundamental research and to build bridges between the academic world and ACC practitioners through the dissemination of knowledge, training programmes and participatory research. Georges Favraud's research focuses on Chinese embodied knowledge, and in particular Taoist knowledge, based on fieldwork carried out since 2003 in the central province of Hunan. He is working on the contemporary practices and transmission of this ancient knowledge (martial arts, meditation, medicine, as well as divination and geomancy). Through life stories, genealogies and the history of communities of practice, he is conducting a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of the processes of modernisation in China. Since 2021, he has also been interested in the reception and reinvention of these practices in France, in the context of the global process of cultural globalisation. He is also a practitioner and teacher of the so-called ‘internal’ martial arts, which he has studied for a long time in France (since 1979) and in China.