Body & Soul Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

by Wacquant, Loïc

• ISBN13: 9780195305623
• ISBN10: 0195305620
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

When French sociologist Loic Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action." Body & Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century's end.

Author Biography

Loic Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie europeenne, Paris. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow, he is the author of numerous works on urban marginality, ethnoracial domination, the penal state, and social theory, translated in some dozen languages. He is a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography.

Table of Contents

The Taste and Ache of Action	vii
Prologue	3	(10)
The Street and the Ring	13	(138)
An Island of Order and Virtue	17	(24)
``The Boys Who Beat The Street''	41	(17)
A Scientifically Savage Practice	58	(19)
The Social Logic of Sparring	77	(22)
An Implicit and Collective Pedagogy	99	(28)
Managing Bodily Capital	127	(24)
Fight Night at Studio 104	151	(84)
``You Scared I Might Mess Up `Cause You Done Messed Up''	152	(6)
Weigh-in at the Illinois State Building	158	(13)
An Anxious Afternoon	171	(9)
Welcome to Studio 104	180	(12)
Pitiful Preliminaries	192	(16)
Strong Beats Hannah by TKO in the Fourth	208	(12)
Make Way for the Exotic Dancers	220	(6)
``You Stop Two More Guys and I'll Stop Drinkin'''	226	(9)
``Busy'' Louie at the Golden Gloves	235	(22)
List of Illustrations	257	(6)
A Note on Acknowledgments and Transcription	263	(4)
Index	267