Body and Soul Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer Book

When French sociologist Loïc 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. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer vivissects the manufacturing of prizefighters and offers a model for a full-color "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action." Breaking with the prefabricated journalistic and artistic images of the heroic champion stepping into the limelight, Wacquant focuses on ordinary boxers in their everyday environment of the gym. He reveals them to be devoted artisans of the virile body who patiently hone an honorific craft, share a protected and protective sociability, and seek recognition and redemption in the closed brotherhood of the ring. He shows how the gym functions at once as a sanctuary against the dangers of the street, a scaffolding for the silent pedagogy of skilled organisms in motion, and a school of discipline and morality in which occupational ethic is literally inscribed in flesh. From the fragile microcosm of the gym set against the social disintegration of the surrounding ghetto, Wacquant invites us backstage and ringside at a local boxing card to witness how the dualities that organize the prizefighter?s existence -- material interest and sensuous desire, affection and exploitation, the masculine and the feminine, the sacred and the profane, abstinence and jouissance -- come together on fight night. And he takes us inside the "squared circle" to share the anguish and the thrill of his own trial by fire at the Golden Gloves tournament. Effacing the conventional boundaries between social science, documentary, and fiction, Body & Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a proletarian bodily craft and a unique vista into life and labor in the black American ghetto, but also a fascinating tale of personal transformation and social transcendence.Read More