Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

by Loïc Wacquant

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195305623
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/23/2006
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	8.70(w) x 4.82(h) x 0.76(d)
Lexile:	1380L (what's this?)

About the Author

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, 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 ActionPreface to the U.S. EditionPrologueThe Street and the RingAn Island of Order and Virtue"The Boys Who Beat the Street"A Scientifically Savage PracticeThe Social Logic of SparringAn Implicit and Collective PedagogyManaging Bodily CapitalFight Night at Studio 104"You Scared I Might Mess Up 'Cause You Done Messed Up"Weigh-in at the Illinois State BuildingAn Anxious AfternoonWelcome to Studio 104Pitiful PreliminariesStrong Beats Hannah by TKO in the FourthMake Way for the Exotic Dancers"You Stop Two More Guys and I'll Stop Drinkin'""Busy" Louie at the Golden GlovesList of IllustrationsA Note on Acknowledgments and TranscriptionIndex

What People are Saying About This

Robert Coles

"Here is original-minded social science research, carefully done and knowing documentary field work, become something else: an absorbing personal journey of experience, observation, and understanding, compellingly and instructively narrated. Body & Soul is a book that will enliven its readers, acquaint them with a whole world of ambition, purpose, and vulnerability, and live in their minds long thereafter."--(Robert Coles, author of Doing Documentary Work)

Zygmunt Bauman

"Body & Soul is a gem, destined for a life of classics like Street Corner Society (though much fleshier and juicier and denser), studied over and over again as a pattern to follow, though defying the ability, imagination, and, indeed, humanity of the would-be followers. An act impossible to match. A poem in prose, a work of love and wisdom rolled into one: this is how ethnography should be written, were the ethnographers capable of writing like that."--(Zygmunt Bauman, author of Liquid Modernity)

Jerome Bruner

"This remarkable and courageous book gives life to Pierre Bourdieu's adage that we 'learn by body'. A Frenchman in Chicago sets out to learn about the black ghetto but not through detached observation: he joins the local gym and labors to become a boxer for whom, as for his buddies, 'fighting is my life, my woman, my love'. Though he yearns to become a pro, he never loses sight of the sociology in his quest. Bravo for sticking with science, for this book spells out a stunning lesson in the carnal sociology of where we are and what we are doing."--(Jerome Bruner, author of Making Stories)

Editorial Reviews

"[R]eveals a remarkable ethnographic and theatrical eye...a model account of a personal, embodied sociology..." —American Journal of Sociology

"Body & Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could—if properly read and disseminated and emulated—put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis." —Social Forces

"[A] sociological tour de force...sure to be widely used as an exemplar of how to conduct participant observation research.... It is packed with fruitful conceptual and theoretical discussions." —Qualitative Sociology

"A fresh and authoritative treatment." —The Ring: The Bible of Boxing

"Body & Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring." —Los Angeles Times

"[R]eveals a remarkable ethnographic and theatrical eye...a model account of a personal, embodied sociology..." —American Journal of Sociology

"...a provocative, exhilarating, maddening, and profoundly idiosyncratic effort." —Contemporary Sociology

"Body & Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could—if properly read and disseminated and emulated—put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis."—Social Forces

"[A] sociological tour de force...sure to be widely used as an exemplar of how to conduct participant observation research.... It is packed with fruitful conceptual and theoretical discussions." —Qualitative Sociology

"A fresh and authoritative treatment." —The Ring: The Bible of Boxing

"Body & Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring." —Los Angeles Times

"Loic Wacquant's Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer is perhaps the best yet sociology of the body—-its theorizing is less explicit than is the acuteness of the observations." —Contemporary Sociology

From the Publisher

In this challenging work, French sociologist (and MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellow) Wacquant engagingly writes about his participation in a previously foreign social milieu. For Wacquant, it is the world of a famous (and now defunct) Chicago boxing gym in the tough black neighborhood of Woodlawn, just south of the predominantly white University of Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, where Wacquant was teaching and living. For three years he "trained alongside local boxers, both amateur and professional, at the rate of three to six sessions a week, assiduously applying myself to every phase of their rigorous preparation," from shadowboxing to sparring in the ring. The result is a detailed and compelling narrative divided into three equally entertaining and distinct parts. The first and most dense, "The Street and the Ring," is an explication of the "social space" of the gym that balances a hardcore theoretical look at the gym as "a complex and polysemous institution" with excellent interviews with the gym's tough-talking owner DeeDee Armour that reveal how the "controlled violence" of the gym stands as an option to the violent street culture on Chicago's South Side. Two shorter essays are less academic in style and show Wacquant to be an excellent reporter. In one, he describes in depth one of the more than 30 boxing tournaments he attended in various nightclubs, movie theaters and sports arenas. In the other, after he is completely accepted by gym patrons, who have named him "Busy Louie," he thrillingly details his own successful competition in the Chicago Golden Gloves, the city's most prestigious amateur tournament. (Dec.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

... a well-written, insightful and above all fascinating account which draws the reader in, combining sociological insight with good stories about strong characters.... this is a great book, which I recommend to anybody with even a vague interest in embodiment, sport, or boxing.

The Sociological Review

Body & Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring.

L.A.Times

A fresh and authoritative treatment.

The Ring: The Bible of Boxing

Here is tough-minded social realism standing against a popular neoromanticism, each essential and unavoidable in an ethnography that poses as literature of public truth. Through this clash emerges a model account of a personal, embodied sociology, depicting how pain and effort become integral to, and constitutive of, the establishment of tightly held group bonds.
—Gary Alan Fine

American Journal of Sociology

As serious about the sweet science of boxing as Wacquant is practiced in the craft of sociology, Body & Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could - if properly read and disseminated and emulated - put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis.

Social Forces