Body & soul : notebooks of an apprentice boxer

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Bibliographic Information

Body & soul : notebooks of an apprentice boxer

Loïc Wacquant

Oxford University Press, 2006

  • : pbk

Other Title

Corps et âme : carnets ethnographiques d'un apprenti boxeur

Body and soul

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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 dissects the making of prizefighters and 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, but also a revealing tale of self transformation and social transcendence. And, by fleshing out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus, it deepens our theoretical grasp of human practice.

Table of Contents

  • THE TASTE AND ACHE OF ACTION
  • PROLOGUE
  • THE STREET AND THE RING
  • FIGHT NIGHT AT STUDIO 104
  • "BUSY" LOUIE AT THE GOLDEN GLOVES

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