Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

ISBN-13: 9780195168358 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 274 str.

Loic Wacquant

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"With a sociological imagination inspired by Bourdieu and writing that is electric, Wacquant brings to life the pain, sweat, and discipline of boxing, as well as the vivid language, small triumphs, and gritty masculine comraderie of those who devote themselves to it in rundown gyms on Chicago's South Side. With respect and affection for those who mentored him, he takes us into a lifeworld that offers to some an alternative to the deadly streets of urban wastelands." —Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Veiled Sentiments