Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

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.


Author: Loïc Wacquant
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/23/2006
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.70h x 4.82w x 0.76d
ISBN: 9780195305623

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.

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