Body & Soul

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 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.

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.

- The Taste and Ache of Action - Preface to the U.S. Edition - Prologue - The Street and the Ring - An Island of Order and Virtue - "The Boys Who Beat the Street" - A Scientifically Savage Practice - The Social Logic of Sparring - An Implicit and Collective Pedagogy - Managing Bodily Capital - Fight Night at Studio 104 - "You Scared I Might Mess Up 'Cause You Done Messed Up" - Weigh-in at the Illinois State Building - An Anxious Afternoon - Welcome to Studio 104 - Pitiful Preliminaries - Strong Beats Hannah by TKO in the Fourth - Make Way for the Exotic Dancers - "You Stop Two More Guys and I'll Stop Drinkin'" - "Busy" Louie at the Golden Gloves - List of Illustrations - A Note on Acknowledgments and Transcription - Index