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 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."
This expanded anniversary edition features a new preface and postface that take the reader behind the scenes and reveal the "making of" this classic ethnography. Wacquant reflects on his path to, and uses of, fieldwork based on apprenticeship. He traces the genealogy and draws the anatomy of habitus and explicates how he deployed it as method of inquiry. The postface retraces the trials and tribulations of his gym mates in and out of the gym over the past thirty years, and reflects on what they reveal about the economics of prizefighting, masculinity, and the passion that binds boxers to their craft.
Body and 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. A subtle investigation and provocative extension of habitus, this expanded anniversary will intrige and excite students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities.

Loïc Wacquant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris. A McArthur Prize winner, his research interests include comparative urban marginality, the penal state, embodiment and social theory. His books have been translated in twenty languages and include Urban Outcasts (2008), Punishing the Poor (2009), and The Invention of the "Underclass" (2021).

- PREFACE TO THE EXPANDED ANNIVERSARY EDITION: WHEN SOCIAL SCIENCE MEETS THE SWEET SCIENCE
- 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 THE STUDIO
- "You Scared I Might Mess Up 'Cause You Done Messed Up"
- Weigh-in at the Illinois State Building
- An Anxious Afternoon
- Welcome to Studio
- 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
- POSTFACE
- FORGING THE PUGILISTIC HABITUS: REFLECTIONS ON BECOMING A PRIZEFIGHTER
- Pathway to the ethnographic craft
- Habitus comes to the gym
- For epistemic reflexivity: from flesh to text
- Appendix: Genealogy and anatomy of habitus
- THE AFTERLIVES OF CHICAGO PRIZEFIGHTING ACROSS THREE DECADES
- What they became after the Woodlawn gym closed
- On the social and symbolic structures of prizefighting
- Boxing life on the internet and death in a chicago ring
- Post scriptum: on pugilistic piety
- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- A NOTE ON ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND TRANSCRIPTION
- INDEX