Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (review)

Over two decades ago in his seminal "Program for a Sociology of Sport," Pierre Bourdieu (1988 [1982]) identified the primary challenge confronting the enterprise. On the one hand, Bourdieu wrote, those who know the most about sport tend to lack the inclination or ability to appreciate (much less be critical of) its broader social connections and significance; on the other hand, those who possess the requisite skills to analyze its forms and social functions generally dismiss sport as unworthy of serious scientific investigation. Scholarly research and writing on sport has progressed a great deal in the last twenty years, but it is not until now, with the appearance of Loic Wacquant's dazzling ethnographic journey into the world of an inner-city Chicago boxing gym, that I would say for certain that Bourdieu's challenge has been answered. As serious about the sweet science of boxing as Wacquant is practiced in the craft of sociology, Body and Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could – if properly read and disseminated and emulated – put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis.

The book is divided into three parts, each having a distinctive purpose and style. The first and most extensive is "The Street and the Ring." Set in the context of Chicago's Southside, it is an attempt to make sense of the gym and the culture of boxing more generally. Wacquant's starting point and primary insight is that the discipline boxing requires stands in symbiotic relationship to the disorder and decline of the American ghetto – for inner-city young men of color, in short, the gym is "an island of order and virtue" (p. 17). These chapters detail the many facets of the social logic of boxing – the psychological and sociological makeup of recruits; the daily dedication and high technique that training demands; the regimented diet; the control, mutual respect and tacit understandings necessary for actual fist-to-fist competition. Working at "the very edge of that which can be intellectually grasped and communicated" (p. 59), Wacquant demonstrates that "being" a boxer is a practical synthesis of thought and action, pain and pleasure, regimen and innovation, indeed body and soul. This analysis of the "pugilistic habitus" will be familiar to those who know Wacquant's previous work, and his writing is eloquent and electric as always. But the way Wacquant uses the book form to weave together field notes, interview transcripts, and theoretical exegesis (not to mention dozens of photographs – most taken by Wacquant himself, some taken of him) endows his thinking with unprecedented depth and power and feeling.

This vision is given further depth and shape in the second and third parts of the book. The second is a day-in-the-life account of a promising young boxer from Wacquant's gym preparing for a boxing "card" at a working-class tavern in the city. In minute detail, we follow Curtis Strong and his trainer Dee-Dee from the morning weigh-in to the post-fight festivities, meeting the various people who compose their world: the matchmakers and promoters, the training-partners and cut-men, state officials, fans, friends, and other hangers-on. Along the way, we observe the small talk and interplay that constitutes the regular daily life of boxers in the ghetto (and presumably other inner-city residents as well). These pages have a genuine humanity and literary quality about them, not to mention a dramatic tension that builds as we come to care about Curtis and wonder how his bout will go. Imaginatively conceived and brilliantly executed, Body and Soul takes us on the journey of inquiry and discovery that is ethnographic practice. Fittingly, the ethnographer himself takes center stage in the conclusion where "Busy Louie" recounts his first and last Golden Gloves fight. The chapter like the book is as much of an aesthetic as it is intellectual achievement. My...