Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer by Loïc Wacquant
Author(s): Gary Alan Fine
Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 110, No. 2 (September 2004), pp. 505-507
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Book Reviews
505
Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. By Loı¨c Wacquant.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xivϩ274. $26.00.
Gary Alan Fine
Northwestern University
Hoping for a passage to observe the American ghetto, Loı¨c Wacquant,
then a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the Hyde Park
area, stumbles upon the Woodlawn Boys Club, a boxing gym populated
by young African-American men minutes from campus. For Wacquant
this South Side world seemed the apotheosis of Otherness, even while as
a student of Pierre Bourdieu he questioned attempts at Orientalizing race.
Yet, as he proclaims, the gym was “a mere two blocks from my abode
but on a different planet” (p. ix): big black men as little green ones. In
this, the book owes much to anthropological imaginaries. The Woodlawn
gym becomes an exotic Otherworld with “Busy Louie” our Tocqueville-
in-trunks.
Body and Soul is certain to surprise disciplinary readers who view
Wacquant as a fierce polemicist and subtle theorist of urban inequality
and racial domination (views embedded in some of Wacquant’s previous
essays on boxing and, perhaps, in his second, planned volume on the ring,
The Passion of the Pugilist). However, Body and Soul is a surprisingly
generous and gentle work, apolitical at its core. The black ghetto, while
by no means absent, is not here a subject of theorizing. It is the canvas
on which these men are knocked down and from which they strive to
rise. This volume contributes most dramatically and effectively to the
sociology of emotions and of the body—Marx’s suffering being—and both
embraces and interrogates the traditional model of a realist ethnography.
Believing that his South Side gym was a separate world and he a
“perfect novice,” Wacquant strives diligently through his apprenticeship
to become a competent member of this body, as boxer and as gym buddy—
if not quite as native. His nicknames, “The French Hammer” and “Busy
Louie,” testify to his acceptance and to his diffe´rance. This work, emergent
from authenticating notebooks, is an account of that attempt, a project
Wacquant describes as a “sociological-pugilistic Bildungsroman” (p. vii).
Wacquant discovers at the gym a mentor, DeeDee Armour, the gifted
coach of generations of fighters, a moral paragon who enters the benighted
pantheon of ethnographic key informants, alongside William Foote
Whyte’s Doc, Mitchell Duneier’s Hakim, and Elliot Liebow’s Tally. We
readers become socialized to DeeDee’s moral worldview, just as Wacquant
and his fellow boxers did. As Wacquant is learning to experience his body
anew, he never stops questioning how this experience is mentally, culturally,
and socially situated. As such, Body and Soul qualifies as the first
sociological classic of reflexive autoethnography. Wacquant’s power is
precisely in the fact that—in the lengthy opening chapter at least—he
subjects his observations and his emotions to the same theoretical rigor
American Journal of Sociology
506
to which ethnographers often subject the actions and interpretations of
others.
Body and Soul is designed as a triptych: “The Street and the Ring,”
“Fight Night at Studio 104,” and “‘Busy Louie’ at the Golden Gloves.”
The initial essay, “The Street and the Ring,” occupying the majority of
the text, is Wacquant’s attempt to develop an embodied, carnal, emotive
sociology of pugilism and, implicitly, other domains of social life (although
his scope conditions remain unspecified). Wacquant recognizes that the
boxing gym is a lair, a space away from the struggles of the ghetto, a
place that demands bodily discipline and control, in sharp contrast to the
life outside. Tempting indulgences in sex, food, drugs, and drink place
one outside DeeDee’s moral boundaries. The gym is, in this sense, a site
of “protected sociability” (p. 26), kindred to the Valois cafeteria, perched
on the other edge of Hyde Park. Like the African-American patrons of
the Valois (or those of those other notable Chicago establishments, Jelly’s
and Trena’s, as described by Elijah Anderson and by Reuben May), the
Woodlawn boxers are members of the respectable working class (p. 46).
While these men at DeeDee’s ring are more emotive than the talkers who
sit at Slim’s Table, they employ similar strategies to distance themselves
from the disorganization that surrounds them. Through the supportive
resources of their group and their tough mentors, an avenue for stability,
if not escape, emerges. The picture that emerges, as we watch Curtis,
Ashante, and Butch battle their way to equilibrium, is precariously sanguine,
if never precisely rosy.
The other two segments are set pieces. The second chapter, “Fight Night
at Studio 104,” a meticulous account of a single day—the preparation,
production, and presentation of a fight in South Chicago—reveals a remarkable
ethnographic and theatrical eye. Few other field essays so insistently
immerse us into social (and economic) worlds as hauntingly and
eloquently as this. If Wacquant has his writing tics (he is too fond of
describing boxing as “the manly art” and “the sweet science”), he reveals
a playful, personal, and profound ear for language (“the tutti-frutti of
academe”) to match his disciplined eye. However, while the essay embraces
the foundational detail, it abjures theoretical claims. For 80 pages
we are drenched in the arcane and arching world of boxing, left with
puzzles, much as Wacquant must have been as a novice.
The third section, “‘Busy Louie’ at the Golden Gloves,” is a 20-page
recounting of Wacquant’s entry in the Chicago Golden Gloves tournament—read
the book to learn the denouement. The essay was originally
composed for a French literary journal, and it constitutes what Wacquant
terms a sociological novella. Read skeptically (it is always prudent to read
sociological texts skeptically) the moral narrative depicts a nerdy intellectual
discovering love, community, and his bad-boy self by entering the
ghetto and learning the ropes among an unlikely group of buddies, under
the tutelage of a sage patriarch. By the end, Busy Louie triumphs through
an awe-inspiring display of courage that simultaneously marks both his
Book Reviews
507
acceptance by and transcendence of this dark utopia. By looking inward
in order to look out, Wacquant is able to salvage the masculinist fantasy
of boxing as a scaffold for the existential self—and by making himself
the hero, he can romance his subjects as the triumphant heroes of a
compellingly savage world. The accounting is coolly eloquent, crisply
instructive, but finally of more use as data than as analysis. It is truly an
instance of raw empiricism.
As the book progresses, the sections become increasingly personal, retreating
from the rigors of theory to the rigors of the ring, leading Wacquant
to speculate that the book could be read backward, from lived
experience to experienced theory. Yet, each depiction is writerly, revealing
a deluged and torrid participant.
Body and Soul is not a volume that speaks to boxing as an outpost of
the postindustrial political economy. That claim deserves attention that
it does not receive in this volume. Here is an author—like many academics
who have traversed inner-city streets—struggling to resolve the tension
of the tragedy of urban lives versus their against-the-odds heroism. Here
is tough-minded social realism standing against a popular neoromanticism,
each essential and unavoidable in an ethnography that poses as
literature of public truth. Through this clash emerges a model account of
a personal, embodied sociology, depicting how pain and effort become
integral to, and constitutive of, the establishment of tightly held group
bonds. These bonds create a moral space in which a tiny public can
provide communion for impoverished strivers and French intellectuals
alike.
Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration. By R. Keith Sawyer.
Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003. Pp. ixϩ214. $49.95
(cloth); $22.50 (paper).
Jason B. Jimerson
Franklin College
In Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration, using jazz musicians
and improvisational comedians as exemplars, R. Keith Sawyer argues
that prior work on music and humor has overemphasized scored and
scripted ingenuity, product over process, and personal imagination over
social inspiration. He calls for a paradigm shift that stresses improvisation,
emergence, and interaction.
His work reminds me of my own research on pickup basketball, where,
lacking coaches, referees, and playbooks, players make up each play as
they play. This activity epitomizes the creativity that Sawyer wants to
analyze. The process (playing well) matters more than the product (a win
or a loss). Furthermore, how well the players play is determined by their
interactions: each time one set of players score, the defenders take away