Body & Soul

When French sociologist Lo�c 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.


"[R]eveals a remarkable ethnographic and theatrical eye...a model account of a personal, embodied sociology..." --American Journal of Sociology

"Body & 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." --Social Forces

"[A] sociological tour de force...sure to be widely used as an exemplar of how to conduct participant observation research.... It is packed with fruitful conceptual and theoretical discussions." --Qualitative Sociology

"A fresh and authoritative treatment." --The Ring: The Bible of Boxing

"Body & Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring." --Los Angeles Times

"[R]eveals a remarkable ethnographic and theatrical eye...a model account of a personal, embodied sociology..." --American Journal of Sociology

"...a provocative, exhilarating, maddening, and profoundly idiosyncratic effort." --Contemporary Sociology

"Body & 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."--Social Forces

"[A] sociological tour de force...sure to be widely used as an exemplar of how to conduct participant observation research.... It is packed with fruitful conceptual and theoretical discussions." --Qualitative Sociology

"A fresh and authoritative treatment." --The Ring: The Bible of Boxing

"Body & Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring." --Los Angeles Times

"Loic Wacquant's Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer is perhaps the best yet sociology of the body---its theorizing is less explicit than is the acuteness of the observations." --Contemporary Sociology