Carnal Connections: on Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership1
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Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter 2005 (C 2005) DOI: 10.1007/s11133-005-8367-0 Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership1 Lo¨ıc Wacquant This article responds to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology devoted to the author’s book, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (vol. 20, no. 3, summer 2005). Four themes are tackled: the positioning of the inquirer and the question of social acceptance and membership; the dynamics of embodiment(s) and the variable role of race as a structural, interactional, and dispositional prop- erty; the functioning of the boxing gym as miniature civilizing and masculinizing machine; apprenticeship as a mode of knowledge transmissioin and technique for social inquiry, the scope of carnal sociology, and the textual work needed to convey the full-color texture and allure of the social world. This leads to clarifying the conceptual, empirical, and rhetorical makeup of Body and Soul in relation to its triple intent: to elucidate the workings of a sociocultural competency residing in prediscursive capacities; to deploy and develop the concept of habitus as operant philosophy of action and methodological guide; and to offer a brief for a sociology not of the body (as social product) but from the body (as social spring and vector of knowledge), exemplifying a way of doing and writing ethnography that takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life. KEY WORDS: boxing; embodiment; habitus; membership; apprenticeship; black American ghetto; viscerality; writing; reflexivity; autoethnography; carnal sociology. I am grateful to the contributors to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology devoted to Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (vol. 20, no. 3, summer 2005) for the seriousness and sincerity which they have engaged my book, and for the varied and vigorous reactions, criticisms, and queries contained in their papers. I shall aim to respond in the same spirit, by explicating my purposes, spelling out and defending my claims when needed, and pointing to some Correspondence should be directed to Lo¨ıc Wacquant, Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720; e-mail: [email protected]. 1Response to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology on Body and Soul, vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2005. 445 0162-0436/05/1200-0445/0 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 446 Wacquant implications of my incarnate approach to and analysis of pugilism as skilled action. For the sake of clarity, I shall regroup their comments in four thematic clusters and tackle each in seriatim: the positioning of the inquirer and the question of social acceptance and membership, indicating how friendship can be an invaluable resource for fieldwork; the dynamics of embodiment(s) and the variable role of race as a structural, interactional, and dispositional property; the functioning of the boxing gym as miniature civilizing and masculinizing machine and the conundrum of the “missing women”; and, finally, apprenticeship as a mode of knowledge transmission and technique for social inquiry, the scope of carnal sociology, and the textual work needed to convey the full-color texture and allure of the social world. I hope that these responses and elaborations clarify the conceptual, empirical, and rhetorical makeup of Body and Soul (Wacquant 2000/2004, hereafter B&S) in relation to its triple intent: (i) to vivissect the manufacturing of prizefighters in an effort to elucidate the workings of a bodily craft, that is, a sociocultural competency residing in prediscursive capacities that illumines the embodied foundations of all practice; (ii) to deploy and develop the concept of habitus by tracing its layering and fleshing out the imbrication of its sensual, moral, and aesthetic facets; and (iii) to offer a brief for a sociology not of the body (as intelligible social product) but from the body (as intelligent social spring and vector of knowledge), exemplifying a distinctive manner of doing and writing ethnography that recognizes and takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life. POSITIONING “BUSY” LOUIE All the contributors remark on the peculiar position and relations I devel- oped as a French novice learning to box in a predominantly black gym located in Chicago’s ghetto. Stoller and Zussman question my claim that my “French nationality provided [me] with a special entry into the social niches of African America” (Stoller 2005, p. 198); both recount personal anecdotes implying that such a notion is deceiving if not deceitful (Zussman [2005, pp. 201, 206] seems to think it is a distinctively French fantasy). This is ultimately an empirical matter; and, in the case at hand, my nationality was clearly a facilitating feature, and on both sides of the investigative equation. It saved my limbs if not my life one muggy afternoon of August 1988, in my third week of training, when a burly young man stopped me as I was coming out of the back of the gym and inquired aggressively about my reasons for being there. An enigmatic and tense interrogation ensued, centering on what a student from the nearby university like me knew “about us black people,” during which his four friends initially sitting on a bench were ambling closer towards me, causing me to worry whether I should try to dash for my car parked on the street or sprint straight to my apartment building three blocks away before their bellicose intentions erupted into physical onslaught. But the threat of imminent Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership 447 fracas vanished in a flash when something in my response tipped my would-be assailant to my foreignness. I was asked my nationality. Because my interlocutor had “heard that French people’re nice, ’cuz they got a nice cultural background,” I was let go unharmed on this note: “You lucky you a Frenchman,’ cuz if you be some redneck or some other white dude from over here, you in big trouble man. You don’t come in this neighborhood if you a redneck.” This happy denouement´ is but one of many manifestations I received of the well-documented a priori sympathy that France enjoys in the black-American community (for historical reasons mentioned in B&S p. 10).2 As my ringmate Ashante once put it, “French people ain’t crackers, they always had good rapport with blacks, goin’ all d’way back,” by which he meant that a Frenchman is not directly implicated in the bitter black-white dualism that organizes American so- ciety and may even have cultural affinities with his community. Thus trainer Eddie was proud to take me to a self-advertised “French bakery” in Hyde Park to check on its authenticity (it was a sham), and he admired the French because “they tend to eat like blacks ’cause you said you eat rabbits and d’whole pig, right, d’inside of the pig too, right? Yeah, well we black people do that too.” Needless to say, it is not a matter of what “the French” really are or do but how they are perceived to be and behave. My gym buddies’ vision of my home country as a Communist society where all youths attend university for free, women instinctively bare their breasts on the beach, and adults never stop fornicating (“The French, they make love all the time: they make love sooo much, that’s why their fighters never win no world titles”) needed not be accurate for it to afford me a measure of goodwill. On the side of the inquirer, being an alien (at multiple levels) in and to the city of Chicago meant that I continually diverged from the expected course of conduct of a white American—starting with going into the ghetto specifically because I had been warned not to set foot “west of Cottage Grove” and “south of 61st Street” under any circumstance by a university official on my first day on campus. The shocking paucity of U.S. researchers who have conducted sustained fieldwork among black Americans after the wave of urban ethnographies of the sixties crested along with the ghetto riots testifies to a distinctive reticence to seek entry into their “niches.” Likewise, it is not by happenstance that the half-dozen white students from the University of Chicago who came to train at the Woodlawn Boys Club for short periods over the three years of my sojourn there were all foreigners.3 2These include the novel experience of equalitarian treatment by black soldiers during World War I and the “Negrophilia” of the artistic and political avant-guarde of Paris during the interwar decades, which fostered the myth of a “color-blind France” and thence the consolidation of an expatriate community of African-American writers, performers, and academics after mid-century who construed France as their homeland-in-exile (Stovall 1996; Archer-Straw 1999). 3Zussman’s (2005, p. 201) opening tale of the three na¨ıve young Frenchmen raring to visit Harlem upon landing in New York City, in spite of being warned by their American hosts to not venture in a territory they considered off-limits, further confirms that white Americans and foreigners view the black ghetto through different lenses. And it undercuts the very point Zussman (2005, p. 207) aims 448 Wacquant My Frenchness is not a matter of having enjoyed a “special entry” in the sense of a privileged access to the ghetto forbidden to, say, Euro-American researchers, so much as a propitious prop that often smoothed early communication and oiled personal relations. (White Americans can and do conduct such work, in rare cases, but at the cost of violating a deeply rooted norm of social as well as academic propriety, cf.