Review of Loic Wacquant

Book Review Towards a Carnal Sociology, Towards a Carnal Urban Studies? Michael J. Lorr Wacquant, Loic. 2006. Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, a skinny French wannabe boxer, delivers an ethnographic account of Chicago’s ghetto by describing the sport of boxing and analyzing it as a mirror image of the street. Wacquant uses this mirror imagery similar to the way his mentor Pierre Bourdieu analyzes the chiasmatic nature of social structures. In other words, Wacquant outlines how the disciplined practice of boxing reflects life on the street of the ghetto. Remember that mirror images are inverted—simply put boxing is order, street-life is disorder. Furthermore, Wacquant describes boxing and his own experience learning boxing in a neighborhood gym as the development of a pugilistic habitus. Wacquant again utilizes a term, habitus, from mentor Pierre Bourdieu to distinguish how the logic of practice is imbued in actual human bodies. Inspired by how bodies learn boxing in a Chicago ghetto gym, Wacquant calls for a carnal sociology. This type of sociology illuminates how general policies and discourse become inscribed in human bodies. Body & Soul is written in three parts. Wacquant uses the first to explain how one trains in the gym to become a boxer and how the pugilistic habitus is imbibed and embodied as a form of pedagogy. Part two is about observing an entire fight day from the night before weigh-in until the celebrations and ride home after the fight. This second section also explains various important supporting-role fight jobs, like cut-man and matchmaker. The third and final part of Body & Soul is about Wacquant’s experience boxing in a Golden Glove Tournament. At this point in the book the reader is as invested in Wacquant’s amateur boxing status as he is. After having vicariously experienced the