Subject: Mr. D.
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 13:16:01 -0500



Thanks, Rick.  You give a good picture of Wacquant's investigation of
boxing, which I took (from the discussion--not from my having read
Wacquant) to be a serious investigation [and as people of my generation
would be prone to do when the original and slightly odd invective appeared,
I thought of M. Ali, one of the more interesting and wonderful people of
the pre & post flowerpower era].

The interesting question about boxing [well, first, I have to admit that if
i had a TV, I probably would like to watch it--I'm an ex-wrestler, by the
way], given the sketch that you give us below, is the part it plays in the
larger culture--not just within in the af-american and poor white culture
within which it operates.  The question is what ideological function does
it serve and how does it work to ensure the continuation of the surrounding
social structure, within which boxing is a poor person's sport for  the
bourdieuean reasons we all know?  Of course one has to ask how sports work
to instantiate the capitalist ideology (or school?).  This leads to how
does the array of sports work--and how does boxing fit in the array?  One
of course has to think now only about the participants but about the
spectators and who the different spectators are--or more exactly, how the
different spectators for the same event are affected differently according
to their social space.  One has to include wrastling (not wrestling) in
this question, and then it's wonderful to play those sports off against
croquet, polo, tennis (historically interesting now).  The subject of
"sports" [play verses worktime] is a good one.

Then the next question is why our friend (i haven't been paying attention
to the discussion or who the "players" are) opened the discussion up with a
dismissive and as i take it, a confrontational tone.  This would invite our
friend to ask himself about his anger at so-called intellectuals, as if
participants here (or Wacquant) were intellectuals (and as if we didn't
most of us know the history of Bourdieu's relationship with
intellectualism, which is why I thought my glimpse of this discussion
revealed it as a strange one on a list associated with Bourdieu).

I would be very interested in our friend's social class background and
whether he could trace his anger from there.

irvin peckham
[rural, working class, absolutely loved the 60's background]




Rick Fantasia <RFANTASI-AT-email.smith.edu>-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu on
07/16/2001 04:05:40 PM

Please respond to bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu

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To:   bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
cc:    (bcc: Irvin Peckham/ipeckh1/LSU)

Subject:  Re: Wacquant on boxing


Your question is certainly a valid one, but it is not entirely unlike the
earlier posting ["what is Wacquant all about?"] which breezily dismissed
not just Wacquant the social analyst, but the work of ethnographic analysis
itself. A real  understanding  of the social logic underlying social
research (and therefore the motivations motivating various kinds of
researchers) cannot be reached by simple speculation, or as a philosophical
problem, but as a sociological one that, in this case, would require the
completely valid and important, but systematic theoretical and empirical
analysis of academic  scientific practices. It is a valid question, but not
one that can be seriously answered in the abstract, nor at the level of the
individual.

As an individual, however, I can say that I was motivated to respond to the
original posting about Wacquant on boxing, because I found the hardly
veiled accusations made ("the air of Fascism" after all??) to be both
completely unjust and completely ignorant of the work itself. To actually
read this work is to immediately force a confrontation with the very
preconception of boxing as a barbaric activity. In relation to the
dystopian world of uncontrolled violence, police repression, economic
destruction ,social neglect and stigma that fairly characterizes the poor
African-American community in which it is located, the boxing gym that he
studied, among other things can be seen as a remarkable oasis of solidarity
and of mutual respect, where bodily discipline and control is practiced as
a craft whose considerable skills are passed down from journeyman to
apprentice. The contrast of this institution with the utter breakdown of a
market for skilled labor in the poorest black communities of the U.S. is
stark. Wacquant's work on boxing is a very much more complicated analysis
than this, but by reading it we actually do learn quite a bit at least
about his sociological view of his own motivations. These are discussed
openly, reflexively and within the analysis itself, of the French edition
of the forthcoming English version of his book, BODY AND SOUL: Ethnographic
notebooks of an apprentice boxer [which I understand will be published by
U. of Minnesota Press).

Of course you should feel free to inveigh against intellectuals for using
research questions to satisfy psychosexual urges, but please read
Wacquant's work on boxing, for it forces all of us to confront the limits
to our own selective outrage.
Rick Fantasia




>>> rdumain-AT-igc.org 07/13/01 05:14PM >>>
Fair enough!  But my question is a valid one.  Intellectuals love
violence--in theory and from a safe distance in most cases--so one must
always be suspicious until one gets the scoop.  The lesson the 20th century
is how millions of people get psychologically primed for fascism.  Blood
sports is one of them, and the intellectuals' fascination with boxing
reveals their own sadomasochistic lust for power and their predisposition
to submit their own intellectual gifts to naked power.  Hence I think you
need to direct your concern over what is inflammatory to the real purveyors
of barbarism.  Academics love getting angry in theory, but when somebody
gets angry for real they shit they pants.

At 04:19 PM 7/13/01 -0400, Elaine Power wrote:
>Please don't grind your personal ax against boxing on Wacquant's back.
Read
>some of his work instead.
>
>Elaine Power

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