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8471.
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8473.More information
Body and Soul.Drawing on a year-long participant observation study of a blackboxing gym in Chicago's ghetto, this article attempts to outline the principles that organize boxing as a social activity of which the human body is at once the seat, the instrument, and the target. Analysis of the social background of fighters, of their motivations, and of the types of interaction that go on in the "gym" shows that this self-enclosed world cannot be defined outside of its relation of symbiotic opposition to the "street" : the boxing club is the locus of an intense bodily discipline but also the backbone of a specific masculine sociability that it protects from the pressures and insecurity of ghetto life. Learning pugilism requires to effect, on a practical and collective mode, a genuine gymnic, perceptual, emotional and mental conversion : the boxer's workout consists of an endless regulated manipulation of the body that somatizes and diffuses the knowledge stored and displayed by all the members of the club by means of a gestural and visual pedagogy that excludes the mediation of a theory. Wighin the scheme created by the synchronization of drills and by the disposition of bodies in the space of the "gym", the coach operates in the manner of an implicit conductor whose main function is to elicit and to proportion the investments -in the twofold sense of economies and psychoanalysis- of the boxers by maintaining their belief in the pugilistic illusio. Finally, the successful unfolding of a boxing carrier demands a rigorous management of one's bodily capital which is not the product of individual decision-making or of external normative imposition, but the expression of a "pugilistic practical sense" (and especially of a relation to the body and to time) born from the lasting immersion in the specific universe. The Manly Art thus presents the paradox of an hyper-individual sport whose inculcation is quintessentially collective. This investigation ultimately reveals boxing to be a kind of "savage science" that stands at the borderline between culture and nature and whose adequate understanding requires that we forsake the conventional oppositions between the body and the spirit, rational choice and habit, and between the individual and the institution.
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8474.
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8480.