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Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership

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Abstract

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. 28, 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 property; 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720

    Loïc Wacquant

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  1. Loïc Wacquant
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Correspondence to Loïc Wacquant.

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Response to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology on Body and Soul, vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2005.

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Wacquant, L. Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership. Qual Sociol 28, 445–474 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-005-8367-0

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