587638

research-article2015

SOC0010.1177/0038038515587638SociologyBeauchez

Article

In the Shadow of the

Other: Boxing, Everyday
Struggles and the Feeling
of Strangeness

Sociology
2016, Vol. 50(6) 11701184
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0038038515587638
soc.sagepub.com

Jrme Beauchez

Centre Max Weber, CNRS, France

Abstract
On the basis of an ethnography of a group of boxers, this article questions pugilism as an experience
of confrontation with the other, the reasons and effects of which lie beyond the ring. Using the
boxers words to explain their everyday struggles, this article seeks to describe fighting figures
by placing them in the full depth of their biographical paths. These boxers share the experience
of immigration and their life stories have all been marked by profound feelings of strangeness,
understood as a social disqualification of otherness that causes deep and private wounds. Like the
shadow of the other, hanging over the conversations of gestures, the boxers wounds and the
violence of their biographical paths can help explain how they experience their fights, through the
idea of a bodily response to all the hardships they have endured, well beyond the ring and its rounds.

Keywords
biographical paths, boxers, confrontations with the other, ethnography, everyday struggles,
feeling of strangeness

People say that the Gants dOr is a club where there are only immigrants. But in fact,
there are only people who have suffered. These guys have all had a shitty time and
yet they still give themselves an extra constraint: they come and box. You see,
it really means something!

Emphasizing his last words with a dark look, Boris seems completely unaware of the
clinking of spoons and glasses, and of the bursts of conversation around us. The solemn
nature of his words has carried him far away from this January afternoon where we are
Corresponding author:
Jrme Beauchez, Centre Max Weber, CNRS, 6 rue Basse des Rive, 42023 Saint-Etienne Cedex 2, France.
Email: jerome.beauchez@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr

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sitting together in a bar. After the tortuous stories of each of his club companions, Boris is
now trying to tell the story of his own elsewhere and the meaning of his pugilistic
commitment.
It has been eight years since he left his native Martinique and moved to Estville, a
Rhenish metropolis in north east France.1 At 26, Boris has already seen a number of his
friends engulfed in the snares of Fort-de-France city life, with too much crack and too
many ways of getting by, but too few real prospects for the future. Leaving behind the
suburbs of his French Caribbean hometown and their doleful horizons, he projected his
future across the Atlantic. Now living in exile, Boris plays out his struggles every evening in the agonistic rhythms of the gym where some 30 bodies engage in private dances
of fist fighting. In this small life-world of pugilistic workouts, all backgrounds are represented and intermingled, with fists brandished like the roots of uprooted countries in
America, Africa, or the Middle East. But none of the young men who come to the gym
every day seem to be fully considered French, since people say that the Gants dOr [the
French for Golden Gloves] is a club where there are only immigrants (Boris).

Where the Shadow of the Other Falls Upon the Self

These boxers are continually reduced to a disqualified otherness: that of threatening
strangers (Amin, 2012: 98), always ready to knock out polite society. Boris and his
companions are aware of this bad reputation. Tagged across the walls of the workingclass neighbourhoods most of them come from, it springs from the cracks and creates
their tough pugilistic portraits as young men ensnared in insidious liminality. Just beyond
the boundary between us and the outsiders, this reputation consistently relegates these
heirs of immigration to territories of not-belonging (Said, 1994[1984]: 140). These are
places of exclusion, immigrant neighbourhoods or banlieues, where threshold effects are
experienced as an incessant sway between suffering here and feeling the disillusioned
loss of somewhere else. This particular way of being neither from here nor there
(Bauman, 1997: 18) means that those who embody it remain out of place, in-between,
where the shadow of the other falls upon the self (Bhabha, 1994: 60). The Gants dOr
boxers live and fight in this shadow every day, both in and out of the ring. As this text
will show, when they don their boxing gloves for an encounter with the other (or a representation of the other, in the case of shadow boxing against an imaginary opponent),
these mens fights embody a wide range of different struggles. The boxers confront
adversity on a daily basis and the different shapes this adversity takes seem to condense
into what I suggest calling their feeling of strangeness.

The Feeling of Strangeness: A Microsociological Approach

Ever since the founding texts by Georg Simmel (1971[1908]) and Alfred Schtz (1944),
the figure of the Stranger as a sociological form of ambivalence between here and
there, between them and us, between insiders and outsiders has been a key area
of concern for researchers (for examples in recent decades, see: Ahmed, 2000; Amin,
2012; Bauman, 1997: 17ff.). In these works, the Stranger usually appears not as a person
but as a character based on the most emblematic traits of his/her marginal condition.2

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Biographical details and empirical observation therefore take second place to generalization leading to unpeopled characters constituting different ideal-type representations of
the Stranger.
This article focuses on the specific rather than the general and analyzes daily experiences of strangeness. It is grounded on a microsociology of pugilistic commitment that is
peopled by men whose struggles, hardships and dreams do not point to the idea of a certain social condition but reveal a reality they perceive and experience in the flesh.3 Moving
from ideal type to real type, abstract figures of the Stranger are replaced by the concrete
feelings of strangeness experienced in this case, by these boxers when the discredited
other becomes so ingrained it even informs their own self-perception (Hall, 1990: 225
226). We will then see how such a feeling takes shape in these individuals life paths, leaving them with a deep impression of interior exile that is exacerbated each time they come
up against the ambivalence of the categories of us and them. This feeling of strangeness
interferes with identity construction and confines selves to out-of-placeness (Hall and
Back, 2009: 669670). Although it is fuelled by the insidious violence of sporadic expressions of racism or social exclusion, it is more than a mere product of these things.
In principle, the blows responsible for inflicting the wounds of otherness in the depths
of the boxers flesh are blows that cannot be returned. Nevertheless, Boris seems to say
that they are at the root of all the others. This opens up a novel perspective on the gym as
a place where violence is not extended but converted. The violence of the boxers biographical paths which seeps invisibly into their conversations of gestures (Mead,
1967[1934]: 4243) could therefore explain how they experience their fights. The latter could be seen as a bodily response to all the hardships they have endured, well beyond
the ring and its rounds. This hypothesis will be explored at the intersection of the biographical schemes analyzed here. I will look at the details of the actual things by which
I mean micro-material such as accounts of situations and narratives of experience that
reveal how the other is shaped in negative terms and how a feeling of strangeness
becomes imprinted in the very heart of the self. In this sense, the microsociological lens
adopted by this text is not an end in itself; this is more than a simple case study. It is a
way of questioning a whole set of social problems that the boxers face in a very tangible
way, but which also extend beyond their individual lives. The following pages will work
on the concepts of Self, Other and Strangeness, which are key concerns in social theory
and which are brought into play by these confrontations. However, unlike conceptual
discussions where fieldwork simply provides examples, the intention here is to take the
capital letters off them (Geertz, 1973: 21) in order to tease out the lives, experiences and
daily struggles that actually make up these abstract notions.

Making Sense of the Struggles: Learning About the Boxers Everyday

Realities
Consequently, the primary goal of this study is to grasp how the boxers make sense of
their struggles. This idea of making sense refers as much to the tangible experience of the
ring as to the way in which boxers experience the meaning of the fight. Having become
one of them, I began by joining in gym activities so that I could experience with my own
body what it is like to train for a fight. In France, Germany and Luxembourg, I also

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attended the numerous galas or boxing parties, known for their public face-offs, which
punctuate the fighters lives.4
Beyond the physical engagement which is the basis of a boxers status, many other
moments helped me as I pursued my comprehensive approach. Articulating physical
experience with the emergence of meaning, they unfolded in the kinds of situations that
a hasty observer might be inclined to see as little more than a sideshow. Yet they constitute one of the key stages upon which the theatre of discreet allusions, farcical intrigue
and sly secrets is played, through which is woven the fabric of information that reveals a
worlds meaning. Waiting as a group in front of a gyms closed door, participating in
locker-room conversations, sharing the long hours before a weighing, putting up with the
long distances required to get to a fight, or having a drink at a bar: it is in moments such
as these that, from a stream of seemingly insignificant exchanges, significant patterns
appear which make the ordinary meaningful by giving it new relief.
At least it was new for me. I was learning about the lives of boxers, who were not so
much informants as they were simply people informed about a reality their reality a
few fragments of which they passed on to me. While attempting to collect and reconfigure the key scenes of this reality, I emphasized the occasionally disjointed connections
between these various sketches by drawing on biographical interviews. In this way, I was
able to get beyond practice and being there as my sole framework for accessing the
boxers life narratives and the subjective reasons they threw themselves into the ring.
Inspired by Paul Ricurs phenomenology (see, in particular: Ricur, 1994[1990]), my
work on the fighters identity and narratives, and the reflexivity it produces is one of the
key features that distinguishes it from other research on the social world of boxing.
Whereas most scholars confine themselves to the chronicles of champions, only a few
have proposed a sociology of ordinary fighters lying far from the medias gaze (for the
most recent examples, see: Heiskanen, 2012; Trimbur, 2013; Woodward, 2014).
This ethnographic approach to studying the daily lives of boxers was pioneered by
John Sugden in 1979 (see: Sugden, 1996: 200ff.). Loc Wacquant built on this work by
learning to box in a Chicago gym from 1988 to 1991. This observant participation
became the basis for some dozen articles, the most important of which contributed to the
writing of a book which has since become a classic (Wacquant, 2004[2000]). Wacquants
investigation was conducted as close as possible to daily life in the gym and inspired
many other researchers to focus on the habitualization of the fighting bodys techniques
(for a compilation of recent works on the topic, see: Snchez Garcia and Spencer, 2013).
These texts focus in detail on the social production of an efficient body and they reveal
the formative acquisition of a specific habitus understood as an embodied system of
dispositions towards fighting. However, these works rarely provide the reader with biographical background matter or information about the boxers life paths and how they
experience themselves as fighters.5
Although this does not detract from their scientific quality, the same is true of genderbased studies of boxers. Most examine the forms of masculine identity promoted by boxing
(De Garis, 2000; Heiskanen, 2012; Woodward, 2007) or the gender trouble resulting from
the presence of women in the gym, a (former?) bastion of masculinity (Halbert, 1997;
Lafferty and McKay, 2004; Paradis, 2012). Here again, though, little is said about how the
experience of the ring fits into individual lives that have often been marked by a particularly harsh relationship to the social world. In her work, Lucia Trimbur (2013: 39ff.) does

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question this harshness by rendering the words of the boxers from Gleasons Gym (New
York) as they provide first-person narratives of the meanings they give to their fights. This
pugilistic point of view championed by Loc Wacquant, although he only presents a
small part of it himself (Wacquant, 1995) is at the core of the present article. Consequently,
it offers a variety of perspectives on the lived experience of the fight and how the shadow
of the other is cast over the ring and beyond. It is through this attention paid to sensemaking in the interweaving of boxers biographical paths that themes like that of strangeness and its feelings can emerge as a background to bodily clashes.

The Boxers Body: The Flesh of Exile

Saturday 21 April 2001. This evening the Gants dOr boxing club is giving its annual
grand boxing gala. It is 9 p.m. and while the hall in Estville resonates with the impatient
cries of spectators who have come for the boxing show, the boxers prepare their confrontations among themselves in the changing rooms. As Boris is about to go into the ring
area, Mohand is just starting to warm up. In an hour and a half, just after the amateurs
fights, he will open the ball of professional matches. After exchanging a rousing look with
his colleague on his way to combat, Mohand temporarily withdraws from all contact and
retires to the depths of the changing rooms. Facing the wall, with the noise of his fellow
boxers also concentrating on preparing for their fights, he starts to dance lithely to the
rhythm of the gestures of the punches he gives to the body of an imagined opponent.
Minutes go by, in action. Between two fights, the sound system throbs with rai music,
booming through the room. I look at Mohands lips. He is mouthing all the singers words.
While his flesh seems to reach out to his childhood Kabylia, his body continues to throw
the punches for which he now seems ready: left, right hook, up, down. Now hes hitting
fast and with precision.

Punches and their Kabyle Resonance

However, before Mohand counted his punches and the well-placed series of blows to his
boxers body, he had already recounted them, telling me about other settings than the
boxing ring. There too, it was a question of body, flesh and affronts. An affront that had
been shared between France and Algeria since Mohands birth in Estville in 1972; the
affront that his Kabyle grandparents believed they had suffered when, far away from
Tizi-Ouzou, his father had married a French woman, and a non-Muslim. Looking to
close the gap of exile, with its representations of shamefulness, and to rebuild broken
ties, his father chose his sons Mohand aged 4 and his younger brother aged 2 to give
physical substance to this endeavour:
My father wanted to do things well, you know He said to me: Right, were going to forget
all that, were going to send our children to their grandparents, theyre going to learn the
language and the culture.

In this reproduction of displacement, the ideal of regained cohesion soon faded in the
face of the stigma of strangeness: They [his Kabyle family] took revenge on me because
my father had married a French woman and for them it was not right, you know.

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Mohand was seen as crystallizing this betrayal because he embodied it and the
revenge he talks about was often enacted, time and again, on his body in the most brutal
way possible:
I was hit every day, it was really serious. Why? Because when I spoke French I was hit; when
I spoke Kabyle, I was hit. My parents were in France, they werent aware of what was happening
there.

His 10 years spent in Tizi-Ouzou were years of insistent and diffuse prejudice, which for
a long time remained nameless. When as a teenager he finally spat it all out to his parents, his definitive return to France went hand in hand with a slowly built up feeling of
resentment towards his father:
Hed experienced the destitution that I went through there; but why did he make us go through
it? If you can give something you didnt receive, then you have to give it! You have to
show sand, show water There isnt only stone because stone was imposed on you!

The marks of his Kabyle history continued to affect his daily life: an educational system
ill-suited to dealing with the atypical abandoned him more than he abandoned it.
Similarly, in the dialectics of closeness and distance at work in his relationship with his
father, distance gradually took over. As their relationship deteriorated, once he was a
young adult he soon left the family home. Yet again, he encountered stone, this time in
the working-class areas of the outer Estville suburbs neighbourhoods of exile (Dubet
and Lapeyronnie, 1992) where he spent much of his time with his relatives, most of
whom suffered from the same longing for elsewhere. He met with both closeness and
distance again as their ambivalence characterized his own subjective feeling towards his
identity and the meaning of his existence. The Kabyle Frenchman and the French Kabyle
interwove and sometimes disappeared, leaving a void deriving from the double absence
that Abdelmalek Sayad (2004[1999]: 125) analyzes as a meaningful element of strangeness experienced in the intimacy of its divisions.6

Boxing as a Metaphor for Exile and its Struggles

It was during this time of anomie, while he alternated periods of unemployment and
temporary jobs, here and there, a dropout, that Mohand took up boxing. By chance, in
one of the gyms he started in he heard about Luis, the Gants dOr coach, and his qualities.
They met shortly afterwards. More than a mere work contract between a coach and an
apprentice boxer, this encounter stands out in Mohands life as a moment of alternation.
That is to say, following Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967[1966]: 157), a
moment that helped him to transform his subjective reality by acting on the main wounds
of his life course (i.e. the feeling of not belonging and of strangeness). Hence the following ostensibly simple sentence: Since Ive gained confidence in boxing, Ive gained
confidence in life.
In order to keep his social status as an outsider beyond the gym context where
Mohand and all the other boxers clearly appear as established members Luis counts

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on the inclusive force of the collective to fight against the pernicious symptoms of all
these injuries to the self that come from non-belonging, from strangeness. He is all too
familiar with them as they have also punctuated his own story. This former boxer was
born in Chile in 1953 and has been training pugilists since 1989. In many ways, the Gants
dOr (founded in 1993) is the fruit of his determination to pass on the pugilistic science
that supported, accompanied and stimulated the often heavy steps of his successive
exiles. As his life path led him from Pinochets Chile to the military Junta of Argentina
and then to France as the only way to escape different dictatorship regimes, Luis was
often confronted with external adversity.
He patiently built himself up from within and used his boxers body to hit back against
a social destiny often characterized by enforced absence and unspoken prejudice. In
expressing his resentment, Luis chose leather gloves as a way round the iron hand of the
military. Using these skins weathered by the courage of an unshakeable resistance to
blows, Luis saw the possibility of creating something that would reach far beyond the
hardness of armed violence. Since then, those who have donned the golden gloves of
his club have acted as an extension of this Inca warriors featherweight silhouette. Torn
away from his world, Luis remains attached to the need to hit back against the ill fortune
that he has constantly experienced as a gap between a certain idea of his personal worth
and the trials of a destiny damaged by his constant struggles as an exile: Everything I
have been through, it was hard. Even in boxing, I wanted to be given a chance and I
didnt get it. But I didnt have anyone. What Ive done, Ive always done alone.
It is with his boxers, at the gym, that Luis chose to reach beyond the solitude that he
continually experienced as the sign of his marginal status as a man caught between two
worlds: one lost and the other not quite gained. I want to give a chance to those who
want to do something, is his usual answer regarding the shortcomings of his own career.
And every day, as he encourages the cooperation of each and every boxer in training
routines, he creates a team, so to speak, in Erving Goffmans sense of the word (1959:
77). Out of sight, in the secrecy of the gym, all the elsewheres thus coalesce around a
single project: building up a collective force to which each person contributes and from
which each person benefits. Luis is wont to repeat that: alone, youre not a boxer.
Beginner or world champion, its other peoples punches that make you learn and make
progress! As a moral code of the pugilistic body, this fundamental belief in the strength
of the collective as a source of individualities guides the gestures of training, giving them
the dense nature of carnal sociality.
Producing a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of these gestures means discovering all
these undercurrents of shared trials, all these deposits of experience, which are continual
reminders of exile and how strangeness has punctuated these mens existence. This, in
the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968[1964]: 139140), is what makes up the
flesh of the boxers that I encountered. More than an anatomical composition given over
to using its fists, this flesh is the sensory memory of lived experiences. It lies below consciousness and constitutes the individual and social framework of perceptions of the
world and its struggles. Here the boxers visible body is only the synthesis of this invisible memory of fights, which conceals the meaning of these conversations of gestures.
Whether they are to be found in the exchange of blows, in Mohands Kabyle murmurs,
or, fist after fist, in Luiss hand-to-hand fights against his past solitude, these

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conversations reveal the depth of a pugilistic dedication. And the agonistic figures of this
dedication can be seen as metaphors for other struggles, or as the art of forming one body
from, and in the shadow of, the blows struck by the other.

In the Shadow of the Other: The Art of Forming One Body

Sometimes the boxers gaze lies. These fighters look hard at a specific place on their
opponents body, as if to indicate the spot the glove will hit, but they are not sincere.
Their sincerity lies elsewhere, in the attack that, at the same time, lands brutally on the
cheekbone or the liver that their eyes had passed over without a second glance. And this
evening, as Akims gaze lies, it is Mourads liver that takes the punch. His breath taken
away, he finds it difficult to recover. Struggling, his feet seem to hesitate to tread on the
canvas of the ring again. A slight groan betrays his insistent pain when, suddenly, violent
and stealthy, the uppercut springs forth. An eye for an eye: the blow hits home. Hanging
off this arm, the full weight of which seems to have landed on his jaw, Akim struggles to
come to terms with the crunch. He chews and swallows it like a poison, which, in a few
seconds, seems to have aged him by several years. This is enough for everyone in the
room to edge closer. Nobody wants to miss a scrap of the confrontation, which continues
in the same way: tactical, inventive and tough. As their matching destinies frolic in the
ring, Akim and Mourad, recent arrivals from Algeria, dream of their ambition of professional careers here. Mehdi immediately confirms this. Hypnotized by the figures of their
fight, he comes up to me as a fellow boxer to say: You see that, they know why theyre
here! They havent come from the middle of nowhere for nothing! They sweated blood
there! They give what hurts! Theres Algeria in all that. And what are their memories of
Algeria if not the flesh of their fights?

Between Us and Them

Akim showed me the wounds to his flesh, much deeper than the impact of a punch, when
he explained why he and his cousin Mourad both several times champions of Algeria
and members of the national boxing team had decided to leave their town of Chlef and
their country. In addition to their exasperation with seeing their best years lost to the difficulties of local youth caught up in the inextricable politico-religious quagmire, they
also suffered the experience of civil war and its terrors. As they witnessed its violence,
they felt less threatened than deeply extraneous to what was happening to their province,
abandoned to fratricidal rifts.7 In the shadow of this other, where enemies were incessantly invented whilst cutting down anyone and everyone, Akim and Mourad had not
only lost the meaning of blows but all hope of finding it again. For them, hope could only
lie elsewhere: in France and with a professional boxing career which, far away from
Algeria, would make their fights intelligible once again.
In the ring, where blows have meaning, and even the possibility of making money, it
is decided face to face who will stay standing by risking a death being knocked out
that remains mostly metaphorical. For Akim and Mourad, giving meaning to their fights
again meant choosing exile. The same is true for Bachir, their former coach, who recently
settled in Estville where he works as a youth worker in a working-class area of the

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northern suburbs. In fact it was Bachir who organized their arrival in France, going as far
as to contact Luis and get him to agree to welcome the two boxers in his gym, the only
one in the area to have a group of professional pugilists. Faithful to his fighters ethics,
Luis agreed to help the two applicants to try their luck. Since then, Akim and Mourad
have donned their gloves every evening, hoping to cover them in the gold of a victory. To
achieve this, they first have to face the metallic taste of blood running from their lips,
split by blows that they have become used to brooding over. They reflect upon their
exiled present with this same bitter brooding. They are trying to reach the status of professional boxers while struggling with the adversity of their complicated exile: working
out how to be from there, while living here, or how to cope daily with the strangeness of
their suffering and the weight of their dreams.
While each of them has found different ways out of the labyrinths of the self, the fragments of the life stories of Boris, Mohand, Luis, Akim and Mourad contain many similar
phrases, and parallels can be drawn within the differences of their individual stories. In
these stories, the fluctuating boundaries between us and them are keenly felt and
senses of belonging intermingle in a quite undecided manner. Being no longer from
there, while still not completely from here, means experiencing a hybrid identity or, to
take up Homi Bhabhas term quoted earlier: the shadow of the other fall[ing] upon the
self (Bhabha, 1994: 60). This split and obscured identity, facing double prejudice, is
hidden behind different faces according to the context. However, its diffuse imprint continues to appear in the life stories told by the other boxers. All of them have experienced
these shocks of the doubleness of similarity and difference (Hall, 1990: 227). The
emphasis placed on the latter arises from individuals being confronted with the arbitrary
nature of the social construction of their own dissonance with groups, institutions and
national spaces that reveal their strangeness to them.
It is the same for the sorry chronicle of ordinary prejudice harboured against those
from working-class areas, North Africans and black individuals, represented by all those
at the gym. Producing a feeling of otherness experienced in the adversity of external and
coercive reality, this socio-logic of the Alter is the basis for a feeling of an original
prejudice (Mohand: My mothers French, my fathers Algerian, and I was born What
am I supposed to do about it?). At the same time, it creates the tensions inherent to a
need to surpass (Mehdi: In France, its difficult for an Arab. He mustnt be good, he
must be the best.).8 Through a movement that is inextricably individual and social at the
same time, the Gants dOr boxers strive to escape a certain determinism to their fate.
Understanding the acts of this movement requires an approach in which the behaviour of
their bodies is considered in its flesh and blood as a special means through which to
analyse confrontations with the other, from the wounds of otherness to the resistance put
up to blows. What remains to be observed is the public stage for these confrontations,
when all the dialectics of the self and other are focused on the moment of the fight.

The Body of the Other and Shared Blows

Nassim is boxing this evening. His opponent is a seasoned professional who has recently
reached the final of the French championship. A victory over this opponent with more
caps than him would be excellent for Nassims career. He is over the age of 30 and does

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not have much time left to crown this career with an important victory. However, despite
what is at stake, he appears fairly relaxed. Surrounded by his close friends those from
the Gants dOr, who form a sort of protective skin around this body in which they all trust
Nassim goes from one to another, jokes, shakes hands and keeps touching the members
of his pugilistic family, as if he needed to feel their presence by maintaining tactile
contact. I myself enter into the spontaneity of this collective effervescence and warmly
encourage him. Like the others, I receive a wide smile and a friendly tap on the shoulder.
Shortly afterwards, I say to Mohand: Its OK, Nassim looks pretty laid back; he doesnt
seem too stressed. Mohand replies:
You know, hes got experience: more than 40 professional matches. But believe me, hes
stressed. He just copes with it better now than in the beginning, is all. Thats why hes not alone
either. Its very important not to leave a boxer all alone before a fight. He always needs to be
surrounded. Otherwise he broods, you see. And thats not good when you start to worry Its
really important to feel the guys around you before a fight. In the changing rooms, everywhere,
all the time: a boxer must never be alone!

Said with great conviction, Mohands words remind me of the phrase Luis constantly
repeats like a sentence pronounced upon the fighting body: alone, you arent a boxer.
Beyond the face to face, despite the visible solitude of both opponents, each of them is a
common individual (Sartre, 2006[1958]: 19). A true network of social relations links
each boxer to his past opponents, to the training rooms, and above all to the group of
pugilists that forged him and then took him as far as the ring. At the time of the confrontation, the individual boxer draws all of this together, embodying what Victor Turner
would have called a pugilistic communitas (2008[1969]: 9697). This expression refers
the boxers to the limits of the social work conducted in the wings, which has produced
them as they appear on the public fighting scene. However, also, and above all, it conjures up the specific form of sociological self-sufficiency (Simmel, 1906: 489) that they
forge with their regular coaching partners. This is where, in the secrecy of the body and
its techniques, individual skill emerges from the crucible of collective strength and will
that the boxers build up under the authority of their coach and of their more experienced
counterparts (Trimbur, 2013: 4147; Wacquant, 2004[2000]: 99; Woodward, 2008: 540
545). While this social construction cannot be outlined in detail here, the fact nonetheless
remains that each boxers obligation to give unfailingly of himself throughout his training explains the very form of the counter-gift he receives from his sporting companions
when the moment comes to fight in public. Having given of his body during training, in
return he receives a body ready for the fight. A body that is ritualized in the collective
performance given by the members of the communitas, like that of the Gants dOr, who
are present around Nassim, touching, supporting and accompanying him right up to the
time of the fight. And this is why, on the threshold of combat, on the last lap leading from
the changing rooms to the ring, this protective skin collectively wrapped around the
individual who has been called upon to fight does not fail. On the contrary, it is reinforced. Most boxers are carried forward to the fight at the heart of the group of their
fellow boxers and surrounded by their clamours. Once in the ring, they will embody the
strength of the carnal collective, the body of boxers which seems to live and reach
beyond the simple juxtaposition of its members.

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That evening, this body designed for intimate fights was intensely embodied by
Nassim in the best possible way: by winning.9 Through all the gestures expressing this victory, it made its way into the flesh of Nassims fellow boxers who spontaneously took it on
board and linked it to each of their movements. As they symptomatically mimed each of
Nassims acts just below the ring, it was as if they all suffered and leaped forward with him.
This mimetic excitement of the other members (Elias and Dunning, 1986: 80) therefore
exulted when the result was announced as they felt the satisfaction of a proof of value collectively obtained through this fight. Of course, first and foremost, this trial by body was
won by Nassim. But everything about him from the gaze he firmly locked into that of his
training partners, to the arms he kept raising with them in a sort of continual exchange of
victory signs indicated that he was sharing his moment of glory with them. The lesson to
be learned from these rituals of cohesion is that a boxer is only alone in appearance when
faced with an opponent who is probably as numerous as he is. Displaying this social density in combat therefore means offering a thicker description of it by discovering the
underlying sociality of the flesh against which the individual fighting figures stand out.

The Intelligence of the Fight: Phenomenology of the

Capable Man
As described here, the boxers body appears in the full density of its fights. It is like the
living metaphor of flesh which, deep inside, bears the marks and hopes of a true fight for
recognition.10 If the phenomenology of practice can be said to reveal its object, then it
certainly seems to contribute to the struggle engaged in by all the boxers I met to prove that
they were capable of confronting and overcoming the different forms of incapacitation
they had suffered in the past. These experiences of the brutalization of relations with the
other can be drawn together under the notion of strangeness seen as an ill of exile experienced as simultaneous losses (of there and of here) and all that remains is an enigma.
Within the ebb and flow of life experience, the feeling of strangeness seems to be the
violence at the root of a truly tough relationship with the social world and, as defined
here, it suspends the self-evident aspects of the visible violence of hand-to-hand fighting.
Instead, it shifts its realistic overtones towards the invisible wounds left by all the selfnegations experienced by the boxers. They try to respond to the latter by consistently
maintaining their co-presence in the face of adversity. Luis constantly asks those who
engage in these trials by fist to be an honour to themselves and the club and to show
what they are capable of. In this we can see a desire, written in the flesh, to gain recognition of their own worth, which is often challenged or even denied by the other through
the generalized anonymity of various stigmatizing marks of otherness.
Through the interwoven biographies presented here as the backdrop to understanding
boxers everyday struggles, this article has tried to show the social conditions that give
rise to such a desire for recognition. The challenge in writing this text consisted in establishing a sociology of this intention towards the world steeped in strangeness. The question remains as to the objective chances boxers have of fulfilling this intention. Is it
necessary to become a champion in order to do so? This question remains partly unanswered as it lies beyond the scope of this article, which seeks to describe the dense nature
of the social experience that contributes to the birth of ordinary pugilists. Reading the
article as a chronicle of social integration through boxing would mean misreading its

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object and missing the meaning that the actors themselves give to their pugilistic commitments. The idea of the social integration of immigrants, or the heirs to immigration,
is mostly expressed in the language of the establishment (i.e. that of lawmakers and
political decision-makers). It seems to be a request made of the outsiders to manage the
effects of their strangeness (Sayad, 2004[1999]: 216ff.). However, all the work of social
recognition undertaken by our boxers in fact aims at refusing the very idea of this strangeness, experienced both as an enigma and an affront. How can these boxers try to find the
solution to a problem that is imposed upon them, when they refute its very terms? The
boxers solution lies elsewhere, in the public fights in which all those at the Gants dOr
engage, without exception. Beyond the notion of competition, these fights appear as the
only means of obtaining from the other (the opponent, and above all the spectators) the
recognition of their worth, something previously only obtained from their coach and the
members of their collective boxing body.
The course of recognition achieved by the boxers takes on its full meaning as they
face this other in the ring in front of an audience. The mutual nature of this confrontation
is thus materialized through the public demonstration of their ability to dominate the
other (or, put differently, to assert their ascendancy over a rival, or at least to make this
rival pay dearly for any victory). In the ring, at the heart of the fight, the pugilists life
seems to be more intensely engaged in the risk of a dramatized death that is spatially
delineated by the fighting zone. This risk is played out dramatically on the ring in games
of life or death, all the more hotly disputed as they are fought over by two bodies in confrontation. If a sort of pugilistic ordeal can be said to exist, as a trial of value that gives
legitimacy to a boxers existence as a boxer (Le Breton, 2000), this would be its locus, in
the very bodies and flesh of the fighters striking one another.
This also shows that, in boxing, the figure of sacrifice is always oneself. A self that is
above all committed, as Loc Wacquant (2004[2000]) noted, to the tough realities of preparing the body for fighting in the ring. Achieving the pugilistic asceticism demanded of
all would-be fighters requires stringent exercise and diet, and entails both fatigue and
hardship. Although Wacquant does not say this, it is a self that is then confronted with the
other in this ring an other who appears as a kind of intimate enemy. The same weight,
the same fighting nakedness, the same desire for recognition, the same experience; often,
the pugilist is faced with a disturbing twin moving before him in the ring. However, this
twinship is less about identical doubles than about a shared inner feeling. The other
appears as a double stranger who is affronted in this forceful face-to-face trial. It is as if,
to establish the foundations of ones own worth, it were necessary at the decisive moment
of the fight to snatch this worth away from the resemblance of the other and to shatter
ones mirror image. The mimetic desire for victory an object that cannot be shared
leads to the violence of confrontation where ones self is implacably pitted against the
other.11 Boxing and its confrontation of bare lives therefore certainly reveal something of
this struggle for the self where the other is both the limit and the condition, as well as the
figure with and against whom everything is played out in the shadow of punches.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Lucy Garnier and Susan Braud for their help with writing this article in
English.

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Funding
This work was supported by the French National Research Agency under Grant ANR-12JSH1-0008 (Socioresist project).

Notes
1. As with the names of individuals referred to in the text, I have used a fictitious name to refer
to the town where the study was conducted in order to protect the protagonists identities.
2. The notion of a sociological character is borrowed from Jonathan Wynn, who sees this as originating in Georg Simmels work on the Stranger, the Renegade and the Artist (Wynn, 2011: 520).
3. This conception of microsociology or a peopled ethnography, where concepts are forged by
the experiences in which they are embodied, is inspired by the terminology used by Gary Alan
Fine (2003).
4. My investigation began with this participant observation phase (19992002), during which I
became a boxer among boxers. The ethnographic data were then enriched by longitudinal research
on pugilists biographical paths. This work has been reported in a series of articles and book chapters published in French between 2009 and 2012. As a synthesis of these reflections about the
pugilistic experience, I have written a book entitled Lempreinte du poing: La boxe, le gymnase et
leurs hommes [The Mark of the Fist: Boxing, the Gym and their Men] (Beauchez, 2014).
5. Mitchell Duneier also criticizes the lack of biographical evidence in Loc Wacquants work
(Duneier, 2006: 151ff.). As for the sociological portraits of boxers drawn by Wacquant, they
mainly concern two biographies: one of Curtis Strong and one of Butch Hankins (Wacquant
2004[2000]: 131ff.).
6. Following on from Abdelmalek Sayads founding work on Algerian immigration in France,
anthropologist Paul Silverstein (2004) has put forward a socio-historical reading of this very
particular form of hybrid self, the complexity of which is very clearly embodied in Mohands
biography.
7. For an ethnography of othering and the culture of conspiracy in the context of the Algerian
civil war (19912002), see: Silverstein (2002).
8. For other biographical analyses of how daily confrontations with racial disqualification are
expressed and handled, see: Harries (2014); Lamont and Mizrachi (2012).
9. On the sociological phenomenology of intense embodiment, see: Allen-Collinson and
Owton (2014).
10. While this idea takes us back to Axel Honneths interpretation of the Hegelian theme of
Anerkennung, the development that follows is inspired by the way Paul Ricur took it up in
his Course of Recognition (2005[2004]). Preceded by the phenomenology of the capable person
who questions the conditions of recognizing oneself along an I can mode, the moment of
Anerkennung, or mutual recognition, is presented by the philosopher as the indispensable reply
of the other to the selfs intimate questions. As it gives a social basis to what we ourselves identify
as our capacities, it is like a desire to exist that can only be fulfilled by the recognition of others.
11. Regarding this reciprocity of violence grounded upon the expression of mimetic desires, see:
Girard (2014[2001]).

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Jrme Beauchez is a sociologist and lecturer at the Universit de Lyon/Saint-Etienne. He is also a

researcher at the Centre Max Weber and a member of the Laboratory of Excellence Intelligences de
mondes urbains (a multi-disciplinary research cluster on urban worlds). In 2014, he published a book
entitled Lempreinte du poing: La boxe, le gymnase et leurs hommes [The Mark of the Fist. Boxing,
the Gym and their Men] and is currently the coordinator of a research programme on daily resistance
to domination funded by the French National Research Agency. In this context, he conducts and
directs ethnographic investigations with different marginalized populations, looking at their capacity
to resist adversity at the intersection of gender-, class- and race-related domination.
Date submitted June 2014
Date accepted April 2015