When French sociologist Lo-Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago''s South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist''s strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Glovestournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu''s signal concept of habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action."This expanded anniversary edition features a new preface and postface that take the reader behind the scenes and reveal the "making of" this classic ethnography. Wacquant reflects on his path to, and uses of, fieldwork based on appr
