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
People say that the Gants d’Or 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 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 d’Or [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 working-class 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 d’Or 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 men’s 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 Schütz (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 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: 669–670). 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]: 42–43) – 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 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 boxer’s 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 world’s meaning. Waiting as a group in front of a gym’s 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 Ricœur’s phenomenology (see, in particular: Ricœur, 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 media’s 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.). Loïc 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]). Wacquant’s 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 body’s techniques (for a compilation of recent works on the topic, see: Sánchez 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 gender-based 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 question this harshness by rendering the words of the boxers from Gleason’s Gym (New York) as they provide first-person narratives of the meanings they give to their fights. This ‘pugilistic point of view’ – championed by Loïc 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 sense-making 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 Boxer’s Body: The Flesh of Exile
Saturday 21 April 2001. This evening the Gants d’Or 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 Mohand’s lips. He is mouthing all the singer’s 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 he’s 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 boxer’s 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 Mohand’s 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, we’re going to forget all that, we’re going to send our children to their grandparents, they’re 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’.
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 weren’t 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:
He’d experienced the destitution that I went through there; but why did he make us go through it? … If you can give something you didn’t receive, then you have to give it! … You have to show sand, show water … There isn’t 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 d’Or 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 Mohand’s 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 I’ve gained confidence in boxing, I’ve 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 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 d’Or (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 Pinochet’s 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 boxer’s 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 warrior’s 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 didn’t get it. But I didn’t have anyone. What I’ve done, I’ve 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 Goffman’s 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, you’re not a boxer. Beginner or world champion, it’s other people’s 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 men’s existence. This, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968[1964]: 139–140), 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 boxer’s 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 Mohand’s Kabyle murmurs, or, fist after fist, in Luis’s hand-to-hand fights against his past solitude, these 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 boxer’s gaze lies. These fighters look hard at a specific place on their opponent’s 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 Akim’s gaze lies, it is Mourad’s 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 they’re here! They haven’t come from the middle of nowhere for nothing! They sweated blood there! They give what hurts! There’s 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 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 fighter’s 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 Bhabha’s 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 mother’s French, my father’s 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, it’s difficult for an Arab. He mustn’t be good, he must be the best.’). 8 Through a movement that is inextricably individual and social at the same time, the Gants d’Or 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 Nassim’s career. He is over the age of 30 and does 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 d’Or, 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: ‘It’s OK, Nassim looks pretty laid back; he doesn’t seem too stressed’. Mohand replies:
You know, he’s got experience: more than 40 professional matches. But believe me, he’s stressed. He just copes with it better now than in the beginning, is all. That’s why he’s not alone either. It’s very important not to leave a boxer all alone before a fight. He always needs to be surrounded. Otherwise he broods, you see. And that’s not good when you start to worry … It’s 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, Mohand’s words remind me of the phrase Luis constantly repeats like a sentence pronounced upon the fighting body: ‘alone, you aren’t 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]: 96–97). 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: 41–47; Wacquant, 2004[2000]: 99; Woodward, 2008: 540–545). While this social construction cannot be outlined in detail here, the fact nonetheless remains that each boxer’s 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 d’Or, 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.
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 Nassim’s fellow boxers who spontaneously took it on board and linked it to each of their movements. As they symptomatically mimed each of Nassim’s 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 boxer’s 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 self-negations 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 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 d’Or 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 boxer’s 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 Loïc 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 one’s 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 one’s mirror image. The mimetic desire for victory – an object that cannot be shared – leads to the violence of confrontation where one’s 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.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Lucy Garnier and Susan Béraud for their help with writing this article in English.
Funding
This work was supported by the French National Research Agency under Grant ANR-12-JSH1-0008 (Socioresist project).