[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[Martin Packer]

On Jan 4, 2018, at 4:19 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Boxing was abolished in Russia and China as a gladiatorial form
> of entertainment in which the patricians still preyed on the plebeians. For
> reasons I never really understood, the German communists felt very
> differently about it. But I am Chinese, I guess: I don't think boxing or
> wrestling should be legal, much less legal "entertainment". Shouldn't a
> critical cultural anthropology be able to look at cultural pathologies and
> diagnose them? What is the point of an oncologist who interprets the
> symptoms only in order to celebrate the cancer?

Good questions, David. On my reading, Wacquant’s analysis is very much a ‘critical’ one, in the sense of being sensitive to exploitation and inequity, and also exploring the conditions for the possibility of the phenomenon he is exploring: how someone becomes a boxer - and why?

Wacquant rejects the simple view that boxers must be unethical people (men, largely) because they train for a violent sport. His aim is to show that being a boxer (the ontological complicity of a person with that form of life) has an instrumental aspect, an aesthetic aspect, and an ethical aspect. There is an “ontological transcendence” involved. He bases this analysis on his own experience training to box, and on the ways the boxers talked with him, the things they said - their representations of the boxing life, from the inside, as it were. He concludes that being a boxer makes sense; it is a valid life to which to dedicate oneself.

At the same time, he does not simply accept this single side of the way the boxers talk. He describes, in a coda to his “point of view” article, how their ambivalence and inquietude also became evident. And in another article, titled "A fleshpeddler at work: Power, pain, and profit in the prizefighting economy,” he describes precisely the ways fighters are exploited, and become meat for the prizefighting machinery.

His concern, one might say, is not to blame the victims, while at the same time disclosing with excoriating prose the horrifying system in which they are trying to make a living, and striving to make a life.

I’ve attached the “point of view” article: everyone should have it!  :)

Martin