For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood

Abstract

This article elaborates the social ontology and methodology of carnal sociology as a distinctive mode of social inquiry eschewing the spectatorial posture to grasp action-in-the-making, in the wake of debates triggered by my apprenticeship-based study of boxing as a plebeian bodily craft. First I critique the notions of (dualist) agent, (externalist) structure, and (mentalist) knowledge prevalent in the contemporary social sciences and sketch an alternative conception of the social animal, not just as wielder of symbols, but as sensate, suffering, skilled, sedimented, and situated creature of flesh and blood. I spotlight the primacy of embodied practical knowledge arising out of and continuously enmeshed in webs of action and consider what modes of inquiry are suited to deploying and mining this incarnate conception of the agent. I argue that enactive ethnography, the brand of immersive fieldwork based on “performing the phenomenon,” is a fruitful path toward capturing the cognitive, conative, and cathectic schemata (habitus) that generate the practices and underlie the cosmos under investigation. But it takes social spunk and persistence to reap the rewards of “observant participation” and achieve social competency (as distinct from empirical saturation). In closing, I return to Bourdieu’s dialogue with Pascal to consider the special difficulty and urgency of capturing the “spirit of acuteness” that animates such competency but vanishes from normal sociological accounts.