Chicago fade : putting the researcher’s body back into play

The second piece of the series depicts a highly meaningful incident of physical interaction outside the ring while the ethnographer was conducting fieldwork in a boxing gym, tracking the fabrication of the pugilistic habitus through apprenticeship (Wacquant, 2004). In a painful haircutting session, the author receives not only a black‐American style fade , but confirmation of his full membership in the group. This text emphasizes the fundamental importance of accounting for ethnographer’s lived experience as intersubjective and embodied; it is through our lived bodies in action that we relate to the world that is shared with the informants (Merleau‐Ponty, 1962; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Crossley, 1996). Here ethnography emerges as a corporeal activity that plumbs the processes through which knowledge of a particular culture becomes acquired and deployed, the researcher being an active, socially constituted agent producing effects in the field (Wacquant, 2009). Paula Lökman, Scenes and Sounds Editor