Acknowledgements; Contents; Introduction; Part I In Private: Where the Blows Resound; Chapter 1 The Stranger: Portrait of the Boxer as a Young Man; The Boxers' Microcosm; A "Neighborhood" Accent; A "Foreign" Body?; At the Gym: Among One's Own?; In One's People's Name; The Indigène and the Sergeant; From One Training Room to Another; The Circle's Center and Periphery; Two Faces of the Working-Class World; Professional Boxers; A "Side Job"; What Their Fists Know About Fighting; Boxing Amateurs; Students Who "Put on Gloves"; Going Pro; Reasons for Joining; The Heirs of Immigrant Workers

Boxing as Resistance?Chapter 2 Incorporating the Novice: The Elementary Forms of the Boxing Experience; "Work Out!"; "Do What You Can, but Go All the Way!"; In All Lucidity: Enduring Pain; Embodying Boxing; From Virtual Nonexistence ...; ... To the Agonistic Affirmation of Oneself; Recognizing Oneself Among One's Own; Choosing the "Right People"; An Ethnomethodology of Boxing Selections; With and Against the Other: Boxing as "Enterprise of the Self"; Law of the Ring or Code of the Street?; "Tough Love" as a Group Response; Coda: The Writer, or the "Good for Nothing" Doctor

Chapter 3 The Punching Factory: Boxers and Daily LifeBoxing with Language: Putting Interactions into Words; Hand Games and Language Games; A Learned Irony; Code and Gender: An Ethnography of Conversational Exchange; Governing Bodies: A Behavioral Structure; "You've Got to Be There at 6:15 P.M.!"; Punches as an Ordering Principle; The Duties of the Ring; Acting Cohesively: A Phenomenology of Perceptions; Working Individually, Thinking Cohesively; Doing It Well: Reflecting (on) Hitting; Scaffolding the Practical Sense: An Experiential Transition

Chapter 4 When Boxers "Put on the Gloves": Sparring and the Limits of the Fighter's InstitutionalizationThe Institutionalization of Boxing and Its Limits; A Family Affair; Conceptual Considerations; Putting on the Gloves; At the Gym; Embodying Combat; A Sense for Practice: A Bodily Rhetoric of Honor; Modeling Action: Toward a Bodily Synthesis of the Effective Boxer; Educating the Emotions: Honoring One's Opponent; Violations, or the Negative Definition of Fighting's Boundaries; "Don't Get into the Ring to Be Pitiful!"; Sparring's "Deep Acting"

On Excellence's Positive Margins: The Art of Dancing Well in the Solitude of the FightA Clash of Skills; Expert Duels; Making Oneself "Hard to Pain"; Conclusion (at the Boundaries of Boxing's Institutionalization); The Gym and Its Organization: Toward Ethno(bio)graphy; Behavioral Structure and Phenomenology of Perception; Practical Sense and Reasons for Practice; Part II Facing the Other: Trials of the Self; Chapter 5 Counting the Blows: The Mark(s) of Exile; I'll Be a Pastor and a Boxer; Necessary Male(volence); Hot Blood, Cold Bold, and the Poles of the Sacred; There Are More Than Stones