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Notes
Wacquant’s work has engaged and been engaged by scholars across the range of disciplines, from sociology, anthropology, and law to urban planning, cultural studies, ethnic studies, criminology, political science, public policy, geography, and philosophy. See, to give but one example, the three symposia on his book Urban Outcasts in the journals City (December 2007, March and June 2008), Urban Geography (In Press), and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (forthcoming), and the Author Meets Critics sessions on the book at the 2008 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association.
Bourdieu defines “habitus” as a system of schemata of perception, tacit knowledges, and abilities, born of patterned social influences and sedimented in the body. Habitus, Bourdieu argues, operates below the level of consciousness and reflexivity to guide our cognition and conduct. (See Bourdieu 1990, pp. 53, 56; see also Wacquant’s (2004c) compact recapitulation of the genealogy and functions of this oft-misunderstood concept.)
What uninformed readers miss is the analytical distinction between the pitfalls of ethnography (e.g., romanticism, sanitization, underdeveloped theory, and the linkage of micro-situations to larger structural trends) and the execution of Wacquant’s own work in relation to those challenges. See Wacquant (2002a,b).
See Wacquant (2008a), p. 9.
Wacquant (2005a) also discusses this strategy of combining writing styles in his “Carnal Connections,” his response to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology devoted to critiques of his book Body & Soul (vol. 28, no. 2, July 2005). Specifically, see pages 467–472. Nina Eliasoph (2005) discusses the contribution that Body & Soul makes to the question of writing, duly repressed in sociology, in her piece “Theorizing from the Neck Down: Why Social Research Must Understand Bodies Acting in Real Space and Time.”
See Hancock (2005, 2007) for elaborations. For recent inquiries taking up the carnal challenge of practical initiation as a means of ethnographic inquiry, see Auyero and Swistun (2007), Buchholtz (2006), Crossley (2004), Desmond (2007), Lande (2007), McRoberts (2004), Purser (2008), Scheffer (2008), Thiel (2007).
For a discussion of how the racial imagination manifests itself in everyday discourses, see Hancock (2008).
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Hancock, B.H. Following Loïc Wacquant into the Field. Qual Sociol 32, 93–99 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-008-9121-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-008-9121-1