In the Shadow of the Other: Boxing, Everyday Struggles and the Feeling of Strangeness

Abstract

On the basis of an ethnography of a group of boxers, this article questions pugilism as an experience of confrontation with the other, the reasons and effects of which lie beyond the ring. Using the boxers’ words to explain their everyday struggles, this article seeks to describe fighting figures by placing them in the full depth of their biographical paths. These boxers share the experience of immigration and their life stories have all been marked by profound feelings of strangeness, understood as a social disqualification of otherness that causes deep and private wounds. Like the shadow of the other, hanging over the ‘conversations of gestures’, the boxers’ wounds and the violence of their biographical paths can help explain how they experience their fights, through the idea of a bodily response to all the hardships they have endured, well beyond the ring and its rounds.