LISTENING TO BOXING HEARTS AND BEATS: ANALYSING BOXING (THROUGH) SOUNDSCAPES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
Abstrakt
Boxing or the "sweet science" of bruising has over the years grasped the attention of many sociologists and ethnographers. While significant attention has been given to material, spatial and visual aspects of the social world of boxing, its sound dimension has remained widely overlooked and neglected.
In my analysis I look at different soundscapes produced around boxing to try to understand how this auditory approach can potentially bring us a different understanding of the cultures and social worlds studied. The analysis draws on multi-sited ethnography carried out in various boxing gyms in 4 Central and Eastern European countries (Czechia, Slovakia, Serbia, and Bulgaria) consisting of an ongoing, until today more than a year-long participant observation.
Stepping into the boxing gym means entering (literally and symbolically) a myth, a story, a narrative and being both shaped by it and shaping it. Together these myths craft the boxing identity and determine what boxing identities can be crafted. They are passed orally through the textual and verbal narratives of local and global boxing heroes, visual representations, but also through sounds and music. In my contribution I will look at how these soundscapes reflect, reproduce or question boxer's individual and collective - notably gender, class and ethnic - identities as well as how they mirror the broader societal context in which the pugilistic events take place.
This contribution thus argues for a more multisensory and embodied qualitative research. Such an approach would allow addressing the calls to analytically consider both embodied form and disembodied logic of socio-cultural practices (Stoller, 1989).
References:
Stoller, P. (1989). The taste of ethnographic things: The senses in anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press.