Loïc Wacquant
Encyclopedia
Loïc Wacquant
Loïc Wacquant (born 1960 in Montpellier
, France
) is a sociologist
, specializing in urban sociology
, urban poverty
, racial inequality, the body
, social theory
and ethnography
.
Wacquant is currently a Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley
, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris. He has been a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows
, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation
Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association
.
Wacquant was born and grew up in Southern France, and he received his training in economics
and sociology in France and the United States. He was a student and close collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu
. He also worked closely with William Julius Wilson
at the University of Chicago
, where he received his PhD in 1994. Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology, anthropology
, urban studies, social theory and philosophy
. He is also co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography as well as a collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique
. His primary research has been conducted in the ghettos of South Chicago
, in the Paris banlieue
, and in jails of the United States and Brazil
.
In his work, "Deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh" in Punishment and Society 3(1) (pp 95–134), he offers a middle-range theory, relevant mainly to American racism against blacks in contemporary society. According to Wacquant, African-Americans now live "in the first prison society of history" (p. 121). The 'hyperghetto' constitutes the fourth stage in the development of 'peculiar institutions', following (sequentially) slavery, Jim Crow
, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental encouragement. As Wacquant vividly characterises it: the prison should be viewed as a judicial ghetto and the ghetto as an extra-judicial prison. Taken together, these constitute part of a 'carceral continuum'. To understand this concept, Wacquant argues for a single analytical frame unifying expansive 'prisonfare' and attenuating workfare, resulting in a deepening marginalisation and social and political subordination of stigmatised and defamed 'surplus' populations. Inspired by Bourdieu, Wacquant analyses the structural constraints and consequences, but like Bourdieu endeavours to provide a more nuanced analysis than, for example, a reductionist Marxian economic analysis (cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure
(see Wikipedia article), referenced by Wacquant in his Punishing the Poor (2009)).
The ghetto
and the prison
are now locked in a whirlpool, when it is no longer clear which is the egg and which is the chicken: the two look the same and have the same function (p. 115). The life in the ghetto almost necessarily leads to more criminal behavior, yet Wacquant presents statistics that show that the distribution of crime between black and white has not changed. Instead he shows that a black, young, man is now "equated with 'probable cause' justifying the arrest" (p. 117). And in the prisons, a black culture is being reinforced by "professional" inmates, a culture which later affects the street.
In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Wacquant denounces popular mainstream conceptions of the underclass
and argues that the boxing gym is one of the many institutions that is contained within, and opposed, to the ghetto. He also explores, through an account of his own experiences as an apprentice boxer in a black ghetto of Chicago, the elaborate process by which the "body capital" of these athletes is formed and managed, and in doing so, building upon the work of his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, he argues convincingly for the development of a 'carnal sociology'.
Loïc Wacquant (born 1960 in Montpellier
Montpellier
-Neighbourhoods:Since 2001, Montpellier has been divided into seven official neighbourhoods, themselves divided into sub-neighbourhoods. Each of them possesses a neighbourhood council....
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
) is a sociologist
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, specializing in urban sociology
Urban sociology
Urban sociology is the sociological study of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing so providing inputs for planning and policy making. Like...
, urban poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
, racial inequality, the body
Human body
The human body is the entire structure of a human organism, and consists of a head, neck, torso, two arms and two legs.By the time the human reaches adulthood, the body consists of close to 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life...
, social theory
Social theory
Social theories are theoretical frameworks which are used to study and interpret social phenomena within a particular school of thought. An essential tool used by social scientists, theories relate to historical debates over the most valid and reliable methodologies , as well as the primacy of...
and ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
.
Wacquant is currently a Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris. He has been a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows
Harvard Society of Fellows
The Harvard Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginning of their careers by Harvard University for extraordinary scholarly potential, upon whom distinctive academic and intellectual opportunities are bestowed in order to foster their individual growth and intellectual...
, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation
Fletcher Foundation
The Fletcher Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that supports civil rights and environmental education. It was created with a $50 million endowment in 2004 by New York financier and philanthropist Alphonse Fletcher, Jr....
Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...
.
Wacquant was born and grew up in Southern France, and he received his training in economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
and sociology in France and the United States. He was a student and close collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
. He also worked closely with William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He worked at the University of Chicago 1972-1996 before moving to Harvard....
at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, where he received his PhD in 1994. Wacquant has published more than a hundred articles in journals of sociology, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, urban studies, social theory and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. He is also co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography as well as a collaborator of Le Monde Diplomatique
Le Monde diplomatique
Le Monde diplomatique is a monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first created mainly for a diplomatic audience as its name implies...
. His primary research has been conducted in the ghettos of South Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, in the Paris banlieue
Banlieue
In francophone areas, banlieues are the "outskirts" of a city: the zone around a city that is under the city's rule.Banlieues are translated as "suburbs", as these are also residential areas on the outer edge of a city, but the connotations of the term "banlieue" in France can be different from...
, and in jails of the United States and Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
.
Research
Wacquant's work explores and links together diverse areas of research on the body, urban inequality, ghettoization, and the development of punishment as an institution aimed at poor and stigmatized populations. His intellectual trajectory and interests are dissected in the article "The Body, the Ghetto, and the Penal State" (2008)In his work, "Deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh" in Punishment and Society 3(1) (pp 95–134), he offers a middle-range theory, relevant mainly to American racism against blacks in contemporary society. According to Wacquant, African-Americans now live "in the first prison society of history" (p. 121). The 'hyperghetto' constitutes the fourth stage in the development of 'peculiar institutions', following (sequentially) slavery, Jim Crow
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental encouragement. As Wacquant vividly characterises it: the prison should be viewed as a judicial ghetto and the ghetto as an extra-judicial prison. Taken together, these constitute part of a 'carceral continuum'. To understand this concept, Wacquant argues for a single analytical frame unifying expansive 'prisonfare' and attenuating workfare, resulting in a deepening marginalisation and social and political subordination of stigmatised and defamed 'surplus' populations. Inspired by Bourdieu, Wacquant analyses the structural constraints and consequences, but like Bourdieu endeavours to provide a more nuanced analysis than, for example, a reductionist Marxian economic analysis (cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure
Punishment and Social Structure
Punishment and Social Structure , a book co-authored by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, is the seminal Marxian analysis of punishment as a social institution...
(see Wikipedia article), referenced by Wacquant in his Punishing the Poor (2009)).
The ghetto
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...
and the prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
are now locked in a whirlpool, when it is no longer clear which is the egg and which is the chicken: the two look the same and have the same function (p. 115). The life in the ghetto almost necessarily leads to more criminal behavior, yet Wacquant presents statistics that show that the distribution of crime between black and white has not changed. Instead he shows that a black, young, man is now "equated with 'probable cause' justifying the arrest" (p. 117). And in the prisons, a black culture is being reinforced by "professional" inmates, a culture which later affects the street.
In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Wacquant denounces popular mainstream conceptions of the underclass
Underclass
The term underclass refers to a segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class. The general idea that a class system includes a population under the working class has a long tradition in the social sciences...
and argues that the boxing gym is one of the many institutions that is contained within, and opposed, to the ghetto. He also explores, through an account of his own experiences as an apprentice boxer in a black ghetto of Chicago, the elaborate process by which the "body capital" of these athletes is formed and managed, and in doing so, building upon the work of his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, he argues convincingly for the development of a 'carnal sociology'.
Publications
- Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (1999) Penal ’common sense’ comes to Europe - US exports zero tolerance April 1999 Le Monde DiplomatiqueLe Monde diplomatiqueLe Monde diplomatique is a monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first created mainly for a diplomatic audience as its name implies...
. (original french version, ita version) - Wacquant, Loïc (November 1999) Prisons of Poverty. Paris: Raisons d'agir.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2004) Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of An Apprentice-Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2005) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Polity Press.
- Wacquant, Loïc (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.