The Business of a Flesh-Merchant: Passion, Power, and Profit in the Economy of Boxing

France has witnessed a significant rise in the recourse to sub-contracting over the last twenty years. The article is the result of an inquiry carried out by way of observation and participation in a boxing club located on the outskirts of Chicago’s South Side, close to the University of Chicago. The paper focuses on the matchmaker as a particular figure in the world of boxing. A close study of what is a crucial function in the world of boxing sheds light on the way the milieu of boxing operates in its recruitment of young underprivileged Afro-Americans with a view to turning them into competent boxers. In his role as an intermediary, the function of the matchmaker is to oversee the encounter between supply and demand in what, to a large extent, is the body market of boxing. As the individual around whom all the transactions revolve, the matchmaker is the figure on whom the milieu’s various tensions and oppositions are projected. Regarded as an exploiter and a body-trafficker by most of the young men whom he hires, his peers deem him “an honest businessman.” He thus epitomizes the general economy of boxing, here understood as a system of exchange of bodies, incorporated within a system of social relations, requiring both the general collaboration of its subjects and the celebration of the success of certain individuals at the expense of others. The article thus puts forward an empirically grounded economic anthropology based on the exchange and the wearing-away of what is the most precious possession of those young candidates for success: their own bodies.