“Punching is a sickness”: Temporal work, violence, and unsettled care among men who box in Accra

Abstract

Men who box professionally in Accra recognize that bouts are physically harmful and that they involve violently subordinating one another. Yet they also share a sense that bouts can be spaces of mutual becoming and affirmation. To navigate the tension between harm and affirmation, boxers and coaches couch their work between the ropes in idioms of care and mutual support. These idioms reflect their understanding that their lives and futures are mutually dependent and intertwined. Yet conflicting accounts of what constitutes appropriate care in the ring arise when boxing's violence is framed in relation to different imagined futures, and when mutual benefit is imagined to occur in the more or less distant future. In the boxing ring and beyond, divergent forms of temporal work animate the unsettled and ambiguous nature of care.