Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the quotidian activity of walking to analyse the links between body, place and global industry. Walking is a practice of place-making for Accra’s boxing community, and my analysis of this process confounds the distinction between the ordinary and the exceptional in this urban space.

Paper long abstract:

The everyday act of walking through Ga Mashie, an area of central Accra, is an important process of place-making for Accra's boxing community. I focus on the long-standing association between boxing and this small area of Accra. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse walking as a quotidian process of creating affective bonds between persons and their environment. Walking through Ga Mashie facilitates encounters on a bodily scale between the boxing community and the public; encounters which are sought by both parties. In contrast, movement by other means, by car for instance, is considered spatially and socially distancing. Walking through Ga Mashie is an ethical practice of presence for the boxing community, which affirms both identity and place.

The association between boxing and this area is central to the pugilistic community's success in the global boxing industry. Thus pedestrian encounters become a way of engaging with the wider world. The exceptional is juxtaposed against the ordinary when pedestrians encounter renowned boxers in person beside material icons of the same sportsmen and women, such as posters and murals. In these everyday encounters the exceptional becomes banal, creating a sense of being in a place of global relevance.

I develop De Certeau and Ingold's approach to walking as a creative process of annunciation, and argue that place and identity emerge simultaneously as parts of a single phenomenon. This framework allows us to address the relationships between place, body and the global which are implicit in everyday practices.