Professional boxing offers hope of vast wealth and global mobility for aspiring athletes in Accra, hopes bolstered by the understanding that Ghanaians are particularly suited to boxing's attrition. However, when boxers become active in the global industry, they encounter power relations which locate them as cheap, subordinate labour, and stymie their championship hopes. As boxers build lives through the sport, they reflect critically on the role their hopes of 'making it big' play in perpetuating industry inequalities, recognizing what I call the ideological function of hope. Despite this, they remain committed to hopes of dramatic success. Their simultaneous optimism and cynicism complicates contemporary accounts of hope as a strategy of resilience in contexts of profound uncertainty. Building on ethnographic research with Accra boxers, I theorize hoping as a paradoxical experience of critique and optimism in equal measure, to account for the contradictory ways people act when orienting themselves towards better futures. Introduction: Aspirations forestalledAbraham 1 is a talented welterweight boxer who turned professional in 2013 at the age of 23, after representing Ghana at the World Amateur Championships. 2 If asked about his future in the sport, Abraham would explain that he planned to build up a winning record, fight abroad, win world titles, and become wealthy through boxing: a common constellation of aspirations for professional boxers in Accra. Abraham and I became close from 2014 to 2016 when we both trained at the Attoh Quarshie Boxing Gym in Accra's old centre, Ga Mashie; Abraham building his fledgeling career while I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Accra boxers.At the time, Floyd Mayweather, a vastly wealthy and unbeaten African-American boxer, was Accra boxers' principal icon of a masculinity associated with material wealth, conspicuous generosity, and global mobility (Hopkinson 2020; cf. Esson 2013). Like others, Abraham shared images on social media of Mayweather posing beside cars, private jets, expensive clothing, jewellery, and piles of cash; wore clothing branded with Mayweather's 'TMT' ('The Money Team') logo; and extolled his slick defensive style

This article explores the body and self engendered through a boxer's training, drawing on fieldwork conducted in boxing gyms in Montreal and Edinburgh. Contrary to contemporary anthropological accounts of the sport, I argue that training practices in these gyms instill a dualistic sense of self, evocative of Cartesian dualism. Paradoxically this is not alternative to, but concurrent with, a sense of embodied knowledge and selfhood in proficient boxers. Dualistic selfhood is traced throughout training regimes and in a boxer's progress from novice to experienced pugilist, considering the different practices developed and encountered during this progress. I conclude by problematizing the anthropological fear of the Cartesian body. By treating the Cartesian body as a philosophical mistake rather than a social reification, social scientists working with concepts of body and self risk creating a straw man that inhibits their capacity to analyze mind-body dualism as a social construct.

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From March to May 2020 in the UK, measures that became known across the world as ‘lockdown’ curtailed personal freedoms in order to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus. While initial criticisms of lockdown focused on the adverse impacts of social isolation on wellbeing, this research article explores how lockdown creates new and altered proximities and intimacies as well as distances. During the initial UK lockdown, the ‘household’ and ‘home’ were deployed in public rhetoric as default spaces of care and security in the face of widespread isolation and uncertainty. However, emergent proximities created by bringing people together in the assumed safety of home also deepened existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. Using anthropological theory, third sector evidence, and ethnographic interview data we explore this process. We argue that understanding proximity and intimacy as fundamentally ambivalent, not normatively affirming, is central to recognising how pandemic responses such as lockdown reinforce and reproduce existing forms of inequality and violence.