wood pushers

The expression "Pousseurs de bois" (Wood pushers) preserves still nowadays this depreciative nuance noted by Diderot because it is used by players to designate, literally, those which not hearing anything with the spirit of the Chess Game (the capital letters are necessary!) remain condemned to act only on the matter which composes the chess pieces. Also to use this expression, whatever its strange and exotic beauty, to introduce an ethnological observation of chess players could seem a priori somewhat unfortunate if this formula did not offer in fact a shortcut of the problematic pursued throughout this research. The objective is indeed to understand what implies from a social, cultural and cognitive point of view the chess practice in general and I have been careful, in this perspective, never to privilege the discourse of the "grandmasters" of the chessboard. Although they are - for the most part - neither "master" nor "grandmaster", the players I have studied, those I have observed, listened to, those with whom I have discussed, played..., do not fall into chess nullity because they challenge anyone who does not belong to their world. But they also know that inside the "chess world", they will never be safe from one of these judgments that pride often prefers not to hear.
These psychological investments do not appear from nowhere; they reveal in fact cultural values which are elaborated and crystallized during very concrete social interactions...