ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the path that young, working-class 'boys' followed after being signed over to their 'master', the racehorse trainer as indentured apprentices. Indentured apprenticeship can be understood in terms of the acquisition of a gendered, classed and embodied racing habitus and how the ways of thinking, acting and being an indentured apprentice become conditioned and evolve through the processes involved in learning the skills required to work in racing. The 'practice' of becoming an indentured apprentice involved the assimilation of embodied knowledge, absorbed as part of the attitudes and dispositions of the habitus which consequently helped to shape present and future practices. Indentured apprenticeship in the racing industry, like apprenticeship in general, entailed learning a craft or trade and assimilating the cultural practices of a particular occupational field. Indentured apprenticeship was a transition from boy to man, which started with some of the initiation ceremonies which interviewees remember being subjected to and to which they in turn subjected others.
