Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fell Running and Voluptuous Panic: On Caillois and Post-Sport Physical Culture.

2011; The Strong; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1938-0399

Michael Atkinson,

Sports, Gender, and Society

As many cultural groups in Western societies have become disaffected with mainstream sports cultures and their logics of practice, sociologists of sport and physical culture have turned their attention to the existential benefits of play and games. There is growing interest in revisiting and exploring the classic theories of play in society, including those of Roger Caillois. The author considers the increasingly popular practice of fell running among a group of enthusiasts in the United Kingdom as an activity that playfully embraces and celebrates the voluptuous panic of ilinx activities. He argues that fell running is not a pure form of ilinx as defined by Caillois but that the sport’s willful—and highly pleasurable—disruption of the mind and body through vertigo and panic fits Caillois’s description of the benefits of play and games. Using ethnographic data about fell runners collected during two years in the United Kingdom, the author suggests that they make existential connections with time, space, and the elements through the voluptuous panic and animal mimicry described by Caillois and others. Key words : Roger Caillois; fell running; ilinx; physical-cultural studies; post-sport physical culture; voluptuous panic Getting [Theoretically] Stuck in the Fells To think, let alone write , about the connection between so-called high-performance athletics and existential pleasure is almost antithetical in academic work. I speak quite regularly with colleagues in sport and exercisescience programs who unabashedly admit that elite-level or “serious-leisure” (Stebbins 2006) sports bear little resemblance to the pursuit of physical health or to the experience of emotional pleasures (besides those, perhaps, stirred by the vanquishing of an opponent). High-performance sports and athletic cultures are typically characterized by a small range of human emotions and experiences (Kerr 2004). But many people engage in the willful abandonment of personal control through intense, sports-like physicality and by placing themselves in athletic contexts that stir doubt, uncertainty, thrills, and anxiety. The literature