Speaker
Description
Various forms of recreational sports entail self-inflicted pain and suffering that can be experienced by practitioners as emotionally and spiritually uplifting. Building on the ethnographic example of a small but growing community of recreational ultrarunners in Estonia, this paper scrutinises the moral language that runners use to make sense of the pain and suffering that running extended distances often entails. In many respects, ultrarunning events are ritualised occasions for performing technologies of the self that, according to Foucault (1985), can be understood as consisting of various practices and techniques that individuals, drawing from available and imagined cultural models, perform on themselves to become moral subjects. Sensations of extreme exhaustion, severe physical pain, or sleep deprivation – common effects of ultrarunning – constitute “bodily affordances” (Gibson 1986) in this self-making process. Capacity and one’s willingness to withstand these sensations, and the self-discipline required when training for and enduring ultrarunning events, can, in turn, be interpreted as “ethical affordances” (Keane 2016) that provide the runners with legitimate means and values for the process of ethical self-making through extreme physical as well as mental effort. But ultrarunning can also engender new sensations on “the edge of experience” such as visions, voices, novel ways of perceiving oneself, nature and life in general. These intimate sensations, often deemed as “almost mystical,” figure prominently in the moral language of the runners, and their descriptions rely heavily on spiritual and also animistic vocabulary.
