ABSTRACT

Contemporary western cities are full of people engaging in exercise, sport, and fitness-related activities. The scope of these activities is broad, and includes such relatively solitary practices as walking, running, and jogging; collective field sports like cricket, football, and softball; and a range of somatic movement-practices such as dance, t’ai chi, and yoga. Yet despite their diversity, these activities all share a number of characteristics. Perhaps most obviously, they all work upon and modify the capacities of bodies in some way: to that extent they can each be understood to focus attention on the somatic dimensions of experience. They also all involve the mobilization and monitoring of effort and exertion: in other words, to engage in them demands some kind of corporeal work and the expenditure of energy, even if the level and intensity of this expenditure varies enormously. Furthermore, most (if not all) foreground kinaesthetic experience: that is, each involves and generates the sense of movement through space, even if the range and scope of this movement varies enormously – from the scale of miles to the micro-gestural.