[ARETE] Neil Baxter, Running, Identity and Meaning

Wed Sep 22 19:19:59 CDT 2021

All,
Please find attached and below Carla Fenton's review of Neil Baxter, *Running,
Identity and Meaning: The Pursuit of Distinction Through Sport.*
Thanks
Duncan

*Running, Identity and Meaning: The Pursuit of Distinction Through Sport*

*Neil Baxter*

*Emerald Publishing, UK 2021*

Reviewed by Caela Fenton, University of Oregon

Running isn’t just a sport. While it can be a competitive activity, it can
also be a social one, a fitness method, a beauty practice, a way to
experience the outdoors, a weight-loss strategy, a form of transportation,
a mechanism for raising money for charity, and the list goes on.

This is the premise of why running is fascinating in Neil Baxter’s *Running,
Identity and Meaning: The Pursuit of Distinction Through Sport *(Emerald
2021). Baxter ambitiously attempts to encapsulate all the nooks and
crannies of this multiplicitous pastime. This is both a strength and
weakness of the text. While giving a compelling overview of running, the
text sometimes falls into the danger of somewhat unavoidable
overgeneralization.

Baxter’s research questions include: What do different forms of running
“mean?” How do the different ways of practicing running relate to one
another? And what identities do various iterations of running help support?
Drawing primarily from Bourdieu and Foucault as theoretical interlocutors,
Baxter argues that running’s contemporary popularity can be understood
through its relationship to key social norms and ideals of our era. It is a
“gendered, classed and ‘raced’ field, structured by values and principles
and specific local forms of physical capital that reflect and reinforce
these categories” (170).

Utilizing data from Sport England’s 2018 Active Lives Survey (ALS), his own
“Big Running Survey” (BRS) and interviews with twenty-one runners, Baxter
combines quantitative and qualitative analyses.

The chapter, “Researching Running: Embodiment, Lifestyle and Identity,”
provides the text’s theoretical scaffold regarding how running uses, shapes
and trains the body. Baxter conceptualizes running as a “field” in the
Bourdieusian sense—that it is not just a leisure, social, competitive
activity, but a “semi-autonomous field of consumption in its own right”
(21). This premise is key to understanding how runners “exhibit a clear set
of positions or distinctive ways of participating, with varying meanings
and measurable, structured social differences” (22).

In “The Evolution of a Field: A Brief History of Running as Sport in
Britain,” Baxter provides a historical overview of British running, paying
particular attention to two important transitions over the last two
centuries. The first transition was the “‘civilizing spurt’ of the
Victorian era,” during which running became a way to enact social position
through codified games and contests. The second, and likely more familiar
transition, was the “Jogging Boom” of the 60s/70s as it played out in
Britain.[1] <#_ftn1> Baxter carefully situates the first Jogging Boom
within the emergence of neoliberalism as the governing ideology of the
West— “install[ing] the individual, competition and economic success as the
overriding values of mainstream society” (52). Running’s second boom
(~2000), while generally increasing participation in women and non-white
populations, remained entrenched in embodied neoliberalism.

In “Running the Numbers: Quantitative Insights and a Map of the Field,”
Baxter undertakes analysis of the ALS and BRS quantitative data. Findings
affirm previous assertions that gender is the primary factor influencing
sporting practice today. Though running as a broad category has a fairly
balanced gender ratio, the *way* running is practiced (i.e. socially,
competitively, as a fitness practice) is gendered. Similarly, though
running as a whole seems to have ethnic diversity proportional to the
overall demographics of the English population, non-white participants are
concentrated in track and underrepresented in iterations such as fell
running (similar to trail/mountain running) and obstacle course racing.
Overall, runners are consistently highly educated and middle/upper class.

“Disciplining the Body and Mind: Running as a Technique of the Self”
examines how the ways in which the body is disciplined/cared for contribute
to the reproduction of class and gender identities and their “moral
hierarchicalization” in a world increasingly obsessed with the entangled
discourse of “health and fitness” (and those as codes for thinness).
Baxter’s interviewees made frequent references to the ideal “runner’s body”
or “running body” as thin, toned, lean, etc. While Baxter’s analysis begins
to examine the history/context for contemporary idealization of thin/toned
bodies, this is one of the areas in which taking on all of running (versus
just recreational or just competitive) may have been too much. Baxter
relates the frequency with which weight loss and the “runner’s body” was
framed as an aesthetic concern by women runners, while weight loss and the
“runner’s body was framed as a competitive/performance concern for men. The
scope of his study results in statements such as the following:

[...] it is possible to describe running that prioritizes the *aesthetic*
correlates of health and fitness as essentially feminised and running
focused on competition and the *performance* of fitness as essentially
masculinised. Both orientations revolve around imbuing the body with forms
of physical capital that are a source of distinction in a society that
places a high value on the slim, fit body. The key difference though is
that feminised running can be understood as organized around the accrual of
aesthetic capital, whereas masculinised running centres more on the
achievement and display of specifically sporting, athletic capital. These
two forms of physical capital are strongly correlated, but are conceptually
distinct and have very different values within and outside the field. 107

I worry that the broadness of addressing running in its entirety leads to
an oversimplification of gender pressures. Broadly, women face more
cultural pressure to enact thinness than do men, however the explicitly
gendered nature of these pressures is not fulsomely addressed (see, for
example Bordo 2003). It also elides the harm potentially inflicted by the
use of the term “runner’s body” and its connection to rampant disordered
eating cultures within competitive running.

“The Price and the Meaning of Success: Training, Competition and
Performance” does account more specifically for the competitive iteration
of running. Of particular note is Baxter’s finding that all of the
competitive women runners he spoke with shared similar experiences of being
exposed to the sport at a young age, having strong parental support and
opportunities to compete at the school or club level. This demonstrates
that rather than an inherent preference of women to run ‘for fun!’ and men
to ‘race,’ early exposure to competitive sporting environments (which tends
to be more common for men) is key.

“Running Places: How the Sites of Running Matter” explores the social and
cultural differences correlated with the main settings of running—the
roads, the track, rural settings and obstacle courses.

Focused exclusively on Britain, readers who approach the text from other
national perspectives will need to remind themselves of contextual
differences (ex: this is why collegiate athletics is not emphasized), as
well as terminological ones (ex: the term “fell running”). This text is
recommended for sport researchers of running and those interested in
embodied neoliberalism and the meanings of fit bodies.

------------------------------

[1] <#_ftnref1> For more on the Jogging Boom from an American context, see
Alan Latham’s “The history of a habit: Jogging as a palliative for
sedentariness in 1960s America” in *cultural geographies*.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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