Fell Running and Voluptuous Panic: On Caillois and Post-Sport Physical Culture.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".