Fitness Cultures

3 credits · Undergraduate

From the meteoric rise of pickleball, to the global commodification of yoga, to Taylor Swift practicing her Eras Tour set on a treadmill, fitness is an inescapable facet of contemporary global culture. Drawing on historical and anthropological perspectives, this course examines fitness as an evolving social category shaped by state projects, health sciences, capitalism, gender, race, and everyday practice. We ask: what does it mean to be "fit," and who gets to decide? To address these questions, we begin with the shifting meanings of "fitness" from Darwinist evolutionary theory to the contemporary fitness industry, asking how the term has moved from survival and reproduction to heart-rate monitors, treadmill desk routines, and CrossFit-type exercise brands. Students will acquire ethnographic and theoretical tools to analyze "fit" populations, "fit" bodies, and sites of contestation, including disability justice, body positivity, fat studies, and queer and feminist critiques. We will explore how fitness is entangled with aspiration, morality, labor, and citizenship, while also paying attention to the pleasures, pains, and politics of moving bodies. During the course, students will have the opportunity to conduct ethnographic work in a fitness space of their choosing, situating the communities and practices that come together there within anthropological debates about embodiment, discipline, ritual, and biopolitics. By the end of the course, students will have developed an historical and theoretical grounding in the anthropology of fitness, as well as critical lenses to consider the many ways bodies are trained, celebrated, and debated in everyday life.