Entering scapeland: yoga, fell and post-sport physical cultures

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic data collected among Ashtanga yoga practitioners in Canada and fell runners in the United Kingdom as a means of discussing the lived phenomenological experience of ‘scapelands’, and post-sport lifestyles. 1 1 Lyotard Lyotard, J-F. 1989. “Scapeland”. In The Lyotard Reader, Edited by: Benjamin, A. 212–9. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. [Google Scholar], ‘Scapeland’. The men and women with whom I participate in these athletic ‘heterotopias’ share incredibly similar penchants for being projected into athletic contexts of existential throwness as a response to late-modern boundary-crossing tendencies.2 2 Foucault Foucault, M. ‘Of Other Spaces’ [1967]. Reprinted in Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–7 [Google Scholar], ‘Of Other Spaces’. In particular, they share preferences for entire physical cultural styles of life which consciously subvert the idea that health, movement and athletics are merely technological or rational modernist ‘things’. As interpreted through the lens of intertwined post-structuralist theories in this paper, fell-running and Ashtanga practitioners purposefully immerse themselves into the loosely defined wilderness of the outdoors, or wilderness of the meditative mind. Á la Foucault, their participation in the respective sporting scapelands becomes a lifestyle technique for engaging alternative ethics of self care in boundary crossing, and boundary imploding, societies.3 3 Foucault Foucault, M. ‘Of Other Spaces’ [1967]. Reprinted in Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–7 [Google Scholar], ‘Of Other Spaces’