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The Age of Fitness - How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
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The Age of Fitness - How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement (Hardcover)
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Loot Price R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R476
Discovery Miles: 4 760
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We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run
marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms,
cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in
competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just
want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In
this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern
preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in
the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was
interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and
renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues,
that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our
contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to
work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind.
Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining
network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions
and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural
repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of
life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed
in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to
success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that
sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and
competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested
in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the
conditions of success and failure in our societies today.
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