Les turbulences alimentaires

Abstract

Following the hypothesis that ultra-trail assumes a “disconcerting” function or even gives rise to “astructural” forms of state, we will show how eating, drinking, excreting during the race reveals and produces a break in habits and normality in an intensified space-time of individual and collective release. The interest is in emotional outbursts that nevertheless remain delimited in an organized, marked out and measured running space-time, similar to certain contemporary forms of institutionalized festivities. From an Eliasian perspective, we question the role played by a nourishment of the “extreme” in the release of emotions and impulses and, at the same time, dans the control of these. We will describe according to which ritualized stages the social and symbolic structure of daily life can be unbridled, if not reversed, dans favor of a paradoxical (dis)order between energizing reduction of nutrition, excessive, festive and regressive eating or, on the contrary, transgressive undernutrition. This dietary turbulence is therefore not an anomic phenomenon, but rather a suspension or even a subversion of the norms of “eating well” revealing the contrasting values of ultra.

Keywords

• deroutinization
• food
• endurance-trail
• (dis)control