Katie Hejtmanek launches "The Cult of CrossFit," with Jillian R. Cavanaugh

Author Katie Rose Hejtmanek will be in conversation with anthropologist Jillian R. Cavanaugh, followed by a book signing and reception.

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CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the people devoted to it. CrossFit claims to be many things: a business, a brand, a tremendously difficult fitness regimen, a community, a way to gain salvation, and a method to survive the apocalypse. In The Cult of CrossFit, Katie Rose Hejtmanek examines how this exercise program is shaped by American Christian values and practices, connecting American religious ideologies to secular institutions in contemporary American culture.

Drawing upon years of immersing herself in CrossFit gyms in the United States and across six continents, this book illustrates how US CrossFit operates using distinctly American codes, ranging from its intensity and patriarchal militarism to its emphasis on (white) salvation and the adoration of the hero and vigilante. Despite presenting itself as a secular space, Hejtmanek argues that CrossFit is both heavily influenced by and deeply intertwined with American Christian values. She makes the case that the Christianity that shapes CrossFit is the Christianity that shapes much of America, usually in ways we do not even notice. Offering a new cross-cultural perspective for understanding a popular workout, The Cult of CrossFit provides a window into a particularly American rendition of a Christian plotline, lived out one workout at a time.

Advance Praise for The Cult of Crossfit

"Building on impressive ethnographic evidence, Katie Hejtmanek has provided brilliant insights into how Christianity in America is tied to the meaning that followers of CrossFit find in their regimen and community. By drawing on narrative analysis and other methods she has made an important contribution to anthropology and several other disciplines." —James V. Wertsch, Washington University in St. Louis

"Guides the reader through the American cultural imagination—a landscape populated by superheroes and animated by apocalyptic fantasies—as it infuses the experiences and beliefs of people enduring notoriously rugged, demanding CrossFit workouts. . . . Impressively, Hejtmanek submitted her own body to this grinding regimen. . . . The result is a fascinating and brave ethnography that generates profound insights into the spiritual sensibilities and class ideologies that inform this fitness empire." —John Hartigan, University of Texas at Austin

"Based on the deepest form of participant observation, Hejtmanek’s ethnography of CrossFit has such vividness and immediacy that a reader can feel the effort and smell the sweat. She compellingly weaves together themes including cultural Christianity’s hegemonic influence, militarism and violent intensity, science and pseudo-science, masculinity and superheroes, salvation and the apocalypse, the frontier and libertarianism, heteronormative whiteness and garage capitalism." —Thomas J. Csordas, University of California, San Diego

Katie Rose Hejtmanek is Professor of Anthropology and Children and Youth Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is a cultural anthropologist, who studies cultures and communities of self-transformation. She is the author of Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop: An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody and co-editor of Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist. She is also a world and national champion in masters weightlifting.

Jillian R. Cavanaugh is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brooklyn College CUNY and the Anthropology Program at the Graduate Center CUNY. She is a linguistic anthropologist, who studies language and culture, as well as food and its cultural meaning and production. She has written about language and social transformation, materiality, aesthetics, gender, and the value of heritage food. She does her research in northern Italy, and received her PhD in anthropology at New York University.

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