Running for : A Performance of Social Reproduction

Hannah Borenstein Doctoral Candidate Duke University

RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 2

Running for Ethiopia: A Performance of Social Reproduction

Abstract

The following analysis draws on social reproduction theory to show how a fan base of amateur athletes who visit Ethiopia contribute to the social and material reproduction of Ethiopian athletics, while simultaneously putting the work of social reproduction onto the athletes. I argue the tourists constitute a larger class of post-industrial white-collar workers that have become mass consumers of exercise and health. Both run for Ethiopia. As the Ethiopian performance of an expected authentic training experience provides conditions of reproduction, the white-collar workers find sights of emotional relief and rejuvenation by feeling charitable and as though they have had an authentic athletic experience. This transnational schema of co-constitutive reproduction serves to make clear how multi-national corporations that form the basis of new forms of consumption can profit, while the work of social reproduction is done by different classes of working people at the same time.

Key words: running, Ethiopia, social reproduction theory, athletes

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“More guys are coming this week,” Binyiam had told me in July 2017, after finishing a run in , Ethiopia. “Maybe 20, 30 people. White people. Spanish guys.” By more, he means a lot. “Why are they coming?,” I ask. “To bring shoes, socks, shirts. Many shoes. Athletes, from Addis, will come,” he says. “They only come to bring shoes?,” I ask. Binyiam laughs. “Well, they like to see the forest, see the runners, take some photos. But they bring a lot of materials,” he says, opening his arms out wide.

My friend, Binyiam, who was doing some light training in Bekoji because he was in the off-season at his club in another city, was referring to Runners for Ethiopia. “Viajar a Etiopía” (“Runners for Ethiopia”) is a group comprised of runners from all levels throughout Spain, who, since 2013, have been making a pilgrimage to Ethiopia to train at high altitude, meet Ethiopian athletes, and donate materials to “underserved runners.” According to their website, they bring over “400 pairs of shoes, 2000 shirts, 500 pants, 400 pairs of socks, 400 gym bags, and 100 singlets, to donate to athletes.” But, also according to their website, they come to experience the “Ethiopian aura,” the “authenticity” that accompanies the country’s “ethnic richness” and “tribal ancestral traditions,” by “knowing the country through its most famous sport and contributing a grain of sand in the improvement of the material conditions of the autochthonous runners.”1

The desire to “see the forest, see the runners, take some photos,” as Binyam said, is one that has now been documented repeatedly, time and again with little variation since the 1960s, when the figure of the “East African runner” began to be globally produced and reproduced. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall points out in his essay “The Spectacle of the Other” that analyzing the representational practice of black athletes is a useful place to understand how the dynamics of “racialized fixing” take place in popular culture:

Meaning ‘floats.’ It cannot be finally fixed. However, attempting to ‘fix’ it is the work of a representational practice, which intervenes in the many potential meanings of an image in an attempt to privilege one.2

Exploring early barefoot Ethiopian champions and attributions to high altitude living and training, this essay - based off of ethnographic fieldwork in 20173 - considers the co-constitutive modes of social reproduction that allow this “fixing” to take hold.

1 Viajar a Etiopía. Retrieved from https://runnersforethiopia.com/. 2 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the “Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 228. 3 A brief note on methodology: On my third trip to Ethiopia, I decided to spend a few weeks in Bekoji - a famous place of which I had heard about but not yet visited. I was staying there training with a few athletes and talking to some people who worked at the Girls Gotta Run Foundation, athletes at the training camp, and people who worked at one of the main hotels. I learned, as indicated in the opening vignette, of Runners for Ethiopia’s arrival about a week into my stay and remained in Bekoji to witness the interactions of the tourists in this town. I had been running with a few athletes in the weeks prior and witnessed an abrupt transformation in the few days leading up to their arrival, as well as the performance documented below. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 4

The following analysis explores the ways in which a fan base of amateur athletes who visit Ethiopia contribute to the social and material reproduction of Ethiopian athletics, while simultaneously putting the work of social reproduction onto the athletes themselves. However, unlike the fan base of a specific team or location, the Spanish tourists here, I argue, constitute a larger class of fitness-crazed white-collar4 workers that have become mass consumers of exercise technology, road race registration, and athletic shoes and clothing apparel, upon which multi- national corporations derive immense profit. I detail how the Ethiopian performance of an expected authentic training experience provides conditions of reproduction whereby the white- collar workers find sights of emotional relief and rejuvenation by feeling charitable and feeling as though they have had an authentic athletic experience. As a result, the work done by Ethiopian athletes creates a material stream of shoes, clothes, money, and other gifts that also allows the athletes to continue working in their sport. I contend that this transnational schema of co- constitutive reproduction, while reproducing class inequalities, may shed light on ways of more clearly seeing how multinational corporations can profit while the work of social reproduction is done by different classes of working people at the same time.

Running through Theory

I draw on genealogies of Marxist social reproduction to foreground my argument, and specifically ones that take into account newer modes of neoliberal production and labor. In Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, he noted that the worker - upon whose value is turned into profit - must have her “natural needs” met in order to continuously return to work each day, ensuring that her labor power - her capacity to work - is upheld.5 Theorists who have foregrounded Marx’s brief foray into ideal social reproduction as their central object of inquiry have expanded thinking about social reproduction beyond the work of physical maintenance - providing food, clothing, and shelter - to mental and emotional realms - providing love, care, entertainment, and desire necessary to reproducing workers.6

4 I use the term “white-collar” to denote a global class distinction. However, while I think class categories are important analytical tools, I recognize that, within groups, the distinctions between white and blue- collar workers are often over-simplified. Thus, while following Carla Freeman, it is important to note that distinctions between blue, pink, and white-collar workers ought to be untangled. For the sake of showing how social reproduction theory works throughout this article, I use the term to build off of Lucia Trimbur’s work. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Lucia Trimbur, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 275. 6 Marx primarily focused on commodity production and opened up the question about who produces the worker and specifically the production of labor power. Marxist feminists have been keen to take up this question for political aims. In the 1970s in particular, activists and scholars sought to bring attention to the centrality of “gendered work” and “reproductive labor” - like housework, emotional support, childcare, biological reproduction, etc., which was foundational in both bringing to light the fallible separation of private and public spheres. See Nicole Cox & Sylvia Federici, Counter-Planning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework (New York: Falling Wall Press, 1976); Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (New York: Falling Wall Press, RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 5

While the work of social reproduction remains an important part of capital accumulation, it continues to take on new forms as new modes of accumulation have followed. Tithi Bhatthacharya urges us to consider other social relationships and institutions central to social reproduction. Wanting to completely abandon the notion of separate spheres of production and reproduction, Bhattacharya compels us to “revise the commonsense perception that capital relinquishes all control over the worker when she leaves the workplace.”7 In doing so, this collapses the ideas of spheres all together, showing how paid and unpaid, appreciated and disparaged, work and leisure are always in social relation to one another. According to Bhattacharya, this is a necessary imperative because it is “the attack by capital on global labor to try and restructure production in the workplaces and the social processes of reproduction of labor power in homes, communities, and the niches of everyday life.”8

The meshed spaces of professional and amateur sport, and work and leisure, are indeed areas in which thinking through theories of social reproduction and capitalism prove worthwhile, especially as cultural commodities like entertainment, sport, and media have become so centered around services that people do rather than the commodities they produce. Nathan Kalman-Lamb analyzes a particular form of labor that is often paid, and sometimes highly paid - athletic labor - as central to the social reproduction that cares for a broader laboring class. Kalman-Lamb turns to sport fandom as a way of reading class relations and economic processes. Fans and spectators, he argues, foreground an important process of identity formation in which people may feel, if only at times, outside the grasp of the alienation that neoliberal capitalism can so forcefully enact on market actors. The fan base offers something “particularly coveted in a capitalist context: the possibility of meaning in the form of community.”9

1972); Sylvia Federici, Wages against Housework (New York: Falling Wall Press, 1975). This produced rifts within feminist thought for inadequately addressing forms of often racialized domestic work that was indeed paid (while underpaid). See bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1981); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004); Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: First Vintage Books, 1983). For later migratory dimensions of exploited work, see Sedef Arat-Koç, Caregivers Break the Silence: A Participatory Actions Research on the Abuse and Violence, Including the Impact of Family Separation Experienced by Women in the Live-In Caregiver Program (Toronto: INTERCEDE, 2001); Adelle Blackett, Everyday Transgressions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019); Carmen Teeple Hopkins, “Work Intensifications, Injuries, and Legal Exclusions for Paid Domestic Workers in Montreal, Quebec,” A Journal of Feminist Geography 24 (2017): 201-212. For explicit calls to move ideas about social reproduction beyond the domestic, see Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014). More recent analysis on how globalized financial capitalism and newer modes of manufacturing have been outsourced to low-wage regions have helped to reconceptualize how social reproduction - paid and unpaid - is part of the production process; see Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproduction Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Social Reproduction Theory, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017). 7 Tithia Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” in Social Reproduction Theory, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 183. 8 Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class,” 212. 9 Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 9. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 6

Kalman-Lamb’s object of analysis is injury in the sport of hockey, but his framing of the work of social reproduction between spectators and athletes, in which the “body of the athlete becomes a vessel for the meaning that sustains the business, the political economy, of sport,” is useful in understanding how athletic labor helps to produce the commodity of labor power for both spectators and athletes.10 However, the cost of such reproduction can be devastating for some. While it creates a place for spectators and fans to dwell in what they perceive to be a space outside the throws of capitalist isolation, and simultaneously creates important revenue streams for athletes, there can be a tremendous bodily cost within this process of social reproduction. Athletes are subjected to precarious contracts, can sustain serious injuries, and may forego proper medical recovery to ensure their means for subsistence continues.

As I will detail below, Runners for Ethiopia seeks a similar experience for fans of sports teams on their vacation, upon which the work of social reproduction is done by both elite and amateur Ethiopian runners. While Runners for Ethiopia are not fans of specific athletes, teams, or even the country’s runners per se, they too, like avid Canadian hockey fans look to athletic labor to provide what can often be fantasized of as a place of play and purity (despite its overwhelming corporatization).

Not only sport, but specifically running, are interesting avenues to turn for empirical research because recreational fitness training has become so heavily commodified in recent decades. In sociologist Lucia Trimbur’s ethnography Come Out Swinging, she analyzed the ways Gleason’s Gym - a famous Brooklyn-based site known for historically producing world-class boxers - sheds light on the lived experience of post-industrial life in New York City. As many boxing gyms in New York died out with the demise of industry work, Gleason’s survived by incorporating features of New York’s cosmopolitan shift into its marketing structure.

New York, which began to grow economically though finance and real estate, saw a coterminous rise in a wealthy consumer class that began to view their bodies as sites of “work.” Trimbur writes, infused with morality, “the postindustrial disciplined body promoted the control necessary to support the ideals of consumer capitalism.”11 Photo shoots and image circulation at a place like Gleason’s, along with a “nouveau clientele” seeking an authentic training experience at top-dollar, then began to provide much of the financial backing for the gym’s operations. Thus, the recreational turn and the growth of white-collar boxers, despite their non-professional aspirations, can actually bankroll the training of serious working class boxers.

Much like the “nouveau clientele” at Gleason’s in New York, I analyze how Runners for Ethiopia seek an authentic training experience on their trip, if only for a shorter period of time. Similar to the trainers who work for the nouveau clientele at Gleason’s to earn an income and continue training, the Ethiopian athletes must arrive on the stage that Runners for Ethiopia construct to reproduce a fan base that makes the sport more materially advantageous. By allowing their photos to be taken, wearing tattered shoes, and amplifying the thinness of the high-altitude air, Ethiopian athletes construct pathways for shoes, money, and other gifts to aid them in future training.

10 Kalman-Lamb, Game Misconduct, 11. 11 Trimbur, Come Out Swinging, 7. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 7

As Runners for Ethiopia upload photos of the athletes and their experience in Ethiopia to their websites and personal accounts, they perform and participate in a post-industrial act of health-oriented and experience-driven self-fashioning. The Ethiopian runners, too, perform a desired subjectivity, through which they hope to be materially compensated. In the analysis that follows, I hope to show how images that continue to represent a type of “natural black athlete” serve to both create the conditions for a type of athlete labor to reproduce the white-collar workers, while being seized upon by the athletes themselves to reproduce the conditions needed to continue training. Paid and unpaid, deliberate and unintentional, this dual analysis is aimed at seeing spheres of production and social reproduction as tethered and unequivocally linked to modes of capital accumulation.

Running in Bekoji

On a brisk and foggy morning, Runners for Ethiopia meet at “Sentayehu forest” in Bekoji, a small town in central Ethiopia, in the region, about three hours south of Addis Ababa. The population is not quite 17,000 and, in Ethiopia, the town is known for being a major barley producer. But what brings Runners for Ethiopia down south is that Bekoji is also the mythological birthplace of Ethiopian athletics. Bekoji is indeed home to several of Ethiopia’s most famous athletes: , Tariku Bekele, Fatuma Roba, , , and , to name a few. A 2014 article from The Atlantic noted the impressive ratio of Bekoji’s medals to populations - as of 2014, the town had brought in 16 Olympic medals - 10 of them gold: “The runners from this tiny town have hauled in more gold medals than India (population: 1.2 billion) has won in all Summer Olympic categories put together.”12

A 2012 documentary Town of Runners brought the spotlight to Bekoji and cemented Coach Sentayehu as a legend in the running world. Now, the Sentayehu forest, named after famous Coach Sentayehu, is a recognizable image that has been broadcasted from the BBC, CNN, and CGTN Africa. Coach Sentayehu, who grew up in Harar, Ethiopia, and moved to Bekoji to teach physical education in the town’s Elementary School, is credited for scouting and developing world-class talent.13 Bekoji and Coach Sentayehu’s exposure have fixed Bekoji in the minds of many as a place where “biological advantage,” good environmental conditions, and proper early athletic development coalesce into forming a “town of runners” dominant in international athletics. Googling Coach Sentayehu yields dozens of articles about the legend and typing “Bekoji” into a YouTube search bar returns several clips of athletes running in the countryside.

The July morning in 2017 was like many others in highland Ethiopia. The air was still and, in nearly every roadside periphery, Runners for Ethiopia saw people toting carry-on-sized yellow plastic jerry cans to pick up water, bending their spines into a “C” in order to do so. Horse taxis clucked by. Transport vans, early 1990s blue Toyotas were already jam-packed with commuters. Patches of smoke from burning trash abounded, and droning in the background were the broadcasted indecipherable chants from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. For athletes in

12 Nick Ashdown, “Little Town of Champions,” The Atlantic, March 3, 2014. 13 Jerry Rothwell (director), Town of Runners (Ethiopia: Met Film Production, Klikk Production, 2012). RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 8

Ethiopia, this assemblage of routinized morning actions and sensations usually means one thing: it is time for practice.

Despite how it is normally captured on screen, the Sentayehu Forest is neither boundless nor mystical; its parameters are no bigger than a grade school soccer field. The width takes a one-minute slow jog to eclipse, and it has a one-directional vertical plane - perfect for hill repeat exercises. The dampness from the previous night’s rains meant that the rainy season began, but had not yet taken full effect, when a mere two minutes of running introduces a viscous, clay-like platform to the bottoms of the athletes’ sneakers. After the day’s session, their shoes were dirty but salvageable.

But what the mud actually indicates for most athletes is that the summer vacation for the tourists is also the off-season for the runners. Most athletes finished their seasons about a month earlier at the national championships, and, unless they are racing abroad in the summer, they are about to take a two-month rest from training. Some have already started this rest period but have come to train for the day, so that Runners for Ethiopia can experience the immersive experience. The asynchrony of these realities signal important questions: What are Runners for Ethiopia thinking about when they zigzag through the trees and imagine an Ethiopian athletic history? And what is this doing for them on their vacation from work?14

When most avid fans think of the beginnings of Ethiopian athletics, they think of the origin story of Ethiopian , who won the Olympic in in 1960, becoming the first black African to win a gold medal. That the competition occurred on the streets of Ethiopia’s former occupier, no less on the street of a stolen obelisk, added to the event’s significance. However, what really cemented the narrative of Ethiopia’s bastion of “naturally-gifted athletes” was that Bikila won the marathon without shoes.15 Even those

14 Of course, that the weather patterns in Ethiopia - the rainy season during July and August - coincides with the summer in most of Europe and North America, where white-collar workers often have vacation days and fewer work obligations, is not an individual choice. That said, Bhattacharya (2017) provides a useful way of explaining the asynchrony through the distinction between abstract labor - which produces exchange value - and concrete labor, which produces use value. She writes: “In my reading, along with the useful distinction between concrete and abstract labor, Marx is also proposing that our performance of concrete labor, too, is saturated/overdetermined by alienated social relations within whose overall matrix such labor must exist. Hence even my concrete labor (gardening) is not performed during and for a time of my own choosing or in forms that I determine but has to “fit in” with the temporal and objective necessities of other social relations.” Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class,” 39. Similar here, the performance of concrete labor that Runners for Ethiopia seek to produce value for themselves - an authentic training experience - has to “fit in” with their temporal necessities of other social relations. 15 And the notion of the mystical “barefoot runner” narrative continues to live on in popular representation, despite the fact that two of the more popular books - Paul Rambali’s 2006 fictional account Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila and Tim Judah’s 2009 rigorously research biopic Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian - note that ill-fitting shoes were the deciding factor in Bikila’s decision to run barefoot, not simply that he did not have access to wearing shoes. In fact, a Finnish physical education coach who worked in Ethiopia and helped broker Ethiopia’s participation in the games noted that the athletes were specifically concerned about running barefoot as it would appear that they could not afford and did not have access to shoes, whereas the shoes were ill- RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 9 unfamiliar with this history, however, may come to know an uncontextualized version of this history through all of the ways it has been commodified for popular running audiences.16

Others who briefly survey the history and rise of East African dominance come across citations of the 1968 in Mexico City as the origin story, as Kenyans and Ethiopians dominated the distance events in a city at high altitude.17 As a result, the high altitude terrain from which Kenyan and Ethiopian runners came was slated to be a central reason for this success.18

However, many also do not know these histories. While it came to be understood in the decades following that black African long-distance runners had substantial levels of running efficiency with high earning potentials, bolstering the rhetoric of the “naturally-talented and spectacular black Athlete,” many have in fact forgotten that these histories have distinct narratives and fewer still know the politics behind their inceptions. Bekoji, then, has grown as a place of mysticism, associated with high altitude and bare-footed training - a place to travel and fitting. Tim Judah, Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian (London: Reportage Press, 2008); Paul Rambali, Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006). 16 Bikila’s barefooted likeness has also been used in commercialized ventures. Alongside a rise in recreational long-distance running, around 2013, an increase in minimalist running sharply rose. Based on narratives that barefoot running was natural, advantageous, and decreased the risk for injury, minimalist shoe sales rose. In 2013, for example, Americans spent $59 million on minimalist shoes - 10% of the $588 million running shoe market. Lenny Bernstein, “Minimalist running style may be undermined by new findings from Kenya,” The Washington Post, January 21, 2013. An Italian company, Vibram, was a primary maker of FiveFinger shoes, which essentially created a shoe that had enough protection to avoid skin piercing but replicated a barefoot running experience. They named one model the “Bikila,” despite not asking permission from the family. When the family did file a lawsuit for $15 million in 2015, it was dismissed one year later. Gene Johnson, “Lawsuit over use of barefoot marathoner’s name by Vibram is dismissed,” The Globe, November 1, 2016. 17 Neil Amdur, “Keino Breaks Olympic Record in 1,500-Meter Run, with Ryun of U.S. Second,” The New York Times, October 20, 1968. After Bikila repeated his victory in Tokyo in 1964 (with shoes), he warned the world that he would continue his Olympic campaign in Mexico City because he would be aided by the city’s high altitude, similar to that of his training grounds in Addis Ababa. After the 1968 games, a New York Times reporter wrote of East African dominance: “Thus, the week-long track and field carnival ended with the United States having reaffirmed its artistic superiority and with one unmistakable physiological fact - namely, that in long-distance, high-altitude races, all an athlete’s training and acclimatization cannot replace the opportunity of breathing the same light air day after day. Africans won every race above 800 meters. Kenyans won the 1,500, 3,000-meter steeplechase and 10,000. Ethiopia, Kenya’s mountainous neighbor to the north, took the gold medal in the marathon when Mamo Wolde crossed the finish line in the stadium after having navigated through the highways and streets of the city.” 18 Dick Kasperowski, “Constructing Altitude Training Standards for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics: The Impact of Ideals and Equality and Uncertainty,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 26 (2009). While the four years leading up to the games were marked with political strife, with student protest movements around the world, the International Olympic Committee and national governing bodies poured resources into scientific studies pertaining to the importance of altitude and performance. These studies seeking to understand how certain training environments, specifically those at high altitude, would yield environmental advantages, coincided with the larger transitional movements from amateurism to professionalism in sports. As a result, mythical sporting virtues of equality and fair play were thrown into question. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 10 train that is imbued with utter “authenticity,” despite becoming detached from chronicled histories.

Running as Performance

Nearly 50 years after the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the tourist group, Runners for Ethiopia, stood at the bottom of the hill of the Sentayehu forest awaiting instructions from the coach himself. They lingered in neon, dry-fit athletic wear, checking their GPS watches, turning on their Go-Pros, strapping their iPhones around their arms, and watching as Coach Sentayehu, donning his full navy blue tracksuit and white baseball cap, organized the 150-or-so Ethiopian runners who have come to Bekoji for the day only.

When I engaged some of the Runners for Ethiopia in conversation, I learned that, not only were they utterly uninterested in my research (about Ethiopian athletes navigating national and transnational institutions to pursue sport), but few knew the top athletes competing in Ethiopia. They were fans of a certain type, but fans of what was not immediately clear. When I asked why they came to Ethiopia, several told me a version of: “I love running. I’m running the marathon here. And if you love running, Ethiopia is a place you should go.” And if what we wear is an expression of our interests, then it was abundantly clear that they were fans - of running, fitness, and health.

This fandom might well be associated with what some scholars have noted as an increased obsession with “body panic.” Some attribute a rise in “body panic” associated with de- industrialization and diffusion of ideal body types in health and fitness magazines as enabling a consumer culture of “healthism” to take hold, resulting in the creation of a “socially depoliticized project: the endless queues for bodily perfection.”19 And often this performance entails owning a plethora of devices that monitor exercise routines, caloric intake, and other data. Thus, if valuing one’s bodily health is tied to morality, then paying thousands of dollars to come to Ethiopia to “train with the Ethiopians” surely must be remembered and shared.20

Perhaps it is not so surprising that, as neoliberal forms of work have proliferated in which people are never really “off” and often working in more isolated environments, means that this is particular form of sociality these white-collar workers may be seeking from newer forms of

19 Shari L. Dworkin & Faye Linda Wachs, Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 13. 20 A growing scholarly interest in digital self-tracking devices (DSTDs) has led some call for inquiries into “critical digital health studies.” See Deborah Lupton, “Critical perspectives on digital health technologies,” Sociology Compass 8 (2014): 1344-1359. Some of the results have ranged from concerns about the forms of data extraction and commodification that can follow to the gender-based embodied experiences that are contested or reified through these technologies of self-surveillance. See Deborah Lupton, “M-health and health promotion,” Social Theory & Health 10 (2012): 229-244; Phoebe Moore, “Tracking Bodies, the ‘quantified self,’ and the Corporeal Turn,” in Handbook of the International Political Economy of Production, edited by Kees van der Pijl (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015); Chris Till, “Exercise as Labour,” Societies 4 (2014): 446-462; Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power,” in Feminist Social Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Rachel Sanders, “Self-tracking in the Digital Era: Biopower, Patriarchy, and the New Biometric Body Projects,” Body & Society (2017). RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 11 alienation. Similar to the explosion in self-monitoring devices that signifies a body obsession, the mass participation in running events and fitness classes in recent years indicates that these performative endeavors to assert a kind of citizenship of which they are a part.21

Although they might not be fans in the way that hockey aficionados form community in Kalman-Lamb’s analysis, they indeed seem to be looking to form a certain sociality through the adoration of athlete laborers. And, like the nouveau clientele in Trimbur’s study, it is this sociality coupled with a privileging of self-care that people look to find satisfaction to afford and do things that make them feel good. In other words, this trip to Ethiopia, many Runners for Ethiopia told me, was “totally worth it.” It was expensive, but a productive use of their vacation time for working so hard. They incorporated their favorite thing to do outside of work - something that was healthy - producing a unique cultural experience to document and reproduce all the while.

Coach Sentayehu knew how to offer Runners for Ethiopia an opportunity not just to see, but to experience the “aura” of Ethiopian running. This was an easy training day for the athletes, and he broke them up into groups of seven or eight, throwing in a Runner for Ethiopia or two with the slower groups. But still, the hilly, root-filled forest with a high altitude and uneven terrain was quite intense for most of the jet-lagged tourists. Most of them dropped off the back of the pack one by one, headed down the hill, and talked to Coach Sentayehu as he subtly supervised the situation.

Everyone was communicating in limited English. “They make it look so easy,” one Runner for Ethiopia joked. “They have been running since they were kids, running to school” another said, affirmatively. “Yes,” Coach Sentayehu said, has learned to say, “the altitude... it’s very difficult.” “It’s like they have only had one pair of shoes their entire lives,” another Runner for Ethiopia added, snapping a photograph of their shoes.

While Runners for Ethiopia were not wrong, since the material conditions in Ethiopia are indeed difficult, where and how they got their information, and how they recycled it, is worth considering. For instance, the Lonely Planet Amharic phrasebook I saw one person toting around has an entire section devoted to running. Beneath the phrases “[insert famous athlete] is amazing” and “Ethiopians are great runners!” and above “Olympic Games” and “marathon” are the phonetic translation of two central words of this vocabulary “altitude” (kefeta) and “bare feet” (bado eger).22

21 For instance, between 1990 and 2013, involvement in long distance recreational races has increased 300%. Jen A. Miller, “The Running Bubble Has Popped (You Couldn’t Hear It in New York),” The New York Times, November 5, 2017. Sales of health and fitness-tracking devices hit $10 billion in 2013; industry analysts predict that this product market will reach $32 billion, more than tripling in value by 2019. Roeen Roashan & Shane Walker, “Wearable Technology Report: Market Data and Consumer Insights,” IHS Technology, 2016. 22 Tilahun Kebebe, Ethiopian Amharic (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2008). RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 12

Images and representations of this type abound and were referenced in the reading and the preparation Runners for Ethiopia did for their trip. In Trimbur’s study, she notes that racial categories are reconstructed through the commercial exchange of the training session. This, too, can certainly be seen in the case of Runners for Ethiopia training with Coach Sentayehu. This racialized form of consumerism is not just about labor on the part of the athletes and the coaches, but in turn the athletes’ “ontological being is also fetishized into a commodity.”23 Just as the Lonely Planet Amharic phrasebook is available for purchase and consumption, so is the experience the athletes are providing. In the case of Ethiopian distance running, the experience of the difficulty of the natural training conditions - the high altitude - contribute to this purchase. Not only does the experience of training with Coach Sentayehu give the tourists a sense of authentic training, but the immense difficulty of running at high altitude brings out an ability to reproduce the idea that the athletes with whom they are running are aided by nature.

By the end of the run, most of the Spanish runners dropped off and acted out humorous pants with their hands on their knees, performing the exhaustion that results from not being raised in a high-altitude African environment. Some, who thumbed through the guidebook beforehand, utter the translation of “altitude” and “air” to everyone’s amusement, shaking their heads in disbelief.

Running for Reproduction

After the athletes finished their runs and came to the bottom of the hill, Coach Sentayehu ordered a series of plyometric exercises. Most Ethiopian athletes do these routines on a regular basis, calling them “gymnastics.” Four rows of runners in straight lines do a series of dynamic stretches and exercises, high-knees, A-B-C skips, what is known in the American running vernacular as “drills.” Rhythm here is key. Everyone must be in sync, and everyone must strike the ground with their feet intentionally, forcefully, so that the sound of feet hitting the ground, in contrast to the lightness associated with good running, is heard. As they stopped running, most Runners for Ethiopia took out their smart phones from their armbands, equipped with high- definition cameras, and began filming. They filmed the zigzagging runners. They zeroed in on the holes in their shoes.

The Ethiopian athletes, many of whom would normally be found training with elite clubs hours away, mostly based in Addis Ababa any other day of the week, also came to Bekoji for this event. In contrast to Runners for Ethiopia, however, they were not in their finest gear. Though most athletes in clubs indeed do have several pairs of shoes, ordinarily given to them used, on the day of the performance they costumed in the most tattered pairs of all. Gaping holes in a particular few that rendered the shoes all but useless made me wonder if they held on to their frayed pairs for just for days like these ones. Those who I saw days prior timing runs and tracking distance with digital watches, some with GPS capability, seemed to have left them home for the day. The athletes, however, looked professional. In windbreakers, leggings, and shirts from international races, many still exuded a high degree of expertise. This is, after all, their work - to run for Ethiopia.

23 Trimbur, Come Out Swinging, 140. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 13

While these images are fabrications of fitness-crazed white-collar subjects through which value gets created by repeated documentation, these processes are materially important. That Runners for Ethiopia have the ability to travel to Ethiopia is in part what allows for the Ethiopian athletics economy to grow in the given the global material climate. The images that they produce of the athletes training, which will later be posted on their personal social media accounts, contribute to a project of self-fashioning in which the body is reinforced as a moral one, while they reproduce the image of a “down-trodden” but “naturally-gifted and docile” black African athlete. In doing so, they also add to a fandom of a particular sort that incorporates their own process of identity formation and adds to the reproduction of the capacity for many Ethiopians to work in the sport.

Later in the day, after the training, there was the big gift exchange in Bekoji. Beforehand, Runners for Ethiopia returned to the hotel for a wide breakfast spread. Eggs, breads, salads were carefully laid out along with pitchers of mango and avocado juice. The fruits required to make the juice, they did not know, had to be purchased from a town forty-five minutes away to satisfy their cravings. Afterwards, the promised “400 pairs of shoes, 2000 shirts, 500 pants, 400 pairs of socks, 400 gym bags, and 100 singlets” were given to the Ethiopian runners at the Derartu Tulu Federation Training camp, where only 40 athletes actually reside and train. Many of the other recipients of such gifts are athletes at Division I clubs in Addis Ababa.

Far from passive, Ethiopian athletes actively seized upon this opportunity to influence the dynamics of these spaces. Like most transnational fields with asymmetric power and capital relations, those with less material wealth creatively respond to spaces of subjection to continuously reshape and redefine their place in processes of value formation. Athletes, who had walked back earlier, and eagerly awaited their new materials, perhaps without breakfast, prepared to do just this while Runners for Ethiopia loaded into their large white pristine tour bus to the training camp, less than one mile away, for the exchange.

As Runners for Ethiopia positioned their materials onto tables and prepared for a presentation of the gifts, athletes strategized their place in line. When Runners for Ethiopia finished speeches and a filmed presentation, they began handing out the bags of shoes and clothes. After so much anticipation, fights broke out between athletes as they fought to be first in line. They wanted to make sure they get the correct shoe size. Unlike Abebe Bikila, these athletes are in fact not used to running barefoot; they did not want to get ill-fitting shoes for training. The fight was quickly diffused without a broader acknowledgement of its occurrence.

The scene was heavily documented by Runners for Ethiopia, and the images continue to live on the website. There are photos of the materials in a pile. There are photos of materials in the hands of Runners for Ethiopia. There are photos of the Runners for Ethiopia preparing to hand the items to the athletes. There are photos of the exchange. There are photos with the athletes holding their newly acquired materials on their own. There are many, many images being “fixed” here. “Fixing,” to reiterate Stuart Hall’s notion of representational meaning- making, is an important part of recreating the material conditions through which spectators and consumers participate in a performative process of reproducing their desires through a marketable, commodifiable, and thoroughly necessary reification of authenticity.

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After the gift exchange, Runners for Ethiopia go back to the hotel for a final buffet meal before leaving Bekoji. As the lunch is being prepared, I saw one of the gift recipients, an athlete, negotiating with another Ethiopian. He was holding an object. I overheard parts of the conversation and pieced together what he was doing: trying to sell an item. When I was able to peek my head around the car, I saw him selling the shoes - the same shoes he was just photographed receiving from Runners for Ethiopia, who were sitting about ten feet away, hungrily awaiting their meal.

Perhaps he was an athlete with plenty of good shoes, looking to make money. Perhaps he was planning to sell the shoes to buy two more pairs of shoes at a market for a much cheaper price. Perhaps he was a retired athlete. Perhaps he was not an athlete at all. Maybe he was a brother, friend, or cousin, of an athlete, who told him to come to Bekoji for the day to try and get a valuable item to sell. Maybe he lives in Bekoji and works at a café and just decided to pose as an athlete for the day. No matter the case, this interaction makes clear how broader economies outside of the exchange are impacted as a result of these broader socially reproductive performances.

Conclusion

As Runners for Ethiopia’s tour bus drove down the road and athletes vacated Bekoji, it felt as though curtains had closed. A mutually inclusive performance had reached a finale that would provide the actors and consumers the means to continue working. Runners for Ethiopia consumed a recreational experience already been stabilized through a range of mass representational mediums and participated reproducing it in the process. They invested in the creation of an economy of barefoot running and altitude training by consuming it through documentation and recreating it in the process. Ethiopian athletes, in their performance of a desired subjectivity, reproduced revenue streams, material gain, and cultural capital, both for individual training enhancement and the market value in both local and global athletics economies. Both were, in effect, “running for Ethiopia.”

The social relations on display here, upon closer inspection, might enable new insights to “the multi-gendered, differently abled subject that is the global working class.”24 While the workplaces of these two groups are different - forests in the Ethiopian highlands, tracks in the capital city, classrooms in Barcelona, business offices in Madrid - capital benefits from these working people reproducing their capacities to keep working on capital’s behalf.

The inclusivity of these forms of social reproduction - paid and unpaid, explicit and implicit - bring together the form of social reproduction done by athlete laborers that Kalman- Lamb has so astutely brought forth, while also echoing the ways in which athletes that might otherwise be disposed of their training grounds and facilities, seize upon this desire and use it for their own laboring reproduction present in Trimbur’s formulation.

24 Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class,” 179. RASAALA, Volume 7: “Recreating Recreation” (2019) 15

In pointing out the ways in which Ethiopian athletes, coaches, and others reconstitute forms of value through this form of fabricated recreation, I by no means wish to obscure power dynamics. On the contrary, the “fixing” of the representation of black athletes as “naturally talented” and, in the Ethiopian case, as aided by high-altitude training, continuously reproduces a black laboring body as a commodity in ways that must be critiqued and is symptomatic of broader structural inequalities intensified by global capitalism.

Branded images linger on the websites of Runners for Ethiopia and make up new images in Ethiopia as runners train, sell, and trade their new materials. Many of these multinational apparel companies are the most powerful in the world - and their own branding is aided by this co-constitutive performance of social reproduction. However, I hope that elucidating the ways that Ethiopians refashioned these material streams that come in as a result of this commoditization can bring to awareness that this reproduction is occurring and show new opportunities to seize opportunities that contest these reproductive forms of subjugation.

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