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