Michael Crawley, a social anthropologist and assistant professor at Durham University, was invited to give this year's Sir Derek Birley Memorial Lecture. For his debut book, Out of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia, he won the 2022 American Anthropological Association's Margaret Mead Award. His current work is on endurance sport, self-tracking technologies and performance enhancement in cross-cultural comparison.
Taking inspiration from Derek Birley's The Willow Wand, this talk begins by exploring some of the myths surrounding Ethiopian running. I then explore some of the insights gained through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with marathon runners in Ethiopia. In particular, I argue that Ethiopian runners understand 'energy' to be a limited resource, which makes training together, and the social relationships necessary to do this well, particularly important. Towards the end of the talk I explore the articulation of change in sport and broader society in relation to Ethiopian running and endurance sport more broadly.