Paper short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork on Butoh dance, ultrarunning, and horse-assisted leadership training and acknowledging that breathing patterns are an integral part of cultural reproduction, we discuss how wilful change of breathing can convey a sense of release from habituated ways of identification.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary life is increasingly dominated by what in the social sciences has been termed technologies of the self, such as mindfulness, positive psychology and body therapies. Breathing is often a constituent practice in such technologies. In this paper we argue that wilful change of breath-ing indeed can convey a sense of release from habituated patterns of emotional identification. We draw on data from long-term fieldwork in three empirical settings - Butoh dance, ultrarunning, and horse-assisted leadership training - to show how a certain kind of breath work may pro-voke a changed sense of self. E.g. in horse-assisted leadership training, managers consciously work with their breathing in order to alter their in-ner states of being, which can make them become (what they themselves experience as) more authentic beings and leaders, the kind of being capa-ble of leading a horse. However, we also stress how this changed sense of self is not always and never easily achieved. Our argument builds on two fundamental insights, established in existing research, but not yet com-bined, namely 1) that breathing is a crucial constituent of emotion, and 2) that emotion by way of identification is an integral part of social and cultural reproduction.