Adventure Sports, Bodily Failure and Developing an Ethics of Humility

Abstract
This article explores the role of bodily failure in shaping our ethical outlooks in adventure sports. Drawing on ethnographic research with white-water kayakers, it shows how the experiences of lost bodily composure and containment alter our relationship to the self by revealing its limits of control. Building on insights from anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy, the article argues that such bodily failure enables an ethical self that is not contingent on external comparison but on an acceptance of the self’s impotentiality as defined by Georgio Agamben. This in turn enables a self-centred humility that becomes the basis for ethical dispositions. By foregrounding the body’s role in ethical becoming, this article contributes to debates in anthropology and social theory on the intersections of corporeality, ethics, and subjectivity.

Keywords: adventure sport; body; composure; containment; impotentiality; white-water kayaking

Introduction
Ethical self-formation has often been framed in terms of social comparison and normative adherence. From Durkheimian perspectives on morality as a socially imposed structure to Foucauldian analyses of self-disciplining, these models have seen ethics as a product of such relational and cognitive processes. However, emerging scholarship in social psychology suggests that ethics may not merely be a matter of social reflection but can also be intimately tied to bodily experience (Strejcek and Zhong, 2014).

In this article, I propose that bodily failure—moments when individuals lose or rescind control over their bodily comportment and bodily boundaries—offers an alternative basis for ethical self-formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with white-water kayakers in the UK, I examine how such experiences of bodily failure affect the sense of self and argue that they enable a form of humility based on an implicit acceptance of one’s limitations. This perspective expands existing discussions in the anthropology of ethics and the body moving beyond models of ethical life centred on deliberation or social acceptance—I seek to foreground the body’s agency in ethical becoming, arguing that the experience of bodily failure can foster an ethics of humility that does not primarily rely on social comparison, even when it emerges through fundamentally relational processes.

Comparison Ethics
Social referencing, the process by which modern humans evaluate themselves through the perspectives of others, is a universal phenomenon. It begins to take shape in middle childhood, when we develop the cognitive ability to view ourselves abstractly (Ruble and Frey, 1991; Robins et al., 2002). We engage in social comparison to self-assess in order to obtain information about our own abilities and to establish a sense of social identity (Festinger, 1954). However, the direction and impact of these comparisons—whether upward or downward—can lead to varied outcomes for self-perception, from enhanced self-esteem to diminished self-worth (e.g., Gerber et al., 2018; White et al., 2006). In an age of comparison such as ours, when thanks to the development of communication technologies and the proliferation of social media, the opportunities for comparison are endless and ever-present, we can switch between different views of the self multiple times time a day. With social psychology further suggesting that it is self-image, rather than moral reasoning that shapes our ethical choices (e.g., Shu and Effron, 2015), it follows that our ethical views can also change from one instant to another (Monin and Jordan, 2009).

Anthropologists, particularly those working within the so-called ethical turn have examined the motivations behind ethical behaviour seeking to answer what actually ‘commits and drives us’ (Dyring et al. 2017: 9). Cumulatively, this growing body of knowledge has aspired to move beyond a view of morality/ethics as socially enforced constraints on behaviour, a view often traced to the Durkheimian equation of the social with the good. Inspired by Foucault’s historical works (Foucault, 1978, 1985, 1987, 1995) and Aristotelian virtue ethics (Dyring et al., 2017), some authors nevertheless stress a form of structure or sociocultural dynamic as endowing values and propose that people make themselves (albeit unconsciously) into moral beings through honing certain dispositions (e.g., Mahmood, 2011), practices (e.g., Widlok, 2004) and ‘ethical self-discipling’ (Hirschkind, 2001) that align with those structures.

Others argue that the deliberative, conscious reflection is central to the ethical life (e.g., Faubion, 2011; Laidlaw, 2013; Robbins, 2004, 2012). These authors position ethics as intellectual phenomena grounded in the awareness of dominant societal values against which people judge themselves and others. This perspective underscores the role of intellectual freedom, even within social constraints, in adhering to or creatively transforming normative expectations (e.g., Faubion, 2011; Howell, 1996; Lambek, 2010b; Robbins, 2004, 2007; Zigon, 2009).

This comparison-centred approach is also evident in the debates over how a moral change comes about and the nature of the relationship between individual ethics and morality writ large. One line of argument here is that since ethics is always public (that is, individuals can expect their communities to pass ethical judgements or create other ethical descriptions of their actions; Keane, 2017), a person is able to become aware of their own ethical position, reflect upon it and transform. Others have suggested that it is the grander social transformations with accompanying changes of the ethical on the social level that bring the ethical to our conscious attention (Zigon, 2007) and lead to individual transformations in response to the changed principles used as a reference point. Others still, draw our attention to exemplars (Humphrey, 1996; see also Højer and Bandak, 2015) as the ideals strove for and the illocutionary power of language (Lambek, 2010a) to vary the evaluation criteria and thus actions.

While grounded in different intellectual traditions and building on different types of data, social psychology and anthropology converge on a crucial point: ethical actions stem from comparisons of the self with others, whether individual or socially constructed. This raises an important question: if our ethical judgements are grounded in variable outcomes of comparisons shaped by how we measure ourselves against others, then how can we achieve any stability of ethical outlooks?

Proposal for Bodily Grounding of Ethics
I propose that certain bodily experiences provide a more stable foundation for ethical perspectives. Specifically, I focus on bodily failure—instances when individuals lose control over their bodies—and argue that these experiences, by revealing the limits of bodily control, cultivate a more stable self-image that is less reliant on external validation and fluctuating comparisons. These experiences arise through interactions between bodies, environments, and material equipment, but the ethical orientation they engender is not structured through comparison with others. Rather, it is grounded in an awareness of one’s own limits. I draw here on a Kantian understanding of humility and bare self (Grenberg, 2005) and a diagnosis offered by Agamben (2011) whose deliberations suggest that contemporary ethical challenges often stem from an overemphasis on capacity and control, to the neglect of the transformative potential of impotentiality.

To illustrate my argument, I turn to ethnographic research with white-water kayaking enthusiasts. The sport involves navigating challenging, turbulent river sections with steep gradients, aerated waters, and obstacles such as submerged rocks and debris. The fast-flowing water making its way between, over and under such formations creates an array of features that a kayaker navigates. These environments test not only technical skill but also mental resilience, as failure to navigate successfully can lead to capsizing or being caught in dangerous hydraulics. Kayakers often recount experiences of such mishaps on the river. These often vivid (and recorded), shared encounters with bodily failure reveal not only the fragility of human control but also present an opportunity for ethical recalibration grounded in humility and self-acceptance.^[1]The key distinction advanced here is between comparison-based and non-comparative ethical orientations. As work on material ecologies suggests, failure is not simply an individual shortcoming, but arises within configurations of bodies, environments, and material arrangements (Robins and Carroll, 2023). While these approaches treat failure as indicative of a mismatch within these material-relational ecologies, the argument here shows that these same failures can give rise to an ethical orientation that is not structured through comparison. Where the river and its associated sociality present affordances, that is, possibilities and constraints relative to the capacities of the body, the moments of failure—loss of balance, failed manoeuvres, displays of bodily odours and liquids—are not failures in relation to others or external benchmarks, but in relation to the dynamic environment of the river. What is encountered is not how one measures up to others, which helps explain why the ethical orientation that emerges is not primarily comparative.

My fieldwork (2013-15),^[2] which included kayaking in Europe, and India involved direct participation and observation of how individuals cope with these challenges and the sociality formed around the pursuits. I also had a chance to observe outdoor retreats for primary school children in Wales, UK. During the same time, I conducted semi-structured interviews with several of my own adult kayaking friends from London, UK. Taken together, the participants spanned a wide age range—from teenagers to individuals in their 70s—as well as diverse professional and social backgrounds. While the examples discussed below draw more heavily on participants in their teens and forties who were often more inclined to articulate reflective accounts, the patterns described were observed across the broader participant group.^[3]

Ethics and the Body
Anthropological approaches have traditionally framed ethics as a domain of the psyche. And yet, we are all likely to have heard about ascetic feasts that cultivate ethical values such as compassion by transforming the body, or about the corporate turn to the so-called adventure sports for help in fostering cooperation, responsibility, and tolerance that has become a large part of experience economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; see also, for example, Brymer and Schweitzer, 2017). It therefore makes sense to suggest that our ethical outlooks may also be shaped by something much closer to us than the normative structures, our communities, families, and so on: our body.

Work at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy already suggests that ‘the concepts on which an organism relies to understand its surrounding world depend on the kind of body that it has’ (Shapiro 2010: 4). Biological and medical sciences too have shown that human brain is capable of rewiring itself in response to a change in bodily composition, for example, a loss or deterioration of a particular bodily function or sensory input (e.g., Bavelier and Neville, 2002; Depner et al., 2014; Silva et al., 2018). Such neuroplasticity allows to create new neural pathways or utilise the existent ones in new ways to restore or substitute the lost faculty. One example of the latter is sensory substitution that enables congeniatally blind people recognise body shapes using sounds (Striem-Amit and Amedi, 2014). In social science lingo, this would be a form of bodily agency on a cellular level allowing the body to change how it interacts with the world and display a form of ethical plasticity. Further, social psychology is suggesting that our brains process physical and moral experiences in the same areas (Strejcek and Zhong, 2014) implying just how intimately these two domains are intertwined. If the same ‘mental machinery’ (Strejcek and Zhong 2014: 220) that processes bodily experiences also builds moral concepts, then we can ask whether and how these two areas of human life affect each other. Anthropology is well placed to explore this interconnectedness ethnographically building on the recognition that biology alone is insufficient in providing a full picture of the processes shaping social and individual lives, if these can ever be disconnected.

While anthropology and other social sciences have explored the body extensively (bodily experiences, bodily forms, and abilities have been acknowledged to affect our perception, our understanding, relations to the material environment, to other humans and non-human animals), the body’s role in shaping ethical thinking remains underexplored. Historically, when anthropology moved beyond the view of the body as a passive product of nature (Lock and Farquhar, 2007), it began focusing on the workings of power arguing that these cannot be understood without problematising discourses naturalising a range of bodily forms defined as ethnicity, gender, disability and so. The body-lens perspective brought about an understanding that today is a truism: that the body cannot be considered in separation from its lived experiences. Hence came the focus on embodiment (Csordas, 1990, 1994; Mascia-Lees, 2011; and many other individual works). Identities, professional or otherwise, gender, ethnicity have come to be seen as embodiments (e.g., Grosz, 1994; Huang et al., 2012; Irvy, 2009; Manzenreiter, 2013). Recognition of our embodied experience as the ‘starting point for analysing human participation in a cultural world’ (Csordas 1993: 135) allowed anthropologists to examine how the body is produced, reproduced, disciplined (e.g., Miller, 2013; Spielvogel, 2003) and capable of learning and knowing (e.g., Marchand, 2008, 2010). Here too, as in the anthropology of ethics, the Foucauldian and Maussian (Mauss, 1973) influences remained strong.

With the focus on embodiment and the acknowledgement that it was decisive in how we construct and construe of ourselves and our relationships, came interest in the means, so to speak, through which we can do that. As a result, we see today burgeoning fields of inquiry focusing on the senses (e.g., Breton, 2017; Howes 2003; Stoller, 1989; cf., Ingold, 2022), emotions (Beatty, 2019; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990), and affect (e.g., Martin, 2013; Ngai, 2007; Stewart, 2007). Once again, the literature here is extensive. The perspective explored here aligns with these studies on senses and emotions but emphasises the body’s agency at moments of failure. These moments, as seen in extreme sports like kayaking, allow individuals to confront their limitations, fostering an ethical sensibility that does not rely on comparisons but on an acceptance of vulnerability of the self and the limits of control.

Beyond Flow: Failure of Containment and Composure in White-Water Kayaking
Bodily control is a central theme in disciplines ranging from psychoanalysis to developmental neurology and social sciences. These different disciplines have developed a similar view on what it means to (be able to) exercise bodily control in accordance with certain socially and culturally sanctioned models. In the former two fields, bodily self-control has been linked to an integrated psychic sense of self (Scully 2012: 145) while the latter have long theorised the normative imprint of societal forces on the bodily comportment (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977; Elias, 1994[1978]; Foucault, 1991; Goffman, 1956, 1982[1967]). White-water kayaking challenges this control through moments of bodily failure manifesting in two dimensions: containment and composure.

Bodily containment is one of the key focus areas in discussions of ‘bodywork’ in eldercare (e.g., Twigg, 2000). It describes what (some) aged bodies are no longer able to achieve, namely, to prevent bodily substances such as urine, faeces, saliva, but also pus, blood, gases from exiting uncontrollably. It also refers to the actions of others that try to tidy up after or reinforce the weakened bodily boundaries to limit the spillage of such ‘leaking bodies’ (Huang, Yeoh, and Toyota, 2012). These actions such as using diapers or assisting with personal hygiene reinforce bodily boundaries, reflect societal norms of maintaining control. Kayakers, on the other hand, normalise uncontained bodies, with mucus, sweat, and odours becoming shared and accepted aspects of their experience. For instance, after an unintended swim (capsizing and exiting the kayak), capsizing and then rolling up (bringing a kayak to an upright position without exiting it), or just rolling for fun, one might emerge with mucus hanging off their nose or stuck to their upper lip—nothing out of place here. The smell that the bodies exert is left uncontrolled, too: T-shirts and thermal underwear used without washing over a few days; sharing meals wearing only those un-fresh garments; the shared dry room where sweat-soaked under layers, neoprene socks, dry suits, fill it up with a mix of scents one would not otherwise want to experience; cars used for kayaking trips getting smelly both from the equipment and the ungroomed bodies that travel in them during trips; a shared tent filled with bodily odours; shared bathrooms (if there are any) not containing either personal smells or sounds; lack of privacy when urinating and defecating outside where you are to be seen, or accompanied by others; discussions focusing on the latter. The nakedness of the body too is an accepted element of day-to-day interactions—it is not rare that one takes off their underwear to change from or into the paddling gear in a parking lot while at the same time engaging in a conversation with others, sometimes newly met people. What is otherwise contained through personal hygiene, cleaning, laundry, seclusion, clothing, or silence, cannot be contained during kayaking. The leaking bodies so rigorously controlled in eldercare and in daily life, are here on display, shared, and accepted without judgement.

Composure refers to the ability to remain clear-headed and in control of the kinetics of the body, its individual constitutive parts as well as any extensions to this body such as a kayak paddle. This imperative to stay composed aligns with societal expectations of bodily propriety, such as avoiding erratic gestures in crowded spaces or respecting personal space of others in public settings. In kayaking, composure is crucial: one must coordinate movements with precision to navigate the dynamic environment of a river (see also Bunn 2022 for parallels in climbing). At the same time, however, kayaking normalises lack of bodily composure.

Failure to remain composed is an inherent part of the sport. One of the most common consequences of not getting it right on a river, ‘having a swim’—capsizing, exiting the boat, and swimming with the current often until rescued—highlights this. The following description of my own experience could be assigned to many others I have witnessed and took part in rescuing.

This swim happened in the French Alps on the River Guil in the (in)famous gorge popularly known among British kayakers as Chateau Q. It is a roughly one-kilometre-long section where the whole river flows through a very narrow, in places barely a meter wide gorge with walls about 10 meter high. The water is deep, aerated, fast flowing, and turbulent. Underwater ledges create hydraulics you cannot paddle around, water bouncing off the gorge walls recirculates parallel to the boat pushing it into the walls, and so on. People who paddled (or intentionally or not swam) it, liken the experience to being ‘flushed down the toilet’. I capsized at the entrance and ended up swimming the whole length of the gorge. Initially, I was trying not to let go of my boat and my paddle hoping that the boat would add some buoyancy to my body and stop me from getting pushed under the water. But soon enough it turned out that holding on to the boat could be quite dangerous as it was tossed from wall to wall with me getting between the wall and the boat risking, for example, a broken nose, an arm, or perhaps even being knocked out. As I eventually let go off the boat and tried to assume the ‘safe’ position (on my back with legs up), it proved impossible. Repeatedly, I was being sucked under the water, luckily to resurface again and any attempts at controlling the position of my body, the movements of my limbs, or trying to swim out of the main current when small patches of calmer water appeared in sight, were quickly annihilated. At some point, I realised that I could not move my limbs anymore. My body was tired out by the constant fight with the water, and I gave up. I let the water do with my body what it fit and as the gorge ended, I was fished out by a member of my team who had to ran into the middle of the river (it got shallow-er here again) to pull me in as I was unable to reach out and grasp the rescue rope he had thrown in my direction. He dragged me out onto the bank, put me down, and I stayed in that position motionless for a few minutes simply because I did not have the strength to move.

This scenario, though extreme, underscores how kayaking dismantles ideas of self-control. Countless times, I have seen people perched precariously on a rock in the middle of a river they somehow managed to climb onto; people being recirculated in a ‘hole’ (a hydraulic feature on a river that recirculates vertically, typically forming after a drop such as an artificial weir) appearing every now and then on the surface trying to catch breath to be finally spit out one item at a time: the boat, the paddle, the body (on the occasions I witnessed, these were alive bodies although that is not always the case); people reaching out and missing the rescue lines as they continued their swim down the successive rapids; people helplessly trying to swim to the river bank while being thrown around by large waves of a river swollen after a typhoon; people scrambling to catch up with their shoe taken off by the current; people with teeth knocked out by a submerged rock; dislocated shoulders. In none of these situations the body appears particularly glamorous or in control. The erratic movements of limbs, unusual positions of the body, contorted facial expressions, sometimes visible bruises are all signs of a non-composed and often simultaneously uncontained body. What is at stake in such moments is not comparison with others, but a direct encounter with limits of one’s own capacity within a demanding material environment. These moments of failure become accepted parts of the experience and catalyse a shift in participants’ relationships with their self-image and ethical outlook—this acceptance paves the way for an ethical perspective rooted in humility grounded in self-knowledge rather than in comparison with others. To the extent that for some people this kayaking life becomes the ‘real life’ as a forty-something Londoner told me, the loss of preoccupation with composure and containment translates into a broader life philosophy, a different kind of ethical base from which to assess oneself and the surrounding world.^[4]

Research on adventure sports often highlights strategies for managing risk (e.g., Lupton and Tulloch, 2002; Zinn, 2008) and the experiences of successfully navigating dangerous situations (e.g., Lyng, 1990). The concept of edgework in risk studies, for instance, underscores the mastery required to maintain control in moments that teeter on the brink of chaos—demanding not only skill but also mental resilience and the ability to resist fear (Lupton, 2013: 214; Lyng, 1990: 859). In short, this body of research predominantly emphasises composure in moments of crisis and treat a state of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008) that individuals enter whether in high-risk sports or other perilous activities like crime (e.g., Katz, 1988) as central to the experience—in this state, the individuals achieve heightened self-awareness and control, transcending societal norms.^[5]

However, white-water kayaking challenges these assumptions by normalizing bodily states that are uncontained and uncomposed. Rather than centring control as a measure of success, we must examine how the struggle—or even impossibility—of maintaining bodily control reshapes an individual's relationship with themselves and those around them. This shift in perspective forces us to reconsider what happens when flow is disrupted, and risk materialises into failure.^[6] Here, Giorgio Agamben’s contemplations on impotentiality (Agamben, 2011) provide a compelling lens through which to understand these transformative processes.

Self-Centred Humility
In his short essay On What We Can Not Do Agamben (2011: 43-45) critiques the market-driven emphasis on flexibility in contemporary democratic societies, which leads ‘today’s man [sic] [believe] himself capable of everything’ (Agamben 2011: 44). This illusion of boundless potentiality estranges individuals from both their potentialities and impotentialities. Agamben argues that this estrangement blinds us not only to what we can do but, more critically, to what we cannot and can not do (what we are ‘able not to do’). He concludes with the following reflection:

Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist. And just as it is only the burning awareness of what we cannot be that guarantees the truth of what we are, so it is only the lucid vision of what we cannot, or can not, do that gives consistency to our actions (Agamben, 2011: 45).

Agamben’s central argument highlights that understanding the limits of our potentiality—and the fact that we can define those limits ourselves—grounds us more firmly in our identity. This idea resonates with the experiences of bodily failure, such as in white-water kayaking. Bodily failures reintroduce us to our impotentiality in both senses. Moments of failure reveal that we cannot always be in control, regardless of our social personae, professional expertise, or self-confidence. Recognizing such limits prevents overidentification with mastery in any one domain of life, fostering an unembellished sense of self. Simultaneously, because such a bare sense of being allows the moral agent a ‘proper perspective on herself’ (Grenberg, 2005: 133), embracing this impotentiality—our inability—supports a deeper sense of possibility, including the ability not to act. As bodily failure in contexts such as white-water kayaking does not necessarily operate through comparison, it does not require alignment with external expectations.

In kayaking, such failure particularly underscores how awareness of impotentiality fosters humility. This is not humility as ‘meekness, and a principled sense of one’s inferiority’ (Grenberg, 2005: 1), as historical portraits and literary works might suggest (Grenberg 2005). What distinguishes this form of humility is that it is not grounded in comparison with others but is rooted in self-knowledge and an acceptance of limitations encountered through embodied experience: it is self-centred in that it does not depend on evaluating oneself against others, but on recognising what one cannot do. It results in a sense of confident calmness and the ability to distance oneself from societal expectations. Several of my kayaking interlocutors stressed how the sport is inherently calming with a teenage paddler noting that the best thing about kayaking is ‘how chilled everyone is’ because, in their experience, they have ‘never met a kayaker who’s sort of uptight’ and rushing around.

This calm detachment extends beyond the river. A forty-year-old kayaker reflected on how his experience on the water translated into his approach to driving. He recognised that while some seek excitement (and perhaps self-affirmation by overtaking others) in high speeds, his own time on the river fulfilled that need, leading him to drive more cautiously. He observed that ‘someone that works in an office gets out and has his fun driving, so he drives fast,’ whereas kayaking had the opposite effect on him: ‘it makes you cold…[laugh] it makes you quite chilled out.’ Similarly, another paddler in his late forties explained his decision not to attempt a challenging gorge, despite knowing others had done so. He did not feel pressured to ‘prove anything’ or ‘up [his] game’ but instead took satisfaction in simply enjoying the river at his own pace.

This mindset also fosters a willingness to embrace constructive criticism. A teenage woman, interviewed by a peer during a kayaking trip, described how she actively sought feedback, stating, ‘I really love it when people do tell me [what I can do better] because otherwise, I will just carry on paddling and be like "yeah, I’m a perfect paddler"… but I think people have to tell me, "you should do this” and stuff.’ While such feedback in clearly socially mediated, it is not taken up here as alignment with fixed standards. Rather, it refines one’s embodied engagement with the river. What is at stake is not measuring oneself against others but attunement to one’s own limits in a dynamic environment. Technique, in this sense, is less about conforming to idealised standards than about responding to the affordances of the river; correction functions as means of refining this responsiveness.

A similar perspective was shared by Kyle, a kayaker in his forties who has been paddling with a London-based group for several years at the time. His approach to difficult rapids was not driven by competition with others but by a self-assessment of his own abilities. He would observe others, not out of a desire to compare himself but to gauge the challenge before him. As he put it, ‘it’s not that I want other people to fuck it up, but I feel good when something is perceived as quite difficult, and I’ve managed to do it coz I like little challenges.’ This constant reckoning with failure and incapacity is integral to white-water kayaking. While teamwork is crucial, each individual in adult groups is generally^[7] expected to make their own decision about whether to attempt a feature. This awareness of one’s limits and, crucially, the ability not to attempt something feeds into the oft-invoked fear-of-missing-out (FOMO), which energises much of the decision-making process on the river. Here, FOMO does not primarily refer to comparison with others, but to an awareness of one’s own missed opportunities within a field of affordances that may not present themselves again.

Beyond the sport itself, this shift in perspective affects how kayakers validate themselves in everyday life. One kayaker put it bluntly: ‘Kayaking made me a hobo.’ At forty years old, he had distanced himself from dominant social expectations, prioritizing experiences over conventional measures of success. Similarly, an eighteen-year-old paddler reflected on how kayaking had shaped his attitude toward formal dress. He acknowledged that there were times he ‘should have felt’ underdressed compared to others but ultimately found himself unaffected by such expectations. When asked why, he attributed this shift in self-perception to his years of kayaking, stating, ‘I think I would say kayaking has defined me, my personality, and the things I do.’

This transformation extends to consumption habits as well. While many kayakers invest significantly in their gear and trips, they often become less concerned with appearances, caring less for haircuts, makeup, or luxury cars. Instead, they prioritise practicality, opting for vehicles suited for transporting gear and fellow kayakers rather than for status. The decorative excess of one’s social persona is reassessed in light of its actual utility.

By normalizing bodily failure and fostering an awareness of impotentiality, the kayaking community enables participants to step away from societal pressures and redefine their values. This failure, while emerging from relational encounters, is not structured by comparison, and encourages a self that accepts its own constraints, laying the foundation for a self-centred humility. Importantly, rather than arising from submission, this humility emerges through the embodied experience of personal limits, cultivating a deeper self-awareness that fosters a more authentic sense of self and confidence in one’s judgment. This process creates a distance from socially sanctioned modes of behavior, self-perception, and self-representation, allowing kayakers to form ethical outlooks that are more stable and less influenced by external judgment and prescriptions.

Conclusion: Beyond Comparison
The kayaking community provides a compelling lens through which to explore how bodily failure can enable individuals to transcend the limitations of comparison-based ethics. A professional outdoor guide in the UK observed that young girls often struggled to work cooperatively during outdoor expeditions due to constant comparison. Their reliance on others’ judgments hindered genuine connection and collaboration:

And they can’t be with another group. But, you take those girls out on their own, they’re amazing. We go into the woods, we build a shelter, we cook a sausage, you know. We would cook marshmallows, make a hot chocolate, great. You take two of them out, they’re okay. Three, three’s a crowd. It’s too much. […] They can’t deal with it. […] one of them is always trying to impress the other one.

As in the case of these teenage girls, many ethical frameworks today are based on a self-concept shaped by external comparison—whether to societal expectations or to others. The notion of ‘boundless potentiality’ that Agamben critiques, often tied to the idea of limitless self-improvement or success, only exacerbates this. What I show here is that by focusing on the experiences of bodily failure, we can move beyond such relational ethics that rely heavily on social comparisons. Rather than defining oneself in relation to others, a more stable and grounded ethical outlook emerges when one recognises the limitations of the body.

A large part of being a kayaker is failing at maintaining a contained and composed body—bodily control is tested and often relinquished. These experiences of failure—capsizing, swimming, losing control, and loosening the bodily boundedness—unravel the identities based on a certainty of control over what the body does. Such stripping of a ‘social skin’ (Turner in Lock and Farquhar, 2007) allows for alternative versions of the self—by normalizing uncontained and uncomposed bodies, the kayaking reshapes the societal personas and identities tied to control and self-mastery.

By embracing the uncontained and uncomposed, kayakers cultivate a grounded, self-centred humility that transcends social constraints—in accepting bodily failure, kayakers forge a deeper connection with themselves, one that is resilient to the shifting dynamics of social comparison providing a more authentic and enduring basis for moral judgment. It is by focusing on these processes, I argue, that we can peer into the relationship between bodily experiences and ethical imagination to show how the body can be ethically creative and foster a different kind of an ethical self—one that is self-centred rather than reliant on comparison. The focus on the bodily failure in these contexts suggests an emergence of ethics that is less dependent on comparison that we had assumed. Grounded in encounters with the affordances of a dynamic river environment, this ethics redirects attention away from external benchmarks and toward lived experience of one’s own limits.

The processes leading to the generation of new modes of being-in-the-world may, but do not have to, become objects of reflection. The moments when the self is unable to sovereignly manipulate either the kinetics, the functions, the boundedness of the body, or the meanings ascribed to it—when the body does not do what is wanted or expected of it—throw into relief the dissonance between one’s sense of self as bodied-being-in-the-world and what is happening to that bodied self. It is in these moments that ‘the subject’s process of inscribing themselves in the world … is interrupted or aborted’ (Carroll et al., 2017: 10) whether one is aware of it or not. In white-water kayaking, reflection is not a necessary element to altering one’s ethical outlooks. Rather, it is bodily failure that first generates new modes of being-in-the-world that may but do not have to become objects of reflection. When reflection does occur, it reveals an ethical change that had already taken place. In this sense, it is not an ethical breakdown (Zigon, 2007) resulting from a mental realisation that one’s beliefs no longer apply, but a bodily failure that leads to an ethical shift happening as a matter of course first through actions and only then accessible to purposeful deliberation.

This article also shows that what is central to white-water kayaking are not just the exhilaration and sense of achievement that are often described as the necessary and defining element of the so-called extreme sports (e.g., Lupton, 2013: 204). Taking these experiences as momentary and focused on success does not do justice to the processes these experiences trigger and their transformative effect—it is not about temporary escape from the demands of the mundane everyday world. Rather, the experiences of un-containment and lost composure change how the kayakers positioned themselves within the lives they live.

If we accept that bodily failure helps to forge a self-centred humility unbound by comparison and competition, then we may also be able to argue that in order to maintain harmonious social life our bodies do not need to be docile (Foucault, 1995), but quite the opposite, that losing control is good for our communal lives. If that is indeed the case, then there might be value in exploring the failure(s) of bodily control beyond, for example, pathologised contexts of sick and decaying bodies encountered in care settings where the boundaries of corporeality become extended (Lawton, 1998: 134; see also Gunaratnam, 2009; Świtek, 2016: 101-105). We can usefully expand the idea of ‘leaking bodies’ (Huang et al., 2012) to everyday contexts in which we are unable to fully eradicate physical traces of our physiological existence, for example, in co-living spaces, such as shared houses, refugee shelters, and others. Thus, we can start thinking of the expansion of bodily boundaries not as something to be contained, as in the care context (Lawton, 1998) or in public convinience facilities (e.g., Cavanagh, 2010; Gershenson and Penner, 2009; Molotch and Noren, 2010), but as a productive space of ethical innovation. If relinquishing bodily control can cultivate resilience, connection, and self-awareness, then perhaps embracing the un-orderliness of our bodies is a necessary mechanism for reimagining of what it means to live ethically.

Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through the generous collaboration of friends, as well as the young kayakers, their parents, guardians, and coaches who participated in this study. I am especially grateful to the Department of Anthropology at University College London for its support, with particular thanks to Allen Abramson. I also extend my sincere appreciation to Deb Pinniger, my research partner, whose leadership and facilitation were instrumental in organising several trips with the young kayakers, which I had the privilege to join.

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Biographical Note
Beata Świtek is a social anthropologist based in Tokyo. Her research focuses on intimacy, the body, care work, adventure sports, ethics, narrative, sustainability, consumption, humour, and Buddhism. Alongside her long-standing engagement with Japan, Beata has also conducted research in Indonesia and in Europe. She is the author of Reluctant Intimacies. Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands (2016) and a co-editor of Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives: Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts (2022), and Monks, Money, and Morality. Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism (2021).