Description: An investigation into the increasing popularity of adventure sports like bungy jumping, surfing and parkour. Taking an ethnographic approach, the book examines what attracts humans to interact with extreme landscapes and the impact such interactions have on society as a whole, the individuals involved and the landscapes themselves. The book also addresses how best to reconcile enjoyment of adventure sports with a moral responsibility towards the environment.
Review Quotes: 'Through the ethnographic lens of hazardous sports and adventure-tourism Patrick Laviolette examines the paradox of recreational excess: leisure activities that combine serious decision-making, fear, heroism, euphoria and risk. Body, danger and environment creatively combine, giving rise to "green" morality, social "thrillscapes" and an "existential imagination". The analysis is flamboyant; anthropology and phenomenology are married in a combustible mix. I highly recommend it.' Nigel Rapport, University of St. Andrews, UK 'Extreme Landscapes of Leisure is a remarkable and unconventional book about the role of imagination in dangerous sports, such as cliff jumping and surfing, that play with danger and death. Laviolette is an anthropologist who draws on Kierkegaard's notions of fear and trembling and Bentham's idea of deep play, then combines these with his ethnographic training to write an evocative phenomenological account of his own experiences, especially in Cornwall and New Zealand. His book is filled with thoughtful reflexivity and intriguing narratives about extreme places, landscapes and activities that stretch mind and body to their limits and simultaneously define and challenge mundane life.' Edward Relph, University of Toronto, Canada 'I would thoroughly recommend the book to those interested in the field of high-risk activities. The book has an edge of excitement about these adventures that is gained through the lens of a first person view, and the interest and intellectual depth of a philosophical analysis of these experiences. Add to this the analysis of the landscapes that provide the physical context for dangerous pursuits, and there is much that is new here for scholars to consider.' Sites 'Overall, this book covers a broad array of extreme leisure perspectives, and the Introduction in particular opens up an informative philosophical discussion on the phenomenology and anthropology of bodily experience. This book will make good reading for gr