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‘I'd rather wear out than rust out’: autobiologies of ageing equestriennes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

DONA L. DAVIS ,
ANITA MAURSTAD  and
SARAH DEAN
DONA L. DAVIS*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, USA.
ANITA MAURSTAD
Affiliation:
Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
SARAH DEAN
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, USA.
*
Address for correspondence: Dona Davis, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of South Dakota, 414 East Clark St., Vermillion, SD 57069, USA. E-mail: ddavis@usd.edu
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Abstract

Horse–human relationships expressed as a kind of co-embodied engagement or mutual physicality between horse and rider receive note in emerging literatures on equine sports and multi-species ethnography. Less attention focuses on the impacts of equestrienne activities on ageing female bodies. This study is based on analysis of narrative data collected from open-ended qualitative interviews with 36 women, aged 40–70, who participate in a variety of equestrian activities and sports in the North American Midwest and Arctic Norway. Although ageing informants associate animal partnerships with the maintenance of health, and although informants' narratives show some accord with master narratives of ageing athletes identified by sports sociologists, the natures of horse–human relationships invite more explicit, horse- specific contexts of analysis. The phrase ‘autobiologies of ageing’ denotes how women's narratives of equestrienne ageing privilege and centre a subjective sense of physical identity or embodied self where the rider's experience of her body becomes entangled with and impartible from that of the horse or horses she rides.

Keywords

equestrian sportsmultispecies ethnographyageing female bodysports and ageing
Type
Articles
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , February 2016 , pp. 333 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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