A Genealogy of Pro-Status Quo Voluntarism: From the Victorian Volunteer Movement to Fundraising Distance Runs for Healthcare

Date
2013-09-13
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Abstract
The current phenomenon of running long distances to raise money and awareness for healthcare-oriented charities has roots in Victorian-era Britain. Combining the pro-status quo nineteenth-century Volunteer movement with forced prison treadwheel labour specific to the same era yields a precursor of less-similar form than the current spectacle but with an exceedingly similar function. The Volunteer movement was little more than rational recreation under the guise of preparing for a war that never came, while prison officials of the era commodified treadwheel labour as a way to make inmates pay for their own institutional expenses. Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption of leisure time defines both the 19th-century Volunteer movement and its current counterpart, which also exhibits characteristics of rational recreation. Both the Volunteer movement and today’s charity running events were and are developed and employed in countries where the governments of the day took (and take) a ‘live and let live’ approach to service provision. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s publication “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” provides a useful analytical tool with which to compare and contrast the individual, social and political aspects of the Volunteer movement, prison treadwheel labour and fundraising distance running.
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Public and Social Welfare
Citation
Francis, C. (2013). A Genealogy of Pro-Status Quo Voluntarism: From the Victorian Volunteer Movement to Fundraising Distance Runs for Healthcare (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24741