What is it about?

Why are people able to keep going when faced with pain, hardship, uncertainty or adversity? This edited volume brings together researchers from different disciplines to explore the many meanings and experiences of human endurance. It examines endurance in contexts ranging from long-distance running and other physical challenges to migration, drought, art and the difficulties of everyday life. The book shows that endurance is not simply a physical ability or an individual personality trait. It is also mental, social and cultural, and its meaning changes across situations and societies. Some forms of endurance are voluntarily sought out, while others are imposed by circumstances. By looking at these different experiences together, the book explores what enduring hardship can tell us about the ways people make sense of themselves, their lives and the world around them.

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Why is it important?

Endurance has particular relevance in a time marked by overlapping and prolonged crises. The COVID-19 pandemic, war, climate change, displacement, economic uncertainty and other challenges have made “enduring” part of everyday life for many people. Yet endurance is often discussed either as an individual capacity to overcome adversity or as a remarkable physical achievement, as in marathon running and other endurance sports. This book offers a broader perspective by bringing together insights from different disciplines and very different forms of human experience. Importantly, the volume does not assume that endurance is necessarily positive. Being capable of enduring difficult circumstances may demonstrate remarkable human strength, but celebrating endurance can also distract attention from the social, economic or political conditions that produce suffering in the first place. The capacity and obligation to endure are also unevenly distributed. There is an important difference between choosing the discomfort of an ultramarathon and having to endure drought, displacement or prolonged insecurity. By examining these tensions, the book helps us think critically about what it means to “keep going”: who is expected to endure, under which circumstances, for how long, and to what end? This makes endurance more than an individual capacity. It becomes a powerful lens for understanding contemporary society and the different ways people respond to uncertainty, suffering and change.

Perspectives

For me, one of the most interesting things about endurance is the extraordinary range of experiences that we describe with this single word. We talk about an athlete enduring physical exhaustion, a migrant enduring displacement and uncertainty, a farming family enduring years of drought, or somebody quietly enduring illness or difficult circumstances in everyday life. These experiences are obviously not equivalent, yet placing them alongside one another raises important questions about what it actually means to endure. I am particularly interested in the ambiguity of endurance. There is something deeply human about the ability to continue despite discomfort, uncertainty and adversity. Endurance can produce self-knowledge, meaning and even transformation. This helps explain why people sometimes deliberately seek out difficult experiences, whether through long-distance running, pilgrimage or other physical challenges. At the same time, we should be cautious about romanticising the capacity to suffer. This becomes especially important when endurance shifts from something we choose to something circumstances require of us. Celebrating people's resilience and perseverance can easily become a way of overlooking the conditions that force particular individuals or communities to endure in the first place. In that sense, I see endurance as not only a personal or bodily phenomenon but also a profoundly social and political one. The question is not simply“How much can people endure?” but also“Why should they have to?” What I value most about this volume is therefore that it does not try to produce a single definition or theory of endurance. Instead, the contributions reveal its complexity across different disciplines and lived experiences. For me, that openness is productive: it allows endurance to become a lens through which we can explore how people deal with limits, time, suffering and uncertainty, but also how they create meaning while continuing to live through circumstances that they may or may not have chosen.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

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This page is a summary of: Contemporary Meanings of Endurance, October 2022, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003321842.
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