The incremental transformation of the body through freediving: A biocultural approach to reflexive bodily practices

Abstract

Expert freediving explores the limits of human endurance, with some divers staying underwater for over 10 min or reaching crushing depths on a single breath. This article explores the enskilment process, especially how freediving training involves a suite of reflexive bodily practices with psychological, neurological, and physiological consequences. Examined closely and over time, skill acquisition is a multi-dimensional process involving self-driven adaptations in a cumulative, uneven manner. Because skills combine biological, cultural, and psychological mechanisms, practices are ideal for biocultural analysis in psychological anthropology. This account of the behavioral-development spiral in freediving enskilment suggests that transformative practices are inherently developmental, with neurological consequences. Theories of practice that ignore the temporal dimension or the variability of skill acquisition, that is, accounts that erase the slow and uncertain accumulation of expertise, fundamentally misrepresent how persistent practice blends biology and culture, and causes transformation, as well as the usefulness of ethnography for studying these processes.