2023 Pauline Schmitt Russell Research Lecture

The Curious Case of the Rarámuri Foot-Runners: Unlikely Avatars of Modern Health and Wellness

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Mark Dyreson, the 2022 recipient of the Pauline Schmitt Russell Distinguished Research Achievement Award, presented "The Curious Case of the Rarámuri Foot-Runners: Unlikely Avatars of Modern Health and Wellness."

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, a little-understood Indigenous culture from a remote area in northwestern Mexico has regularly appeared and reappeared in modern visions of health and wellness. Their exercise regimens and nutritional habits have been touted as remedies for inoculating modern populations against the scourges of urban-industrial civilizations, from heart disease and hypertension to cancer and diabetes to depression and anxiety. Curiously, these avatars of wellness are from other measures one of the least healthy populations in the Western Hemisphere, suffering from persistent malnutrition and endemic diseases and bearing one of the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world.

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"The strange career of these avatars whose tribal name has been regularly translated as “the foot-runners” reveals illuminating insights into modern ideas about human health and development across lifespans from the cellular to the social realms."

Mark Dyreson, professor of kinesiology

About the presenter

Mark Dyreson studies how sport shapes modern societies and impacts ideas about health and human development. His most recent book is Black Mercuries: African American Athletes, Race, and the Modern Olympic Games (2023). He earned his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Arizona in 1989, completing a dissertation on the intersection of sport, politics, and public discourse that became his first book, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture and the Olympic Experience (1998). He joined Penn State's Department of Kinesiology in 1998.

Each year, the Schmitt Russell Research Lecture is presented by the most recent recipient of the Pauline Schmitt Russell Distinguished Research Achievement Award, recognizing the contributions of a distinguished faculty member whose career-long research has had a profound impact on a specific field of study.