The Denegation of the Economy

Abstract

Free-climbing is used as a privileged way of studying the positioning generated by the meeting of the symbolic economy of sport and a market that is trying to extend its hold on it. In order to understand why money has become an internal problem to the free-climbing space, the article analyses how its symbolic economy and its market are organized. As the economization of free-climbing took place almost simultaneously with its advent, free-climbers had to take an immediate stand. At the end of the 1980s, nearly 25 years after the establishment of free-climbing, opposition to its marketization was still strong among its enthusiasts because the symbolic economy of the free-climbing world was at stake. Free-climbers use the denegation of the economy to overcome the contradictions between their anti-economic ethos and the marketing of their performances, while at the same time expressing the values of the social categories to which the sportsmen and sportswomen belong. Thus, denegation is not a conscious way of being close to the climbing culture; it underlines the beliefs that in climbing value does not, as in some other social spaces, depend on the individual’s economic capital but on free-climbing culture.