By drawing on two distinct case studies, the first concerning young men in Sweden whose life project is focused on building as large body mass as possible and the second the lived and embodied experiences and memories of racial and class discrimination among young Afro-Brazilian men, I attempt to contribute to a Marxist inspired discussion on ideology. The paper takes it point of departure in Marxist inspired theories of ideology, in Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic domination and violence, and in phenomenology. I argue that the gym constitutes a specific social field to where the bodybuilders can withdraw from the demands of economic and social mobility and ontological insecurity in the external society, while, at the same time, their life-project is informed by the very same ideology of this society, labelled infravalues. I further argue that the bodybuilders’ withdrawal into the gym, and their project and embodied practices lack the potential of a critical stance towards their economic and social inferior position in the society. This case study is juxtaposed with a research project that explores how lived and embodied experiences and memories of racial and class discrimination among Afro-Brazilians in Salvador form an underlying pattern of tacit collective understanding, which can be transformed into a discourse of Afro-Brazilian victimage and resistance to their inferior position in the Brazilian society.

Scholar 
Örjan Bartholdson, senior lecturer at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). He wrote his PhD on the Afro-Brazilian movement in Salvador, Bahia, and researched on smallholders in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon.