Agon and Ecstasy: Transgression, Transformation, and Transcendence in Competitive Geocaching

Abstract

Geocaching is an organized leisure activity that combines use of computers, Global Positioning System receivers (GPSr), map skills, and the use of reasoning in solving complex problems. It can also involve planned deception and criminal-like behavior while engaged in the activity itself. “Sport” geocachers, in their desire to accumulate large totals of found and logged geocaches, an informal and unsanctioned goal of the pastime, sometimes engage in deviance, both internally and externally defined. Although geocachers see their activity as admittedly deviant, they actively disavow deviant identities and self-identification in their “normal” articulation within the world at large. The deviant, intrusive nature of the act of finding and logging the cache and the after “find” exultation resembles the behavior and emotional process of burglars and thieves, and links the pastime to other constructions of “transgressively agonistic” deviance.