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Surfing and Social Theory: Experience, Embodiment and Narrative of the Dream Glide
Surfing has emerged from ancient roots to become a twenty-first century phenomenon – an ‘alternative’ sport, lifestyle and art form with a global profile and ever-increasing numbers of participants. Drawing on popular surf culture, academic literature and the analytical tools of social theory, this book is the first sustained commentary on the contemporary social and cultural meaning of surfing. Core themes of mind and body, emotions and identity, aesthetics, style, and sensory experience are explored through a variety of topics, and particular attention is paid * evolving perceptions of the sea and the beach
* the globalization of surfing
* surfing as a subculture and lifestyle
* the embodiment and gendering of surfing. Surfing and Social Theory is an original and theoretically rigorous text that sets the agenda for future work in this area. Along with the Surf Science courses now appearing in universities around the world, this text provides students and researchers in sport, sociology, culture and geography with a new perspective and a thought-provoking text.
* the globalization of surfing
* surfing as a subculture and lifestyle
* the embodiment and gendering of surfing. Surfing and Social Theory is an original and theoretically rigorous text that sets the agenda for future work in this area. Along with the Surf Science courses now appearing in universities around the world, this text provides students and researchers in sport, sociology, culture and geography with a new perspective and a thought-provoking text.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
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August 28, 2014
When I was a high school, the surfers in our beach town come summer surf resort were the really cool kids, but more to the point surfing was a really big part of life. It was not uncommon to have a bunch of wet-haired people who were a bit sandy, maybe with salt crusted skin in class after the lunch break…. They’d taken the six minute run to the beach for a surf. In my largely working class high school (about 80% of the student body) with a large (about ⅓) indigenous population surfing was king – among the young men we could field two rugby teams in a good year, a couple of softball teams, usually one soccer and one cricket team; those of us who sailed barely rated a mention. It was different for women – surfing mattered but few surfed; there was always 6 or 7 netball teams and a couple of softball teams. But surfing was a different story: local lore held that after about 10 years the interschool surfing competition was cancelled – my school’s team had won it every year and other schools didn’t see the point. There was a trophy in foyer that seemed to grant credibility to this claim, and certainly by the time I left high school there was no competition.
Despite this sporting success, however, surfing was among the least ‘sportised’ of pastimes – the ‘team’ never seemed to practice but spent long days at the beach regardless of wave quality/surfability and by the time I left (after the championships had been cancelled) there was no longer a team – but there were an awful lot of surfers. Not only that, there seemed to be a strange and mystical hierarchy among them with subtlety attached to the ranking of ‘cool’ that we outsiders never got. Yet there were brief times of deep bonding – such as the four weeks a year when the town’s population increased by about 400% and the fine surf beaches crowded out, although we had about 25km of good beaches to use. This, for me, was time to retreat from the surf beach to the other side of the tombolo and sail on the harbour. Even for those of us who felt this annual bond, spent huge amounts of time on and in the water and had good friends in the surf posse, the mystique of dancing and gliding on waves was incomprehensible – we did not experience the dream glide.
Ford & Brown set out to explore the problem of experience and of embodiment in this useful but ultimately frustrating scholarly exploration of ‘stand up’ surfing. I welcome and embrace the aspiration to analyse surfing-as-practice through the lenses provided by contemporary social theory. I also welcome their eclectic, for the most part, deployment of theory. Some of what they do is conventional is academic work on surfing – the historical outline is widely known but as they note the consensus may be a little too clean, the discussion of subculture and of gender also fairly conventional and as such a useful presentation of a state-of-the-art of work on surfing. Other aspects of the book are more innovative and as such significant – their location of surfing as an aspect of the enchanted sea, of seascapes, of the liminality of the beach, of the Romantic vision of the coastscape (a little explored aspect of the Romantic invention of landscape) is vital yet often glossed or presumed in explorations of surfing. Equally, their discussion of embodiment and their conceptualisation of the surfing/surfed body as having aspects that are practical (it does things), as interacting (it is social-with-other-bodies) and as storied (surfers/surfing/surfed bodies all tell stories of varying kinds) all suggest important ways of making sense of the practice of riding a (usually foam and fibreglass) ‘board’ across the surface of a wave of energy moving through the sea. In a similar manner, their invocation of aspects of dance theory to explore the experience of wave-riding as well as drawing on, for instance, non-representational theory to explore ways to talk about things/a thing that is largely inarticulable, something that is experienced and not reflected on until after it is done. This problem of language to discuss physicality, a largely preter-conscious practice, is one of the major issues phenomenological and other scholars of sport and physicality have – we do not have the words to translate the experience of physical activity into spoken language; Ford & Brown’s use of dance theory and non-representational theory therefore is to be celebrated.
All this brings me back to the ‘ultimately frustrating’ assessment. There were several things that bothered me throughout the text. The first is that for a book that sets out to explore the experience and embodiment of surfing written by two surfers, their experience and embodiment is missing – there are a few end notes where they write themselves in, but their bodies and experiences are missing from the text. This gap almost certainly limits the applicability and usefulness of the text. This gap is even more frustrating because of their emphasis on ‘coenaesthetics’ – in their words (p3) “the development of sensibilities through direct sensual experience”. There is a risk in this approach that coenaesthetics may lead to an experiential ideology that undermines the legitimacy of any critique from those of us who are not surfers, and it may be that Ford & Brown chose not to write themselves in as a way of downplaying their coenaesthetic knowledge, but the effect is in large part one that gives non-surfers no way in to exploring or recognising the sensibility-producing-experience and thereby further undermining our ability to critique. It may be that Ford & Brown are on a hiding to nothing – write themselves in violate the ‘rules’ of scholarly analysis; leave themselves out and undermine their case while raising experience to an ideology, but it is becoming more common for academic-practitioners to write themselves in (see Mark Stranger’s Surfing Life ). The third source of frustration is the interjection of figurational theory and references in places where I’m not convinced they are necessary or add much – for instance, at the end of the rich and insightful chapter exploring embodiment and emotion/sensibility there is (on pp 146 & 147) reference to Elias in a way that feels like an add-on. I accept here that I find figurational theory generally unhelpful and an impediment to explanations of change so others may not be as frustrated by its appearance, but for the most part I had trouble seeing what it added to this otherwise open engagement with a range of analytical approaches.
Finally, my sense of frustration is, I suspect, a result of this book’s self-consciously sacrificial style (as in this being the book we’ll all criticise/critique). It is the first comprehensive attempt to develop an explicitly all-embracing sociological theory of surfing and for all this Ford & Brown are tentative to the extent of being indecisive. I would have liked a little more risk taking in their conclusions. That said, the concluding chapter draws their case together well and outlines a number fruitful areas for new and further research – and as a result redeems itself to become a useful scholarly book but one that feels like a missed opportunity.
Despite this sporting success, however, surfing was among the least ‘sportised’ of pastimes – the ‘team’ never seemed to practice but spent long days at the beach regardless of wave quality/surfability and by the time I left (after the championships had been cancelled) there was no longer a team – but there were an awful lot of surfers. Not only that, there seemed to be a strange and mystical hierarchy among them with subtlety attached to the ranking of ‘cool’ that we outsiders never got. Yet there were brief times of deep bonding – such as the four weeks a year when the town’s population increased by about 400% and the fine surf beaches crowded out, although we had about 25km of good beaches to use. This, for me, was time to retreat from the surf beach to the other side of the tombolo and sail on the harbour. Even for those of us who felt this annual bond, spent huge amounts of time on and in the water and had good friends in the surf posse, the mystique of dancing and gliding on waves was incomprehensible – we did not experience the dream glide.
Ford & Brown set out to explore the problem of experience and of embodiment in this useful but ultimately frustrating scholarly exploration of ‘stand up’ surfing. I welcome and embrace the aspiration to analyse surfing-as-practice through the lenses provided by contemporary social theory. I also welcome their eclectic, for the most part, deployment of theory. Some of what they do is conventional is academic work on surfing – the historical outline is widely known but as they note the consensus may be a little too clean, the discussion of subculture and of gender also fairly conventional and as such a useful presentation of a state-of-the-art of work on surfing. Other aspects of the book are more innovative and as such significant – their location of surfing as an aspect of the enchanted sea, of seascapes, of the liminality of the beach, of the Romantic vision of the coastscape (a little explored aspect of the Romantic invention of landscape) is vital yet often glossed or presumed in explorations of surfing. Equally, their discussion of embodiment and their conceptualisation of the surfing/surfed body as having aspects that are practical (it does things), as interacting (it is social-with-other-bodies) and as storied (surfers/surfing/surfed bodies all tell stories of varying kinds) all suggest important ways of making sense of the practice of riding a (usually foam and fibreglass) ‘board’ across the surface of a wave of energy moving through the sea. In a similar manner, their invocation of aspects of dance theory to explore the experience of wave-riding as well as drawing on, for instance, non-representational theory to explore ways to talk about things/a thing that is largely inarticulable, something that is experienced and not reflected on until after it is done. This problem of language to discuss physicality, a largely preter-conscious practice, is one of the major issues phenomenological and other scholars of sport and physicality have – we do not have the words to translate the experience of physical activity into spoken language; Ford & Brown’s use of dance theory and non-representational theory therefore is to be celebrated.
All this brings me back to the ‘ultimately frustrating’ assessment. There were several things that bothered me throughout the text. The first is that for a book that sets out to explore the experience and embodiment of surfing written by two surfers, their experience and embodiment is missing – there are a few end notes where they write themselves in, but their bodies and experiences are missing from the text. This gap almost certainly limits the applicability and usefulness of the text. This gap is even more frustrating because of their emphasis on ‘coenaesthetics’ – in their words (p3) “the development of sensibilities through direct sensual experience”. There is a risk in this approach that coenaesthetics may lead to an experiential ideology that undermines the legitimacy of any critique from those of us who are not surfers, and it may be that Ford & Brown chose not to write themselves in as a way of downplaying their coenaesthetic knowledge, but the effect is in large part one that gives non-surfers no way in to exploring or recognising the sensibility-producing-experience and thereby further undermining our ability to critique. It may be that Ford & Brown are on a hiding to nothing – write themselves in violate the ‘rules’ of scholarly analysis; leave themselves out and undermine their case while raising experience to an ideology, but it is becoming more common for academic-practitioners to write themselves in (see Mark Stranger’s Surfing Life ). The third source of frustration is the interjection of figurational theory and references in places where I’m not convinced they are necessary or add much – for instance, at the end of the rich and insightful chapter exploring embodiment and emotion/sensibility there is (on pp 146 & 147) reference to Elias in a way that feels like an add-on. I accept here that I find figurational theory generally unhelpful and an impediment to explanations of change so others may not be as frustrated by its appearance, but for the most part I had trouble seeing what it added to this otherwise open engagement with a range of analytical approaches.
Finally, my sense of frustration is, I suspect, a result of this book’s self-consciously sacrificial style (as in this being the book we’ll all criticise/critique). It is the first comprehensive attempt to develop an explicitly all-embracing sociological theory of surfing and for all this Ford & Brown are tentative to the extent of being indecisive. I would have liked a little more risk taking in their conclusions. That said, the concluding chapter draws their case together well and outlines a number fruitful areas for new and further research – and as a result redeems itself to become a useful scholarly book but one that feels like a missed opportunity.
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