What do you call it? Photo: WSL/Kristin, WSL/Robertson, WSL/Michelangelo. Nah, he doesn’t work there.
How do we categorize this activity we do, this communion with, this union between, this time spent upon, beneath (or whichever requisite prepositional elbow word used to marry nouns and verbs you choose) the ocean? Shall we name it: Sport? Lifestyle? Religion? Spirituality? The number of opinions skirting this question, and seeking to name it, are as many and as varied as there are surfers to ponder the question. This is to be expected in an activity that draws the fiercely independent and itself revolves around an individual’s immersion in the fierceness of nature.
What is the purpose of naming? Who stands to profit from a name? Why name this activity we immerse ourselves in at all? Cultivating a sense of the significance of this naming may perhaps shine a light on why we so often find ourselves arguing about “what this surfing really is.”
The significance of “[n]aming is not neutral, it is not giving something a simple label – it is a deliberate act that engages a mode of relation or… of struggle (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011).”
The Contenders
Sport: We are seeing this naming occupying a dominant position in the world of corporate, competitive surfing currently. Surrounded by baseball-like jerseys and lockers, professional surfers prep for their heats in sports-like environments, replete with stationary cycles for warming up and instant replays for fans who watch via webcast. This naming is inextricably linked to the Olympic movement in surfing, a movement that is itself, intimately tied to SIMA, and the current global, neoliberal shift in corporate surfing.
Lifestyle: The model for this emerged in 1959. The Hollywood movie Gidget marked the beginning of, not only the surf industry as we know it today, but also of the prototypical surfer girl image loyally recycled by the surf industry to this day. The newest manifestation of the men’s side of this lifestyle image was already present in Miki Dora in the 1950s. He was a character that contrarily decried the impact of the 95 lb. “girl-midget” on his beloved Malibu paradise, even as he succumbed to the money offered by the burgeoning industry (quickly growing as a result of the influx of “wanna-be” surfers lured by Gidget). These days, the sponsored “freesurfer” is the modern recycling of the “dark knight”, devil-may-care, Dora prototype. Both of these images sell surfing, not as an activity, but as a beach lifestyle that one can buy.
Religion/Spirituality: This perspective gained prominence in the 1970s along with myriad other religious/spiritual social experiments that included mind-bending drug induced journeys, transcendental meditation, guru-like disaffected icons, and alternative, experiential lifestyles centered around “dropping-out” of a post-WWII social conformism. The promise of a metaphysical unification with the universe via surfing gave way all too quickly to the 1980s rush to express one’s individuality through consumerism. The altar of materialism consumed the open-ceilinged church of the ocean in swathes of neon and ill-fitted surf trunks on the bodies of a growing feudal hierarchy called “competitive surfing.” Still, there are some who maintain surfing’s mystical dogma and the experience’s ability to enrich the soul; perhaps closer to what we understand in a modern sense to be a mode of spirituality. The problem with naming surfing as such is that it relies on previous understandings of spirituality which are invariably marred by all sorts of pollutants. Here I say “spirituality”, there you say “the Tao”: the trope is already sullied with stereotypes.
Two of the three “contenders” above are being driven by the surf industry. If the surf industry could collect enough tithes from the spiritualists, they would. It is imperative for the industry to define, to name, to categorize this activity we do because it will know how to treat and market the thing. These names have consequences.
Undefined, however, is a slippery little egg. Daring to put into words (not a name) what surfing means to you, personalizes it, returns it to a state of mystery, confusion, and frustration for an assimilative industry that wants simple, neat packaging and clear, non-nutritive labels.
There is a tradition of “talking story” in surfing that is nearest what is meant by “undefined” here. Sometimes the best way to defy the crushing onslaught of a colonizing force is to tell tales to each other behind the backs of those in power: our creation myths, our histories, our stories.
The further corporate surfing pushes their agenda, the deeper we must go into our narrative. There are no shortboarders here, no longboarders, no body boarders… only us, talking story to each other: ruthlessly undefined.
