ABSTRACT
A sliding flight, explosive manoeuvres, moving walls, momentary green caverns, shocking whiteness of sun-lit foam, exquisite patterns forming and dissipating, thunderous roar, feathering peaks, translucent lips, transcendent highs, gliding along the edge of the two great realms of sea and sky – such are some of the vivid expressions which may be associated with the simple practice of surfing. An autotelic, non-instrumental glide along an ephemeral line of force expending its energy along the margins of our share-based world. An embodied experience with an addictive tendency which may connect with the seemingly endless search for some form of mythical perfection, the ‘dream’ of surfing. Such dreams inspire journeys, lifestyles and, in retrospect, shape and inform memories of personal significance. This book seeks to explore the encultured ‘dream’ and the embodied ‘glide’ of surfing in terms of a whole series of theoretical prisms, drawn mostly (but not entirely) from the interpretive or hermeneutic turn of the social sciences. This text is not an aesthetic evocation of surfing, but rather an attempt to show how our understanding of the nature of surfing may be informed by a wide range of (often theoretical) literatures. As such, this book seeks to draw upon the relatively small amount of systematic scholarship that has focused on surfing, and to provide a basis for the growing body of academic research into the sociocultural, psychological and geographical dimensions of the phenomenon. Although the disciplinary ‘homes’ of the authors are human geography and the sociology of sport, the tone of the book is primarily transdisciplinary, but hopefully contributing to the newly emerging field of scholarship of surfing studies. Indeed, in recent years the first Surf Science degree courses have been established (at the University of Plymouth and Cornwall College in the UK) and there has been a very rapid increase in the number of student dissertations (from a whole range of disciplines) addressed to surfing.
