A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE ISSUE 56 SPORTS c US $12 CANADA $12 UK £7 82 BEING THE WAVE Stefan Helmreich
During the American presidential election of navigations, tracking how the aesthetics of 2008, close watchers of the news learned that the sublime—of individual union with scary phe- Barack Obama was a bodysurfer, riding waves nomena—have contoured risk-taking leisure.3 without aid of a board, propelled only by arms Krista Comer, in Surfer Girls in the New World Order, and swim-finned feet. The aim of the sport, writes reports on how women have struggled against their enthusiast Robert Gardner, “is to cut diagonally sidelining in surf culture, as successive genres of across the face of the wave, trying to slide along just surfer masculinity—strapping, slacking—have under the breaking curl. This increases the speed of claimed social space.4 Racial politics have shaped the ride.”1 Bodysurfing lacks the glamour of board the sport too. Comer tells the tale of Native surfing, or anything like its promotional indus- Hawaiian surfer Eddie Aikau, who traveled to try. It is a solitary and spare enterprise, requiring apartheid-era South Africa with haoles (who, like a feel for how to launch one’s body across the arc him, had been inspired by the 1966 movie The of a breaking wave. Obama arrived at the activity Endless Summer), only to be turned away from a biographically, growing up as he did in Hawai‘i. segregated hotel—an affront his white friends A first-generation African American, Obama was did nothing to address, and which then racialized not, like his University-of-Hawai‘i-anthropology- existing ethnic divides when the group returned graduate-student mother, Ann Dunham, a to Hawai‘i. Arun Saldanha documents how shore- haole—a Native Hawaiian term that refers to white side tourism in Goa, India, ripples with race. His people from the mainland. He stood apart, too, from Psychedelic White proposes that racial identities Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrant commu- materialize not through the enforcement of rigid nities as well as from Native Hawaiians—though boundaries, but rather through Obama joked in Dreams from My Father that his white grandfather would sometimes describe him to side- viscosity … how an aggregate of bodies holds together, ways-looking white tourists as the great-grandson how relatively fast or slow they are, and how they col- of King Kamehameha.2 Obama cut a unique figure lectively shape the aggregate. … Flows of people are at in the water, especially since so much mainland once open-ended and gradually thickened by recurring, American history—think segregated beaches— allegedly conscious decision making. … What bodies do— has worked against African American recreational swim, sunbathe, shout, hold hands, drink, …—determines swimming. who and where they are on the beach.5 This figure of Obama-in-motion impels my meditation here on bodysurfing, which asks how What of bodysurfing? What kinds of body politics a politics might be read from the kinetics of the and viscosities shape this activity? To seek to “be sport, from bodily aspirations that, these days, have the wave” is to be in the pull of the transform- bodysurfers wanting to “be the wave.” Drawing on ing affects and demographics of beach recreation, an ethnographic account of a 2012 competition in in the drift of shifting shorelines and practiced California that I entered, I contend that embodied apprehensions of seawater as force and substance. aquatic techniques—wet and fleshly phenomeno- Such apprehensions are, to lift a term from Gaston logical and political performances—shape not only Bachelard, phenomenotechniques, processes that fash- bodysurfing bodies and selves, but also what body- ion material experiences of the world in calibration surfers take a wave to be. with techniques of the body.6 How does a politics— What does it take to “be the wave”? It takes possibilities for movement and stasis, for social work, getting a feel for the curve of seawater, inclusion and exclusion—inform and issue from studying the methods of other swimmers, navigat- ing social worlds surrounding beach and breakers. opposite: Ken Charon, Obama Rides the Big Wave, Cultural studies of surfing have mapped such 2008. Courtesy the artist. 83 BEING THE WAVE 84 STEFAN HELMREICH
bodysurfers’ encounters with waves as objects sub- “Are you insane?” My six-year-old, Rufus, parrots stantial and evanescent? my father: “Are you insane?” It is bound to throw These questions bring me in August 2012 to any ethnographer off their game, doing fieldwork Oceanside, California, for the 36th Annual World with their parents and kid around, heckling.8 Bodysurfing Championship. I have entered as a com- The event, which has drawn some two hun- petitor, arriving into the younger side of the Men’s dred to three hundred people, features bodysurfers 45–54 group. I am here, perhaps, as Comer says in from the mainland United States, Hawai‘i, France, Surfer Girls, to “return to the scene of [my] coming-of- Brazil, and Australia—though that hardly covers age and take stock of all that has transpired since.”7 the “world” promised by the competition’s name. I went to high school nearby, in the beach town of A quick survey of the bodies in the contest sees Encinitas. A friend from those days, Jeff, with whom mostly white bodies (like mine), and more men than I spent a sunburned summer in the 1980s, is in the women. Beyond the boundaries of the contest are contest—and has been every year since way back. He mostly Latino families from Oceanside. The proxim- asks me if I have practiced. Not much, I admit, hav- ity of Camp Pendleton, a United States Marine Corps ing just flown in from Massachusetts, where I now base, means many beachgoers are working-class teach anthropology. He asks whether I like going left military. The racial and class viscosity is not dif- or right on waves. I have no idea. Jeff points to the ficult to assess. As Simon Leung observes, speaking pier and says, “If you go right, you’ll have to watch out not to run into the pier. If you go left, you can Above: Illustration from an 1897 edition of Captain get longer rides.” As if to complete my sense of hav- Cook’s Voyages round the World depicting “surf- ing entered a time warp, my parents are here at the swimming” in Hawai‘i, then known as the Sandwich beach, ready to cheer me on, though my father asks, Islands. 85 BEING THE WAVE of a Huntington Beach art installation entitled Surf Vietnam (about the surfing-under-gunfire scene in Apocalypse Now), “When you look at surfing histori- cally, you get a story of colonialism, the real-estate development of southern California, the rise of the military industries (fiberglass and foam, what surfboards are made of, came from military technol- ogy), not to mention the beautiful, golden California child.”9 Check. But there is also the inside story, the one participants tell, and one in which, as an anthropolo- gist, I am keenly interested. How do bodysurfers think of themselves, of waves? One of the few books on the subject, The Art of Body Surfing, from 1972, suggests that a desire for “being the wave” has been in circulation for a while: “This is a feeling that can’t be explained, but you know when it’s happening. You’re moving; you’re a part of the wave.”10 That same book also weaves in a narrative from an ear- lier historical sensibility, one that has the sea as an adversary: Legendary Hawaiian surfer Eddie Aikau, who in To the surfing purist, body surfing will always be the 1968 became the first lifeguard hired by the City supreme test of man’s age-old struggle to conquer his most and County of Honolulu to work on the North ruthless, dangerous, and implacable enemy—the sea. This Shore. is because the body surfer challenges the sea at its most violent moment—the thunderous breaker—and he does it without artificial help or assistance.11
That story—and its gendered cast—has origins in Euro-American beach going. As Alain Corbin records in The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, early British bathing, aimed at pressing bourgeois people into healthful encounters with the sea, assumed that waves were oceanic others:
Bathers and physicians both agreed that the sea should offer three major qualities: it should be cold, or at least cool, salty and turbulent. Pleasure came from the whip- ping of the waves. … Bathing among the waves was part of the aesthetics of the sublime: it involved facing the vio- lent water, but without risk, enjoying the pretense that one could be swept under, but without losing one’s footing.12
Bourgeois men and women—who approached waves with the aid of working-class helpers called “bath- ers”—were trained to experience waves in ways Robert Gardner, The Art of Bodysurfing, 1972. 86 STEFAN HELMREICH proper to their sex. Men thought it manly to face the surf because you are deep in the wave, not on it. the waves “alone”; with bathers standing at some … Every real surfer wants to be one with the wave, distance, men would pretend “to be crushed” by not just to ride the wave.”16 The 2011 bodysurfing waves.13 For women, “the emotion of sea bathing documentary Come Hell or High Water features many arose from sudden immersion. The ‘bathers’ would bodysurfers with this same opinion. Celebrity body- plunge female patients into the water just as the wave surfer Mark Cunningham says, “It just seems so broke, taking care to hold their heads down so as real and genuine. You know, it’s just very pure and to increase the impression of suffocation. … [A] Dr simple and it was as tight with nature as I could pos- Bertrand indicated the manner in which ‘the wave sibly get.”17 A story in The Surfer’s Journal genders the must be received’ on various parts of the body.”14 sea female, a mother/heterosexual lover: Nowadays, after more than a century of swim- ming lessons for middle-class people, a “one with The ocean forever trades us bumps and scrapes for only the sea” story for bodysurfers dominates. It tracks about 30 seconds of pure unfiltered joy … But isn’t that changes in masculinity—real surfer men no longer part of the reason we bodysurf? … To be told by Mother have to be steely and stoic, having adopted laid-back Ocean that we are small, that we mean nothing, that I, affects long ago—but it also bespeaks a turn-of-the- Mother Ocean, may be dangerous at times, but fuck, am I millennium environmentalist sensibility.15 Deep in ever going to take you dancing! … We bodysurf to be part the Wave: A Surfing Guide to the Soul, from 2012, rings of that thing full of energy, making its way to the shore, the changes: “Bodysurfing is a great way for a begin- bringing Life.18 ning surfer to get to know the feeling and flow of I ask my friend Jeff what has changed in bodysurf- ing since he took it up. There are fewer of us, he says. He blames boogie boarding, a genre of surfing that sees people riding belly-down on hydrodynamic foam boards. It has become too easy.19 There are growing numbers from other water sports, too, so the style is changing; today Jeff sees athletes—water polo people, junior lifeguards—rather than “kids like us, who just fell into it.” Some techniques have changed; the both-arms-back, shoulders-hunched move, which Jeff and I favored, has vanished. Back in 1972, it had been enshrined in Gardner’s how-to book: “Maneuver to that critical point where the wave is breaking, but try to be right on the edge of the break, then take off exactly the same as before, with a stroke, a kick, hunching the shoulders to get the center of gravity forward so that you are starting down.”20 Another participant, Mike, a white man in his forties, has a different view. “Bodysurfing is having a renaissance” precisely because people are mixing it with other sports, discovering it as “a dimension of surfing”—an account I also hear from a twenty- something, self-identified “surfer girl” straight out Male bodysurfers featured on the cover of the of Krista Comer’s book, who tells me how she thinks “Seaside” issue of the Sydney Mail, 7 March about the difference between surfing and bodysurf- 1906. Courtesy Australian National Maritime ing. As a surfer, one is “conquering the wave.” As a Museum. bodysurfer, she says, “you have the wave flow over 87 BEING THE WAVE
Postcard dated 1908 showing bodysurfing at Manly Beach, Australia, one of the pioneering locations for the devel- opment of the sport. Courtesy Geoff Cater,
your body. It’s a whole different frame of mind.” My generation did not swim as the present generation People are eager to talk about the comparison. does. … We have seen the breast-stroke with the head One of my age-mates, Tom, says he likes bodysurf- out of the water replaced by the different sorts of crawl. ing because “the energy catches you. I try to get in Moreover, the habit of swallowing water and spitting it a dolphin mentality. You’re out there at the source. out again has gone. In my day swimmers thought of them- You’re not going against it; you’re going with it. selves as a kind of steam-boat. It was stupid, but in fact I You’re part of it.” His friend Dave agrees, and goes still do this: I cannot get rid of my technique.21 further: “Waves kind of talk to you sometimes. … Bodysurfing is like a painting and you’re part of There also exist geographical traditions, differences. the painting. You’re out there making your own I fall into conversation with two men from O‘ahu designs.” As Tom and Dave ready for their turn (who call themselves “boys,” a term of address from in the waves, they say they hope people aren’t “all Hawaiian pidgin), and they tell me this is their first agro” (meaning “all aggravated,” too intense) out time competing in California. They too note the there. The younger guys, they say, just race out to presence of athletically minded people. One remarks the waves. The middle-aged guys “just cruise out to that California attracts people (water polo players get the waves, look at each other … ‘I’m not going get another mention) who “train in controlled water. fast, are you?’” There’s a relaxed slowness to this Their bodies move differently.” I am reminded of approach that is about age, but also about when an article by Eric Ishiwata, who in “Local Motions: one came of age. What was once a casual activity Surfing and the Politics of Wave Sliding,” suggests has become competitive. There is the viscosity of that he‘e nalu—Hawaiian for “wave sliding” (board race and class, too—with the new, largely white, surfing)—takes waves to be, above all, cultural arti- privileged water-polo-playing types injecting a facts, even cultural patrimony. “The surfbreaks of focused speed. Dave (Latino) turns to Tom (African Hawai‘i,” writes Ishiwata, are places where “locals American) and says, with a studied wryness, “Let’s carve out resistances” to tourist encroachments, win one for the minorities.” countering the commoditization of surf leisure by Techniques transform. In 1935, Marcel Mauss, in moving into, occupying, and (re)territorializing Techniques of the Body, wrote of morphing modes of Hawaiian waters with distinct habits of individual bodily comportment: and aggregate movement.22 88 STEFAN HELMREICH
Hawaiian stories of bodysurfing make the large waves of the archipelago a plot point, and often script the size of waves into narratives about boys testing their manhood against the sea.23 Residents of Hawai‘i also told me their bodysurfing often emerged from working as lifeguards in the big surf. Lifeguarding in Hawai‘i is usually about saving tourists who underestimate the ocean. Bodysurfing lifeguards stand for life not only because of their vocation, but also because, in contrast to tourists encountering the sea as a force of death, lifeguards’ capacity to “be the wave” positions them as inti- mates with the sea. Being “one with the wave” is greatly buoyed by being able to catch it, and nowadays swim fins are crucial to that intimacy. But it was not until after World War ii that swim fins became widely Prototype and finished version of Owen Churchill’s swim fins. A tag on the reverse of the prototype available. The United States Naval Special Warfare reads: “First ‘Swim-Fin’ by Owen Churchill out of Command’s Underwater Demolition Team was the the molds April 30, 1940.” first to standardize fins, using a design created by the American yachting Olympian Owen Churchill, who claimed that he took inspiration from Tahitian swimmers wearing woven leaves on their feet, but who also licensed (for the United States) plans patented in 1933 by French naval officer Louis de Corlieu. It was only in the early 1950s that fins were commercialized and became popular. Before, in the pre-swim fin days—roughly prior to World War ii—the art of body surfing was severely limited by the inability of the surfer, no matter how skilled, to gener- ate enough quick speed to control the wave. Thus, in the 1920s and the 1930s, it was “straight off” or “over the falls,” with a reckless disregard of consequences.24
Fins can be understood as a material element in the context of Bachelardian phenomenotechnique. In 1934, Bachelard wrote, “Instruments are noth- ing but theories materialized. The phenomena they produce bear the stamp of theory throughout.”25 The fusion of fins with surfers’ bodies thus concretizes a folk theory of waves, one that has waves as enti- ties with biographies of their own, biographies with which bodysurfers can fuse. It is also true, to invert From military materiel to fashion accessory. Bachelard,26 that finned bodies create fresh phenom- Actress Barbara Stanwyck modeling a pair of enologies of experience. swim fins, ca. 1945. It is time for me to get in the water. As I stand at the start of my heat with five other middle-aged men 89 BEING THE WAVE at the foot of the pier, I note that most of us have it. The last time I tried it they had a bunch of people out Voit “Duck Feet” swim fins—a generational marker on jet skis in the water and surrounding me with all (though also a pointer back to Voit’s 1953 retooling kinds of stuff and it was a little distracting for the other for recreational markets a product originally created swimmers.27 for the Navy). The starting horn blasts. I leave the water. I was not the wave. I think: always dive under waves, avoid the Only once back on the beach do I think I am surge, and get out to sea. I think this not so much in lucky to have made it. I come upon several emergency words, but with head, hands, torso, and feet swim- medical technicians, crouched over a swimmer, to ming to articulate themselves into the outlines of a whom they are giving oxygen. Jeff tells me this hap- ghosted former self. I stroke ahead. It is going well. pens: “We had a guy die out here a few years ago.” Then it is not. My breath falls out of sync, and I sink What is it like to be a wave? It is to participate in under the foam in just the wrong way. A pull in my an experience of the sublime—“That quality in nature inner ear tells me I’ve forgotten how to equilibrate or art which inspires awe, reverence, or other high myself. emotion,” notes the Oxford English Dictionary, and Always face the ocean, never turn your back “encompasses an element of terror.” For big-wave to the sea … but “the sea” is a category too big surfers, that sublime is the Romantic, massive and and abstract for what I am in, which is much more terrifying. For bodysurfers, it is an intimate sublime, immediate, and feels like tumbling in a washing an iSublime. But it is an experience, as I hope I’ve machine. In a moment of reverie, I think about all suggested, not only personal, but also political. So, the microbes in the sea… if, as surfing theorist Douglas Booth writes, “deep in Pushed to the sand below—disorienting: waves each surfer’s subconscious is an interpretation of an are hardly smooth, shiny arcs down here—I flash ocean wave,”28 that intuition is also shaped by the back. I used to enjoy underwater takeoffs, eyes open, thickness of history, by the politics of who learns to watching the inside of the wave, trying to crawl into surf how, when, where, and with whom. the impossible subjectivity of the thing. But now, What it means to “be the wave” is changing. far from being the wave, I am swirling, part of the Mid-twentieth-century bodysurfers saw the sea as ocean’s multiple impersonality. an adversary, while their successors see it as an ally. The water gives me a respite. I head back out to And today, wave-being is in further transformation. get something. I remember Jeff’s advice: go left! I get There is a change from casual to competitive, to a wave. If I were thinking in words, I might teleport bodysurfing as an activity sculpted by other board back to my teenage vocabulary, declaring myself and water sports. stoked. Bodysurfing has become an object of deliberate By now, though, a rip current has dragged study. Take, as a stark example, Neville de Mestre’s me northward, out of contest bounds. But, hey, “Mathematics and Bodysurfing,” published in 2004 isn’t bodysurfing all about being alone? The in the Australian Mathematical Society Gazette. De worst thing one can do is cut someone else off, Mestre’s math may not yet have been boiled down disrupting that person’s communion with the sea. into a smartphone app—something one can wave Bodysurfing is about navigating watery social in front of a wave—but there are those for whom space so that one can eventually have that commu- the enterprise has become more calculative sport nion-with-the-wave moment. If that is what it is, than lifestyle, a sea change that will introduce new maybe I am winning! I certainly have more solitude viscosities, new phenomenotechniques, into the than Obama these days. From the Chicago Sun world of bodysurfing.29 Even this article of mine Times, 2009: is a symptom of the abstraction now possible to generate about the shifting shapes of bodies and the president: [Bodysurfing] is a wonderful thing waves at seaside, about waves remade by people, to do. I grew up doing it, love the ocean. I’ll admit to you places, and things as new sorts of nonhuman human that the Secret Service these days does not like me doing phenomena. 90 STEFAN HELMREICH
1 Robert Gardner, The Art of Body as do anthropologist Ajantha the Body,” in Margaret Lock and Surfing (New York: Chilton Book Subramanian and her historian Judith Farquhar, eds., Beyond the Company, 1972), p. 42. husband Vincent Brown—Harvard Body Proper: Reading the Anthro- 2 Barack Obama, Dreams from My friends who happen to be in town pology of Material Life (Durham, Father: A Story of Race and Inheri- and whom we have alerted to this NC: Duke University Press, 2007), tance (New York: Times Books, event. Brown, we discovered back p. 51. 1995), p. 25. in Cambridge, also grew up body- 22 Eric Ishiwata, “Local Motions: 3 See Kent Pearson, Surfing surfing in Encinitas and makes his Surfing and the Politics of Wave Subcultures of Australia and way back when he can. I also wish Sliding,” Cultural Values, vol. 6, no. New Zealand (St Lucia, Australia: to thank Tim Casanelli, Thomas 3 (2002), pp. 257–272. See also University of Queensland Press, Gomes, Gisbert Helmreich, Isaiah Helelkunihi Walker, Waves 1979); Ricky J. Farmer, “Surfing: Mary Helmreich, Rufus Paxson of Resistance: Surfing and His- Motivations, Values, and Culture,” Helmreich, and Jeff Oglesby, for tory in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i Journal of Sport Behavior, vol. 15, company on and commentary (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i no. 3 (1992), pp. 241–257; Ben about the waves. Press, 2011). Finney and James D. Houston, 9 Marita Sturken and Simon 23 See, for example, Malcolm Surfing: A History of the Ancient Leung, “Displaced Bodies in Orrall, “Paipo Days: Paipo- Hawaiian Sport (Rohnert Park, Residual Spaces,” Public Culture, boarding, Bodysurfing, and CA: Pomegranate Artbooks, vol. 17, no. 1 (2005), p. 141. Brotherhood,” (2009). Available at 1996); Douglas Booth, “Surfing: 10 Robert Gardner, Art of Body