A Quarterly of Art and Culture Issue 56 Sports Us

c US $12 CANADA UK £7US $12 $12 ISSUE 56 A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE SPORTS 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 “surfing 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 violent 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 “bathers”—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.

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