Abstract
‘“A damp drizzly November in my soul” develops whenever I imagine a world where myself and others are barred from the waves’ (p. 3). So begins cultural geographer Jon Anderson’s 2023 monograph Surfing Spaces, which problematizes the world of surf-riding.
The book proceeds in two parts. Part 1 explores Anderson’s theoretical point of departure from conventional, terrestrially bound human geography: the littoral. Anderson describes this as a zone of human-cultural-biophysical assemblage, an in-between space that is not quite terrestrial (coastline), nor purely oceanic. He recovers the littoral from narrowly hydrological understandings, showing how it becomes a place through time as social groups form identities via consumption, protection, and sport practices in relation to land-sea interaction. By emphasizing interwoven problems of social power, class, race, gender, and ideology in relation to the coast, Anderson unpacks the diversity of issues that arise from how this geography is redefined historically, but also who such defining serves.
Combining surf-riding technological history with his own ethnographic investigation, Anderson explores the connections and disconnections between pre- and post-colonial surfing history in part 2. He identifies how cultural violence in Polynesia, Australia and elsewhere express littoral entrepreneurial colonization. Through the selective processing and re-presenting of locations, elites, and boosters have mobilized cultural scripts about where and who should be surfing, and how. Anderson’s critical engagement with issues of capital accumulation, racial discrimination, ethnic dispossession, and the market for gendered media cohere to show how surfing spaces are deeply (b)ordered beyond the ‘stoke’ espoused by surf-riders (Figure 1).
September 27, 2019 – At the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street, Huntington Beach, California, a statue of the Hawai’ian Olympian and Surf champion Duke Kahanamoku guards the ever−popular Huntington Surf and Sport store. As Anderson reveals, establishing cultural scripts of courageous heroes and adventurers was an historical process in which even Indigenous surfers became key to the commodification of the littoral zone. Image© Brian F. O’Neill.
One weakness of the text is how the wider series of connections from Anderson’s claims, such as ethnic erasure, racial discrimination, and the ableist culture embedded in surfing are not explicitly linked to aspects of environmentalism. Indeed, at its most useful, Surfing Spaces is, well, not about surfing. Given Anderson’s prior work on environmental movements, 1 this may have been a missed opportunity. For instance, I have seen first-hand how emic-etic dynamics and spatial politics play out in coastal environmental issues as actors enroll the littoral as a basis for reasoning about the politics of pollution, industrial expansion, and ecology, shot through with concerns about leisure and livelihoods. 2 Usefully, Surfing Spaces generates new questions: what is the nature of global politics that enroll the littoral as key to environmentalist identities? Does not the figure of the heroic surfer in exotic littoral locales map onto that of the ecological savior of the future working in any number of environmental non-governmental organizations?
Finally, if we reflect on Anderson’s opening note, one realizes his maneuver. He has drawn us in into the psyche of the surfer. But, he departs from the surfer’s logic through reflexivity. This is an instructive methodological point; emotions, however problematic, deserve scrutiny. Analytical understanding, as Anderson shows, can only occur through an articulation between theory and socio-cultural practice. This occurs when one’s personal situation is placed within a wider context of the struggles that structure experience. As such, students and scholars alike will be able to learn from this well-written account that should be taken as an exemplar exploration of a combined approach to the sociological and geographical imagination. 3
