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ABSTRACT
In nature sports athletes interact with the surfaces, textures and fluids of physical geographical features as well as the dynamic forces that create them. These interactions have largely been ignored by social constructionist thinking in the social sciences; social constructionism renders the natural environment inert, passive, and malleable for human meaning and use. In this article I argue that the elements of natural environments produce affects and sensations that inscribe themselves on, and transform and produce, bodies. Two questions arise from this argument. Firstly, what is the ontology of nature sports within Western philosophy that separates nature from culture as a primary divide in the organization of knowledge? Secondly, are theorists of nature sports correct in their view that participants are fostering a new ethic of care for the natural environment and facilitating a new environmental politics? Here I draw on surfing, an archetypal nature sport, to address both questions.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to Mark Falcous and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions on this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Douglas Booth is Professor of Sport Studies in the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago, New Zealand and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. He is the author of The Race Game (1998), Australian Beach Cultures (2001) and The Field (2005).
Notes
1 Krein (Citation2015, 278) refers to a continuum of competition in nature sports: ‘the greater role formal competition plays in a nature sport, the less of a nature sport it is’.
2 Most contemporary analyses of surfing categorize it as a lifestyle sport (Wheaton Citation2004, Citation2010). Surfing also supports a substantial popular and burgeoning scholarly literature (e.g. Hough-Snee and Eastman Citation2017; Moser Citation2008). The philosopher Aaron James (Citation2017) recently described surfing as ‘the zenith of all human endeavors: it's up there with the arts, friendship, love music, and even sex’ (26), and ‘the fullest expression of the free human's natural state of being’ (49).
3 Formalist approaches ‘maintain that the purpose, meaning and significance of sport practices can be read [from] their formal rules’; contextualist approaches ‘maintain that sport is defined by both its rules and its ethos’, that is, ‘those social conventions that govern how the rules of a sport are to be interpreted in particular instances’ (Morgan Citation2000, 207).
4 Bruce Kidd (Citation1996) offers a prime example of contested meanings in The Struggle for Canadian Sport where he identifies four competing forms in the interwar period – amateur sport, professional sport, workers’ sport and women's sport. These forms ‘locked horns’ and were ‘rocked by internal conflict, often over basic principles’ (Kidd Citation1996, 262). Of course, a form of ontological security can be found even within socially constructed forms of sport. Kidd (Citation1996), for example, acknowledges common ‘intentions and values’ (262) across the competing forms of sport. Similarly, Loy and Coakley (Citation2007, 4652) concede that formalization, institutionalization and regulation have generated ‘dominant meanings’.
5 Huizinga took the view that ‘the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation’ (cited in Loy and Coakley Citation2007, 4647).
6 Such interactions rarely appear in social constructionist analyses of urban sporting spaces that sociologist Mike Silk (Citation2013) calls ‘sterile’ and that geographer John Bale (Citation2000, 180) refers to as ‘placeless’ ‘machines’ that produce ‘rational’ (i.e. scientific), largely disembodied, practices designed to measure and advance human performances (see also Bale Citation2004).
7 While this statement applies primarily to the analytic tradition in Western philosophy, readers should note that other schools of philosophy, including phenomenology and pragmatism, actively consider questions of ontology and the body. Gunnar Breivik (Citation2017) offers a useful introduction to the subject in a recent analysis of three different perspectives on intentionality in sport. Although Breivik (Citation2017, 206) also acknowledges that optimal reactions to the natural environment will be quite different to the context-specific rules, restrictions and obstacles of established/traditional sports.
8 In this regard, scholars of sport often cite the passage in Jean-Paul Satre's Being and Nothingness (1943) in which the philosopher likens human freedom to the skier who, in soft snow, chooses their own path. Aaron James (Citation2017) argues that Satre would have drawn a different conclusion had he considered surfing in which ‘no manoeuvre can be done at will, or on command, not without just the right, fleeting wave circumstances’ (55).
9 Brennan (Citation2017) further affirms the power of the surf in wipeout situations where the ‘pull of the wave’ takes total control of the rider's body (48). In an earlier piece, Brennan (Citation2016) discusses big surf where the waves totally subsume the rider (919). This article is also important for introducing gender into the discussion.
10 Potter (Citation2017b) beautifully captures a particularly intense relationship in another commentary: ‘Julian Wilson timing that [wave] to perfection. You can see that as he stands up he doesn't let go of the right hand – the right hand holding that rail, the left hand feeling the face of the wave. You can see him touching it. Now he [adjusts his weight and] starts to slow down, [intuitively] understanding the dynamics of the wave – which way it is moving, and how fast he is going, how much speed he needs to wipe off. As he slides through this barrel, the thing starts to regurgitate, and in doing so fires him out [of the tube] like a cannonball out of a cannon’.
11 Anderson (Citation2012) adopts a broader definition of surfing than that used here. He includes riding waves on any type of equipment – body boards, surf kayaks, surf skis – as well as long boards and short boards (576). The social history of surfing sharply distinguishes different wave riding craft (e.g. Booth Citation2002).
12 Anderson’s (Citation2012) convergence is synonymous with agencement (581, note 8), the term adopted by Deleuze and his peer Félix Guattari that has been widely translated into the English word assemblage (DeLanda Citation2016; Nail Citation2017). Agencement, Thomas Nail (Citation2017) explains, conveys the idea of an arrangement or layout of heterogeneous elements that present as a multiplicity or as events as distinct from a unity or essence. ‘A unity is an organic whole whose parts all work together like the organs of the human body. Each organ performs a function in the service of reproducing its relations with the other parts and ultimately the harmony of the whole organism’. Instead of ‘organic unities’, Deleuze and Guattari advance the idea of ‘multiplicity’ which is ‘neither a part nor a whole’ but ‘defined solely by their external relations of composition, mixture, and aggregation’. If a combination of heterogeneous elements ‘are defined only by their external relations, then it is possible that they can be added, subtracted, and recombined with one another ad infinitum’ (22–23).
13 Clifton Evers (Citation2006, 230–231) defines stoke as ‘a fully embodied feeling of satisfaction, joy and pride’. The Hawaiian word for stoke is hopupu (Poirier Citation2003).
14 The concept of flow often appears in the literature as a synonym of stoke to describe an athlete's ‘peak’ experience (e.g. Dant and Wheaton Citation2007, 11). However, Barbara Humberstone (Citation2011) is critical of the concept that she argues masks our understanding of bodily experiences by hiding affective and embodied sensations and ‘the sentience of the experience’. Critically, ‘the notion of flow covers up a more insightful mobile and social understanding of body, nature, emotions nexus’ and ‘what is needed … is a sense of the senses in the body's engagement with nature in practice from the practitioner's experience’ (501).
15 Game and Metcalfe (Citation2011, 38) similarly cite a bather who found total relaxation while floating in the water at Bondi Beach. According to the bather, the boundaries between their body and the sea and air evaporated and they merged with the ocean and sky.
16 Elsewhere I refer to feet as ‘the central organ’ of surfing, the sharpest source of proprioception: ‘standing on a thin layer of fibreglass-covered foam transported by an ocean wave transforms the feet from simple structures of locomotion into organs of affect. Through their feet, riders sense the power and energy of the ocean and, in the process of complex and intricate manoeuvres around, through and across the breaking wave, transform that energy into kinetic pleasures’ (Booth Citation2008, 27).
17 Although Ingersoll (Citation2016, 77) appears somewhat ambiguous on this point in her submission that the ‘sensations felt by the surfer’ have the power to ‘radiate out’ and ‘reach those watching on the shore’ and ‘affect and pull them (even tourists) into the experience’ (cf. Anderson Citation2012).
18 Among the organizations listed by Ingersoll (Citation2016, 75) are ‘the Groundswell Society, an ad hoc surfing think-tank that audits and analyses the culture and ethics of surfing and surf culture; the Surfrider Foundation, a non-profit environmental group (United States); Surfers Against Sewage, a non-profit environmental campaigning for clean, safe, and accessible recreational waters (Great Britain); SurfAid International, an international health care service working in surf-rich regions such as Indonesia (Australia); and Save Our Surf … a Hawai‘i-based grassroots group, formed in the early 1960s … in response to increased environmental degradation and overdevelopment in the islands … by dredging’.
19 See also issue 339 of Surfing Life (2017). The lack of environmental perspective is stark in this edition devoted to ‘surfers – who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to live’ (cover).
20 Goulden has twice won the Surfing Life Oakley award for paddling-in to the biggest wave, in 2013 and 2014. The awards included cheques for AU$5000. In 2012 Goulden rescued a fellow surfer from a shark that had bitten him on the arm and stomach at a break in northern Western Australia.
21 Ziolkowski's college, too, cancelled classes that day – 11 September 2001 – which coincided with the attack on the Twin Towers; in the end Ziolkowski stayed home.