Ledizioni Publishing

Interview by Nicco La Mattina

Nicco La Mattina:  In Surfers Paradise, you describe how the figure of the surfer is characterized as a risktaker, emblematic of a putative Australianness and of the Gold Coast specifically. How does the risk-taking surfer presume upon a particular sociocultural ideology of sport and of masculinity?

Dario Nardini: When I arrived on the Gold Coast, I was surprised (among many other things) about the many ways surfing was consistently linked to masculinity. My sporting background was centered on combat sports, and I did not identify in surfing the traits and values that are socially ascribed to masculinity in many other sports (and in combat sports in particular), such as strength, aggressiveness, muscularity, physical confrontation/dominance, submission, and so on. Instead, the ability of a surfer is also measured on different skills, including balance, elegance, grace, fluidity, the ability to read and understand the ocean and currents, and so on. All these abilities, that surfers would probably describe as style, refer not to quantitative and measurable parameters (who submits his opponent, for example), but on subjective and aesthetic parameters, that are frequently and stereotypically associated with what are perceived as female disciplines (gymnastic or dancing, for example).

Through the fieldwork (that is the actual sense of ethnography), I realized that, like other disciplines, surfing is considered to be a risk sport. It is exactly the surfers’ bravery to assume and challenge these risks that characterizes surfing as a men’s field. However, surfing can be a very safe activity – if surfers do not overestimate their ability and choose safe spots/beaches and surf small-to-medium waves. Statistics on injuries are sensibly lower than for other practices (like Thursday-night five-a-side football, for example). Surfers actually risk only when they (intentionally, and consciously) deal with big waves, sharky beaches or rocky breaks, and so on. However, risk in surfing is mainly a social construct, settled in a long-term Western (Romantic) process of cultural conceptualization and representation of the ocean as the expression of the sublime and the place for both fun and adventure, as well as on more localized Australian Beach Cultures (as the historian Douglas Booth has evocatively described them).

The thing is that what we call risk (or extreme) sports are not always actually riskier than other, more putatively traditional disciplines. Risk in these practices, however, is explicitly thematized and centralized as one of the central features and motivations of both the practices and practitioners. As Mary Douglas showed, understanding risk from an anthropological perspective we should not focus on the actual dangers (that exist, and are a fact), but on the way people conceive and deal with certain dangers (and not others). That is, on the cultural meanings and values that are ascribed to danger in a specific social context.

The aestheticization of risk-taking and the courage to take risks make surfing something more than just “pure fun”. Risk-taking is the pivotal fulcrum of the social definition of surfing as a male activity in Australia – even though women have been the co-protagonists of the practice since its introduction in the continent, and are more and more represented on the local line-ups. Risk-taking, and especially the ability to challenge an “hostile” nature, is also at the base of some myth-making processes linked to the process of construction of a national (colonial) identity in Australia. The courage of the first settlers that explored and colonized the Australian bush, embodied by some mythical literary figures, has been relocated, through surfing and surf lifesaving cultures, in the figure of the waterman, that deal with the ocean and the dangers that it entails. In this way, surfing is also intimately linked with the process of definition and reproduction of a (partial, and exclusive, and mainly manly) Australian cultural identity.

Nicco La Mattina:     The theme of reciprocity is present throughout your book, from ideas of fraternal reciprocity between mates to the relation of reciprocity between surfers and the ocean. How are these forms of reciprocity constitutive of or in tension with Gold Coast surfers’ antagonisms amongst each other and self-affirming aspirations?

Dario Nardini: The fact that surfing is challenging and risky gives surfers the opportunity, on the one hand, to feel themselves to be an exclusive group: non-surfers cannot even understand what surfing means to the people involved. “Only a surfer knows the feeling”, is the popular slogan of a famous surfing brand, one that Gold Coast surfers love to repeat in many circumstances. On the other hand, their effort becomes for surfers the essential price they pay for their reward – the waves. In other terms, they establish a reciprocity with the Ocean, because the gift the Ocean offers them, the waves, generates the impetus for a return. They feel in debt with the Ocean. And they pay this debt with their commitment. “There are no free gifts”, as Mary Douglas stated, and waves do not come for nothing. What surfers call stoke, the ecstatic feeling of a good ride, cannot be free, and asks for a reward; and dedication and commitment are considered as a fair payback. However, surfing is an activity where participants compete not (necessarily) for the results nor for the score, but for participating. In fact, the (modern) surfing etiquette is clear: one wave, one surfer. You can share a beer after a surfing session, but not a wave on the line-up. Turns in a wave line-up normally follow this rule: the surfer closer to the peak gets priority. The others must leave the way. In fact, modern surfers perform radical manoeuvres on the wave, and they need space. There is no room on one wave for more than one surfer. And in the hyper-crowded line-ups of the Gold Coast, this generates a tough competition among surfers, that struggle against each other to get priority on the peaks and get the best from their surfing sessions. In their opinion, the waves are not a democratic resource. You need to deserve them. You have to show you can deal with them. And this means you have to dominate the line-up (to rule the line-up, as they like to say) and to beat the competition. Social partnership or collaboration is not expected in surfing on the Gold Coast – except among very close, small groups of friends, or locals. You can only count on your own skills, abilities and initiatives on the local waves, as the neoliberal rationality demands (the Foucauldian “entrepreneurship of the Self”).

Nicco La Mattina: What is the relationship between taste and choice that you discuss in your book? How are these factors related to the synesthetic knowledge that surfers cultivate and to moral premises of their lifestyle choices?

Dario Nardini: In my book, I analyze surfing on the Gold Coast under the light of the international literature on consumption. If one admits that the supply of cultural leisure practices is configured as a market, engaging in one of these activities, just as buying objects in Mary Douglas’ theory, means enacting a philosophy of life, actualizing a worldview (a lifestyle, surfers would say). For the choice of one practice entails not only aesthetic, athletic or performative, but also (and sometimes especially) the adherence to a moral/etiological system for the practitioners. In this process, consumers have an active role, for consumption, as Pierre Bourdieu stated, always presupposes a work of appropriation by the consumer; or, more accurately, it presupposes that the consumer helps to produce the product he consumes. However, on the one hand the choice is limited to the market of the sporting activities that are available in a certain social context in a given moment. On the other, we should consider that the subjectivity of each individual is, as Pierre Bourdieu explained, the expression of a taste that is socially co-constructed by the social actors. What is viewed as fun (and surfing is certainly considered fun) is not simply naturally fun: people learn how to feel it fun, through “system of appreciation” (according to historian Alain Corbin’s definition) that are socially elaborated.

Nicco La Mattina:     Speaking of the Gold Coast context, as one of your interlocutors succinctly put it, “surfing here is mainstream” (p. 201). Not only is this quite different from the gouren wrestling of Brittany (on which you have elsewhere written), but it is at odds with the countercultural history, representation, and practice of surfing elsewhere (such as California). What is distinctive about surfing in the Gold Coast that makes it mainstream and makes the Gold Coast a surfers paradise?

Dario Nardini: As the staff writer at The New Yorker and long-term passioned surfer William Finnegan wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, surfing on the Gold Coast was already mainstream when he went to Australia in 1978-79. “Local surfers were less welcoming. There were thousands of them. The ability level was high, the competition for waves acute. Like anywhere, each spot had its crew, its stars, its old lions. But there were full-blown clubs and cliques and family dynasties in every Gold Coast beach town – Coolangatta, Kirra, Burleigh”. On the Gold Coast – and in Australia – surfing inherited some of the competitive, athletic aspects of the local surf lifesaving tradition, and competitive surfing developed earlier than in other surfing regions. The international competitions’ parameters for the evaluation of surfers’ performances were especially developed in the 1970s around some of the putatively radical maneuvers performed by Australian and Gold Coast’s surfers. Surfing clubs and surfing programs in schools have a long tradition on the Gold Coast, and surfing facilities such as car parking and showers all along the local beaches, or surf racks in the local transports have been implemented since the 1970s. Surfing shops, surfboard shapers and ding repairs are ubiquitous on the Gold Coast, and surfing iconography adorn local shops, markets and parks. Surfing here has also been part of the place-making process that from the 1950s to the 1990s has made the Gold Coast a national, and finally an international tourist destination. This has contributed to normalize surfing to the public opinion’s eyes, and to develop a sportive and athletic (and therefore healthy) image of the surfers, considered as sportsmen more than hippies. Accordingly, even if prejudgments were strong in the “counterculture” years in the 1960s-70s, and can still influence some people’s opinion, they are not central and do not define the social image of local surfers.

Nicco La Mattina: With respect to the notion that the ethnographic encounter necessitates some critical distance (lacking in much scholarship on surfing), and your own “body formed with feet on the ground” in the Apennine Mountains, what role did the adage that “only a surfer knows the feeling” play in your research on the Gold Coast?

Dario Nardini: Billabong’s “Only a surfer knows the feeling” sounds both to surfers and not-surfers like an initiatic mantra. Surfing is something so exciting that you cannot even describe it, if you won’t try it. However, in my book I try to show how surfing is an intrinsically literary activity, that is inspired by cultural (literal, mediatic, and so on) representations that actually orient surfers’ experience. “Only a surfer knows the feeling” certainly means that only a surfer may have experienced what other people can only imagine, but also that it is possible to imagine it (if not, surfing would not be so charming to the non-surfing audience, and even to my own “body formed with feet on the ground” in the Apennine Mountains). And the outcome of this act of imagination, to some extent, conditions the experience. Representations (of the ocean, of the watermen, of surfing) precede the experience of surfing, and orient it. The act of surfing is not naturally exciting. It has become so, in a long process of historical and social construction of the ocean as a place of leisure, contemplation, imagination and detachment, of the watermen as adventurers, and of surfers as embodiment of a contemporary version of the Romantic hero.