CaMP Anthropology

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.

https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/

Erik Shonstrom: Writing Beyond Writing is such a mind-blowing book. You took the most banal thing in the world, the letters that we look at every day, and you do this deep dive into this world. Paragraph after paragraph I was like, “Wow, I’ve never even thought of that.”

What can a script tell us about the people who use it, and how does that script potentially reflect cultural identity?

Tim Brookes: A script is the product and manifestation of its culture, and it embodies and displays the aesthetics, the values, the history and the beliefs, the materials, the tools, even the climate, that have shaped it. You can never sensibly discuss a script without its human context, just as you can never remove a script from its people without incalculable loss.   Let me give you an example. The Beria script was created by the Zaghawa people, who live in Chad and Western Sudan. It’s an extraordinarily arid area, and consequently, their cultural symbiosis with the camel is profound. Not only is the camel a beast of burden, or a form of transportation, but they also do camel racing, and they have camel beauty contests…. In order to denote ownership of camels, as in the American West, they brand them with a branding iron.

In the 1950s a school teacher created a script for the Zaghawa language, which became known as Beria Branding Script because he used symbols that were similar to the branding marks on the necks of the camels. Subsequently, that script was revised by, of course, a vet. Talk about indigenously appropriate technologies! You have not only a technology, the branding iron, that is already in place and a substrate, namely the camel’s poor neck, which is already in place, but you also have a symbol system which is familiar and unique to the people.

That notion of a script that is unique to us, that whose appearance is familiar to us, and which arises out of our own daily lives, our daily perceptions, the landscape literally that we see, that is extraordinarily profound.   To simply see a script as a phonetic system of abstract symbols and say, “Okay, here is a symbol–what sound does it represent?” massively underestimates the importance of the visual iconography of a script and its meaning to the people–which in this case not only fits in with their language, but their geography, their history, even their climate. And as such, it’s a linguistic-anthropological-graphic-semantic confluence.

Erik Shonstrom: One of the parts of Writing Beyond Writing that really blew my mind is how many different groups have devised scripts for their languages. Why would that be a powerful way to either retain or enhance cultural identity?

Tim Brookes: Yes, our research shows that half of all scripts currently in use were created rather than inherited. Half. Yet indigenously-created scripts are often looked down on in academia. They are described as “artificial” or “secondary,” and it’s taken as a sign of their failure that many newly-created scripts don’t survive their creator.

This attitude is both condescending and unfair, because so much inertia works against a newly created script. Often, the script is being created by a minority or an ethnic group the government doesn’t like, so they see the script as potentially dangerous, as a kind of iconic self-presentation that gives the minority group more of a sense of dignity, more of a sense of identity or coherence.

We know of at least four people who have been executed for creating a script for their people.

There are linguistic reasons for creating one’s own script—because the established colonial or missionary script, for example, doesn’t adequately represent all the sounds of the language–but more often it has to do with power. If a culture has been overrun or dominated by another culture that has imposed its own script, sooner or later, people start saying, “Enough.” That’s especially true in the last 20 to 30 years when it’s become increasingly possible to use digital tools to create a workable script, and even to digitize it and then start printing or texting in it.

Erik Shonstrom: Is the internet good or bad for endangered alphabets?

Tim Brookes: It cuts both ways. If you go to the very core of computing, namely the writing of code, virtually all of that is in the Latin alphabet.   On the other hand the Internet has given access and functionality to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get in touch with each other at all.  

There’s a very active world Mongol association, for example, and the fact that they can use their script to represent their language and talk to each other is, I would imagine, extraordinarily powerful and reassuring.  

I know of Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups that are teaching either traditional scripts or, more commonly, new scripts, and in some instances creating YouTube videos as well.

Erik Shonstrom: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?

Tim Brookes: When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.  

As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying their brushstrokes.   What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.

I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens.   As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.

In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.

Erik Shonstrom: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?

Tim Brookes: When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.

As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying their brushstrokes.   What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.

I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens.   As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.

In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.  

Erik Schonstrom: In the closing chapter you talk in depth about pencils. I loved your insight that the way in which you use a pencil reenacts the way in which thinking happens. Thinking is iterative, just like sketching something out with a pencil, which I found totally fascinating and made me immediately want to sit down and write in pencil again.

Tim Brookes: Yes. The pencil is also perfect for the muscular coordination that is involved in the act of writing. We talk about handwriting, but writing involves shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, finger—and as each joint and muscle affects the final product, it means that the pencil is extraordinarily sensitive to our bodies as well as our minds. Not only does handwriting very from one person to another, it even reflects our mood and our level of energy. In fact, the word autograph, if you take it to its roots, means self-portrait: this is the way we display who we are.

Erik Schonstrom: The idea of the evolution of scripts still seems to be common within the world of communication. You spend quite a bit of time soundly thrashing that inherently colonialist notion that the Latin alphabet is a more evolved means of writing.

Tim Brookes: It’s seductive, because the people who make that argument are actually praising themselves. If I say the Latin script has evolved from other, more “primitive” scripts, it means that I’m more evolved. And by the way, the same argument was made to assert that the Chinese script is primitive, even though Confucius was writing philosophy while the Ancient Britons were still painting themselves blue with woad.

Writing does change and evolve in certain ways. When the Bugis people of Southeast Asia went to the islands we now call the Philippines, they exported their writing. But the two locations used different local materials. So writing that had been on palm leaves and whose letters had very distinctive shapes so as to avoid angular strokes that would damage the leaf, now took on different curly letterforms because they were being incised with a point of a knife in a hard bamboo tube.

That’s very different from a culture saying, “Wow, the Latin alphabet is much more sophisticated than our syllabary or abugida. Let’s use that instead.” The occasions when one script was replaced wholesale by another are almost always because of power. The Mongols did not choose to write with the Cyrillic alphabet rather than with their own script because it was a better alphabet. They chose it because the Russians had tanks pointing in their direction. What we call evolution, because it suits us to see it that way, is more often a form of cultural genocide.

Everybody knows the phrase “History is written by the winners.” I extend it say “History is written by the winners in the alphabet of the winners.” The only reason why the Latin alphabet is so dominant–it’s now used by more people than all the other writing systems in the world put together–is because at various critical junctures, the Latin alphabet had more lawyers, guns, and money than somebody else.

Erik Schonstrom: Throughout the book, I got this sense of a dichotomy between the ease and efficiency of printed or digital writing as opposed to the greater difficulty but greater expressiveness of handwriting. When we celebrate and support these endangered alphabets, what we’re really celebrating and supporting is this expressive view of writing.

Tim Brookes: All of that crystallizes in the debate about ChatGPT and AI-generated text. If you regard writing as a commodity or an industrial product, something that you have to get done, then you’re defining writing as a chore. As soon as you define writing as a chore, then you look for ways to reduce that labor or give it to somebody else—or to a robot. ChatGPT is the robot that can do writing for you.

Imagine teaching writing not in English class, but in art class. Imagine a teacher saying, “Why don’t you find a way to practice with whatever tool you choose—pen, pencil, spray paint–to get to the point where you like what you’re doing, it represents who you are at the moment, and is legible to somebody else.

The opposite of the ChatGPT is the little kid who draws a picture of their house in crayon and writes “Mommy” or “Daddy,” and does that out of joy. They give it to the parent as a gift, and then the parent puts it up on the fridge, also out of joy.  

Where did we lose that joy in writing?

In my book I actually spell out exactly how we lose that joy in writing because of the way in which we have defined what writing is, and is for.

The dichotomy that you’re talking about is the crisis that is facing us right now–and the only reason it’s a crisis is because our thumb is so heavily on defining writing as an industrial-commercial-technical product that we want to use as easily and quickly as possible, that we want to be able to distribute infinitely and store forever.

That’s fine as long as it’s balanced by understanding writing in human terms—in terms of its value to the people who use it. It’s just like respecting a writer for the quality of their writing instead of the quantity of their output. You’ve heard of the Slow Food Movement? I’m endorsing the Slow Writing Movement.