Thesis

This work is dedicated to my parents, Judith and Marvin, who each holiday season cleverly disguised the gift of books among the plastic toys and assorted electric joys of my childhood.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many faculty, friends, and colleagues provided aid and guidance during these last three years of study. Of course, I thank my committee members: Dr. Stuart Aitken, Dr. Larry Ford, and Dr. Bill Nericcio. Dr. Aitken’s advice, support, and tireless editing have been essential to the completion of this project. At times I suspect he had more faith in the project than I myself did. Dr. Larry Ford generously served on this thesis committee and on a previous incarnation as well. Also instrumental were the suggestions and support I received from Dr. Doreen Mattingly, who, despite not officially serving on my committee, spent a great deal of her time encouraging and advising me. I want to thank the staff at Surfer magazine and Ruth Meyer, in particular, for providing me with access to the Surfer archives. Also, this project would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the San Diego State University Department of Geography. Finally, thank you Jennifer Miller for dealing with my wildly shifting moods during this long process.

PREFACE

I sit now in a small cafe at the beach in San Diego. It’s a clean and stylish place, the kind that appeals to fashionable, upwardly mobile coffee drinkers - slick and marbleized. I choose this cafe initially because it looked like the kind of place that would encourage long thoughtful visits as opposed to quick consumption. The furniture is padded and the lighting bright and there is a great deal of open space. I prefer cafes where lingering is encouraged.

Once inside I found a seemingly perfect place to reflect upon surfing and its relation to globalization: a beachfront cafe with a California surfing lifestyle theme. The ceiling is reverently adorned with numerous glossy surfboards, both new and historic. Five television monitors conduct a continuous surfing film festival. There is a small section of books and videos documenting surfing’s history. They also provide dramatic splashes of deep ocean blue and the suggestion of a surfing aesthetic. On the walls, between the televised exploits of big wave surfers, hang painted vistas of tropical paradise, as well as empty bags of coffee shipped in from the developing world, and reverently framed photographs of surfers and waves.

The carefully stenciled scriptures were not as obvious as the slick surfing paraphernalia, but they were there, wrapped around the ceiling, hiding behind the shiny surfboards: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful..." Conversations with the owner revealed a tale that weaves together many issues that intrigue me. The owner, a born again Christian with missionary aspirations, opened a small surfer’s cafe in the Philippines while working there as an Internet entrepreneur. He combined his California roots with his Internet skills and created "CoffeeCalifornia.Com."

The idea was a hit and he opened eight locations in the Philippines. He is now receiving international franchise requests. It occurred to him that it might add to his credibility to actually have a presence in California, though no one ever asked. Blond hair, blue eyes, and a 1970s Berkeley education enable him to play the stereotyped role of California surfer. Thus the San Diego cafe is the flagship location, although it is the most recent addition to his enterprise.

Here is an intriguing reversal of nineteenth century imperialism. Surfing, which originated in ancient Hawaii and was condemned by Protestant missionaries, is now a tool of the missionaries. No longer a pagan practice, surfing represents the good life in California. God-fearing Christians, entrepreneurs even, are proud to say they’ve adopted a surfing lifestyle and they’re taking that lifestyle with them into the periphery and bringing their insights on high-technology capitalism and their coffee imports with them. But the story is not actually a complete inversion of the eighteenth century explorer and investor. After all, no one from the periphery has come to take something away from the core. Instead, like their predecessors, these contemporary explorers have come back home from the periphery hoping to take advantage of the capital they’ve acquired abroad. In this way they are not so different from any of us who travel internationally and are empowered by the experience.

In fact, it was my own travels as a surfer in the periphery that initiated the questioning that led to this thesis. In June of 1996, I drove throughout Baja California with a good friend, camping and surfing. Later that summer we flew to Costa Rica with a few thousand dollars in our bank accounts and more than a few misperceptions about Latin America in our heads. Everywhere I went I found myself exposed to American popular culture and witnessed its grip on the young people of these nations. The most dramatic examples of this occurred in the first few days of the trip to Costa Rica. Leaving Santa Cruz, California we flew to San Jose, Costa Rica by way of San Salvador, El Salvador. At our first meal in San Jose we were tormented by loud coverage of the Jose Cuervo professional volleyball tournament being broadcast from the beach in Santa Cruz, California - a distance of about five city blocks from the apartment we had just left.

After a day in the city we took a six hour bus ride to the west coast town of Jaco. Here, among the many small hotels and shops, we discovered a pleasant pizza parlor. The television inside was playing a surfing video filmed at my home break, Steamer’s Lane, Santa Cruz. It seemed I could not escape these images of California. Even more surprising were the fashions worn by young Costa Rica surfers. In deliberate mimicry of California style the children of wealthy city dwellers in San Jose had adopted the essential elements of the macho youth surfing culture I knew so well from home: the tattooed arm bands, the baggy shorts, the sheepskin boots, the skinhead haircuts, the sharktooth necklaces. We were confused. Our image of Costa Rica was forever changed, the old myths destroyed. Where were the ox-carts that we had seen in so many of the tourist brochures and surfing films? What had happened to the idyllic, primitive lifestyle we had imagined, with its close knit kinship ties and its detachment from the first world? It is now obvious to me that so much of how we think about "foreign" places is the product of mythology distributed by the mass media. Many questions were raised by that trip: What exactly is surfing subculture and who does it serve? Why are surfers always talking about lifestyle? What role does surfing play in the selling of places? Is it tied to particular places, thereby facilitating what Yi-Fu Tuan called topophilia, or is it placeless, a style and lifestyle engaged in the homogenizing of places? This thesis represents an attempt to address these questions about the role of surfing in America and about its part in the globalization of the planet.

CHAPTER I

JUSTIFICATION

The public and the academy generally dismiss surfing as either irrelevant or irresponsible, both as an activity and as an object of study. This oversimplification is contradicted by the power and ubiquity of surfing imagery, not to mention the economic force of what has become a substantial industry. Despite the generally grim image of the surfer, he (and I use "he" deliberately here) remains one of the most powerful and enduring icons of twentieth century America. The most popular television show in the world, Baywatch, is little more than an updated version of the 1960s movies Beach Blanket Bingo and Gidget. And southern California, the center of the world’s largest imaging machine and the promised land of American mythology, is virtually equated with surfing and beach lifestyle in much the same way that the cowboy is equated with the wide open spaces of the American West.

Surfing’s history ties together tales of colonization, resistance, and globalization - themes that are central to recent cultural geography. At one time a threatened sacred act in ancient Polynesian culture, surfing is now an important commodity in today’s global economy, spawning a substantial industry in the core countries of North America, Australia, and Europe. The image of the surfer is supremely salable. Surfing-inspired products and images are bought and sold by millions each year. Furthermore, surfers are enthusiastic and extensive travelers of the less developed world. The world is a small place today for the wealthy tourist and the surfer literally has the entire world open to him as a choice of destination. For numerous reasons, both symbolic and economic, many choose to explore the periphery.

Surfing is also actively involved in the shaping of places throughout the world. The practice and imagery of surfing have been involved in place making and place marketing for almost a century. Beginning with the use of surfing in travel advertisements for Hawaii in the 1920s and 30s, the sport eventually came to be a recognizable facet of American culture through its association with particular places and a distinctive lifestyle revolving around the beach and waves. International travel and the quest for "the perfect wave" are staple elements of surf media. This representation of "foreign" places shapes the surfer’s cognitive imagery of the periphery and in turn is likely an important factor in determining how surfers engage these places.

Finally, the social construction of surfing is directly tied to specific notions regarding masculine travel and adventure. Surfers, in their search for the perfect wave, have set up outposts all over the developing world. These tourist places suggest that surfing may be exemplary of the neocolonialism project, whereby control is exerted over the periphery not by overt military actions but instead by means of economic and cultural invasion and persuasion.

The fact that the vast majority of traveling surfers are male, wealthy, and white suggests that a familiar intersection of ideas about gender, class, and race are as involved in this contemporary project as they were in the historic periods of colonization and imperialism. An analysis of surfing subculture, then, provides insight into the processes by which myths and stereotypes of masculine mobility, travel, and conquest are perpetuated and disseminated.

CHAPTER II

METHODS

My primary research goal is to critically examine the contentious and complex relationship between a spatially distinct subcultural practice, surfing, and the underlying social and economic structures in which it takes place. The approach to the subject adopted herein is best summarized as a theoretically informed strategy for investigation. By carefully analyzing the writings and films created by and for surfers, I attempt to identify and describe the worldview of the surfer, as represented in the media.

The specific methods of inquiry used include (1) a review of the existing literature in the areas of culture, commodity, gender, and film in order to place surfing subculture within the realm of cultural studies research; (2) a historical review of surfing subculture which serves as an introduction and situates surfing in commercial and cultural production; (3) a critical, theoretically informed, review of surfing films, including description and analysis of the narratives and themes of a number of influential films; (4) a review of travel articles in the last 30 years of Surfer magazine, resulting in an theoretical analysis of a handful of travelogues; (5) visual and thematic analysis of surfing subculture’s relation to societal conceptions of "nature"; and (6) participant observation.

The data for analysis essentially fall into one of three categories: surfing films, essays in surfing magazines, and surfing books. I watched each film with a critical eye, taking notes on content and symbolism. The magazines were mined for relevant travel essays and articles. The books, often autobiographical and deeply personal, provided more extensive and complete reflections upon the subculture, by both surfers and literary observer.

A substantial body of literature exists on the subject of geography and literature, much of it written from a humanistic perspective that values the experiences of the individual, often elite, subject (Pocock 1981; Burgess and Gold 1985). Geographic study of the media is a logical extension (as well as reaction) to such work on literature, broadening the study of culture to include the means of communication that are central to the lives of most people: television, journalism, and film.

There is no simple recipe for the appropriate method of such analyses. Stuart Aitken (1996) argues that analysis of texts, when supported by theoretical and political insights, is well established in cultural geography. However, he also adds that none of the textual methods he catalogues "by themselves, or in combination, are infallible. Textual methods are social constructions...Today we accept our fallibility and we try to produce work which is honest and trustworthy" (Aitken 1996:211-212).

Various observers note that there is currently a crisis of method in the social sciences (Johnston 1993; Rose 1993; Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Surber 1998). Older positivist methods, which sought to generate numerical data appropriate to categories which were supposed to represent an objective social reality are now highly criticized and dismissed as overly reductionist or naive. Even traditional ethnographic methods, wherein the researcher supposedly marched off into foreign territory to document and record the ‘true" nature of some native culture, now fall victim to valid criticisms about the inherent interpretative biases of such work and the arrogance and ethnocentrism implied by any attempt to present ‘truth." These ongoing debates regarding qualitative methods in the social sciences elevate the importance of interpretation, reflexivity, theory, and politics. Clearly, once a researcher chooses to admit that there are biases in his or her work it becomes necessary to reflect upon those biases, as well as the motivations for the research, and to dispel any notion that there is but one true interpretation of any data, as Norman Denzin makes clear in The Handbook of Qualitative Methods:

In the social sciences there is only interpretation. Nothing speaks for itself. Confronted with a mountain of impressions, documents, and field notes, the qualitative researcher faces the difficult and challenging task of making sense of what has been learned. (Denzin 1994:509)

This does not eliminate the need for researchers to seek truth or be rigorous in their investigations. Instead, it suggests that there are multiple interpretations and that all presentations of "fact" are therefore both biased and political to some degree. As a result of these observations my work shares the skepticism of much critical theory. In particular I am attracted to that school of critical theory which "reads social texts (popular literature, cinema, popular music) as empirical materials that articulate complex arguments about race, class, and gender in contemporary life" (Denzin 1994:509).

This thesis, like much recent cultural geography, focuses on critical and political issues in popular culture (Burgess and Gold 1985; Cresswell 1993). I am concerned with the nature of a specific masculine subculture and, in particular, how this subculture both contests and is transformed by the more dominant culture. Neo-marxist social theories (Gramsci 1971; Harvey 1989; Cresswell 1993) instruct me to look for the underlying economic logic of the production and distribution of the assorted texts and values we are offered by modern consumer society. However, my concern is not so much with these underlying economic structures, but with the texts themselves and how they make explicit both the reification and contestation of capitalist structures through ideology. Of course, the control of ideology and, thus, texts, is not complete or direct. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony was developed to address the subtle, often unconscious control exercised by the powerful over images and thoughts. As a result of the work of Gramsci and his students, geographers, with their traditional emphasis on culture, have rightly expanded their notion of culture to include popular media. As Tim Cresswell notes (1993:250) in his gender sensitive reading of On the Road (Kerouac 1957) "Cultural geographers have begun to view culture as a product of the whole process of living which crucially includes the process by which subordinate groups contest dominant forms of consciousness." Moreover, the social theory of Bourdieu (1986) suggests that choices about identity and lifestyle are ideologically charged. The representation of various styles in the media and their adoption by individuals are not valueless aesthetic choices. Instead, they reflect the pervasive and continuous struggle between social classes that is played out in the media.

A concern for class is not sufficient to an analysis of the role of surfing in American culture because surfing, like many sporting practices, is a highly gendered activity. Insights from the feminist theory of Rose (1993) and Massey (1995), among others, encourage me to search for the connections between gender roles, space, and power. Surfing spaces are gendered spaces and much of the discourse surrounding surfing is intimately tied to patriarchal notions of masculinity, especially notions of exploration and conquest. Thus, I interrogate representations of surfing which tend to value limitless mobility and competition. as well as more feminine representations of surfing which often focus on "nature", the ocean, "foreign" places, and "foreign" peoples.

In addition, feminist theorists force me to question my tendency to structure my thinking in terms of rigid dualisms and to speak in an authoritative, unreflective voice. Much recent feminist geography suggests a radical revision of traditional research methods, elevating the importance of introspection and reflexivity while criticizing reductionist and "totalizing" discourse. Kim England, for example, argues that "the researcher’s positionality and biography directly affect fieldwork" (England 1994:80). Thus, because I am an active surfer, I have included an appendix wherein I explicitly describe my relationship to surfing (See Appendix A).

CHAPTER III

LITERATURE REVIEW

My investigation of surfing subculture revolves around the theoretical positions which have influenced my thoughts about the study of culture. Therefore, this chapter is both a review of academic work on culture and a theoretical position statement. Many of the theories are discussed again, in greater depth, in later chapters. I begin with a discussion of hegemony because this concept is essential to my understanding of the structural role of the media in society. The media serve as powerful tools in the struggle over ideology and social control, a battle which is complexly related to class. This leads me to a discussion of the role of sport in society and its relation to social class. But surfing was not, traditionally, a team sport, nor was it initially embraced by mainstream society. The transformation of surfing into a popular and profitable element of American society - now legitimized in competitive high school teams and widely marketed - suggests commodification. My review of academic work on commodification illuminates intimate connections between the media , representation, and identity. Central elements of identity are well established topics in the geographic literature and I turn next to geographic works which focus on identity politics.

Because surfing subculture is rigidly gendered, work on gender and representation of gender is addressed first. I discuss the ties between gender, geography, and the media. This feminist literature notes relationships between gender and mobility. A review of geographic work on mobility and travel, particularly as relates to political identity, follows. Next I discuss geographic work on place. Literature about the study of landscapes is related to surfing by surf tourism, imagination of surfing adventures, and surf media imagery. On the other hand, I am critical about the way surfers have represented most landscapes, thus I review work which has attempted to complicate humanistic notions of place by reasserting the contested meanings which locals attach to particular places. Surfing subculture embraces a contradiction, seeing "foreign" places in narrowly traditional ways and yet arguing that home surf breaks represent something unique and personal.

Finally, since this thesis relies entirely on media sources for its data, I briefly review recent geographic literature on the media. In this final section, I suggest that theoretical insights provide an essential structure necessary for an analysis of anything as complex as culture and I outline how the theories I review structure the chapters which follow.

The Geography of Popular Culture

Many of my scholarly interests regarding surfing subculture lie within the boundaries of the most traditional themes in geography. These include my interests in travel, exploration, foreign places, and culture. However, much of my research revolves around theoretical concepts which are relatively recent additions to the discipline. For example, my concern with class and social control is derived largely from the influence of Marxist thought which began to influence geographers in the 1970s and remains a prominent voice in theoretical debates. More recently, influences fom cultural studies and the humanities extended geographic analyses to include new sources, including films and literature, while expanding the possible foci of such analysis to include, as in my work, critical questions of meaning and power. Only in the last decade did feminist voices become well represented in the geographic literature, but their critiques of ‘scientific" method and objectivist research were influential, forcing many cultural geographers to critically reflect upon issues of gender and identity. Finally, work on sense of place, so influenced by humanism in the 1970s, was criticized and eventually broadened to include work which is both political and critical. My work, then, involves a somewhat eclectic theoretical collection adapted to my specific research questions.

Hegemony

Much of my analysis of surfing subculture entails discussions of surfers’ ideologies regarding masculinity, mobility, nature, and "foreign" places. I examine the accordance or opposition of these ideas with various elements of mainstream, or what Gramsci (1971) calls hegemonic, ideologies. I understand ideology to mean systems of thought which conceal the exercise of power. Gramsci’s theory focuses on the way that spontaneous and subconscious consent is created by the pervasive, yet subtle, limiting of discourse in all spheres, especially the media and academy. Gramsci argues that many of our ideological choices are limited by the subtle ‘taken-for-granted" nature of shared ideology. The range of ideological viewpoints is limited in all spheres, including the academic, and hence the narrow range of possibilities for resistance or change seem quite normal. In this subtle, taken-for-granted manner, elites exercise limited control over society without resorting to police actions or violence. Gramsci’s work is vitally important in the analysis of popular culture because it introduced what Theodor Adorno called the "culture industries" into Marxist formulations of culture and economy. Thus, we cannot speak, in the manner of early Marxist materialists, of a single ideology, imposed from above by those in power. Instead, because of the cacophony of voices in the media and because of the existence of dissenting voices, we must talk of dominant discourses as opposed to marginalized or subordinated ideologies.

Surfing and Class

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991) specifically discusses the role of sport in the formation and perpetuation of these hegemonic systems of social class. Bourdieu’s work is concerned with the formation and reproduction of what he calls structured inequalities (Surber 1998:258). When discussing sports, he notes that the working class is largely involved in team sports, such as football or soccer, or a number of working class individualistic sports such as boxing and wrestling. These sports serve important socializing functions including an emphasis on strength, endurance, competition, violence, the importance of sacrifice, and submission to collective discipline (Bourdieu 1991). It is in his comments on the more distinctive sports engaged by the bourgeoisie and the upper classes that his analyses are most applicable to surfing. Golf, riding, skiing, and tennis, as well as the less status rich sports of mountaineering and gymnastics are within the scope of his comments, but we could easily add surfing and, more recently, snowboarding to his list.

The engagement in these sports by a distinctive group of socially mobile actors as opposed to the working classes is not simply a factor of differences in economic or cultural capital and free time. Bourdieu argues that choices about recreation and leisure say a great deal about the social aspirations of the individual. Furthermore, it "is the hidden entry requirements, such as family tradition and early training, and also the obligatory clothing, bearing, and techniques of sociability which keep these sports closed to the working classes and those rising from below" (Bourdieu 1991:370). While these sports provide unique, and exclusive, social opportunities to their participants, Bourdieu argues that it is just as much the result of a fundamental difference in approach to the body and physical activity that distinguishes these sports.

The privileged classes tend to treat the body as an end in itself. This can be seen in the "cult of health" that reaches its fullest expression among the wealthy and their obsessive dieting, exercise, and attendance at health spas. Moreover, in the most individualistic sports that make up the new "extreme" or "adventure" sports complex (i.e. mountaineering, skydiving, surfing) the health aspects are combined with the symbolic gratification of practicing "a highly distinctive activity" which "gives to the highest degree the sense of mastery of one’s own body as well as the free and exclusive appropriation of scenery inaccessible to the vulgar" (Bourdieu 1991:371-372). Surfing and its emphasis on travel to islands of paradise, even if often imagined, is part of this trend. This "surfing lifestyle" is the result, then, of a pervasive ideological system whereby cultural capital is acquired via taste (Bourdieu 1986). The exchange of such symbolic capital, he argues, is an important tool in the construction and reproduction of inequality in our society.

In short, Gramsci’s and Bourdieu’s ideas help to explain the very narrow range of ideas presented in the surfing media as well as the apparent wealthy white male homogeneity of the culture. They suggest avenues for critique and analysis of the most commercial and elitist elements of surfing ideology. However, we must remember that unlike many bourgeois sports (golf, tennis, etc.), surfing traces its roots to a ancient tribal culture. Thus, although surfing is adopted by some of the wealthiest in the West, subordinate threads of the subculture are also reflect surfing’s Polynesian origins. The opposition of different ideas in any popular discourse is played out in the commercial media, where ideas are often dramatically transformed by market forces.

Commodification

In a capitalistic society the most important mechanism for the hegemonic control of ideas is commodification, that process whereby places, products, people, ideas and images are construed primarily as goods for consumption in accordance with the directives of the market. Dick Hebdige (1979), in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, demonstrates how consumption of status-rich commodities reflects a desire to be affiliated with particular subcultures. More importantly, Hebdige argues that economic interests function to destroy the political power of subcultures by means of a commercial subjugation of their icons and style. A subculture, he argues, usually forms as a reaction to mainstream culture. Generally, once the subculture is large enough to be noted, the subculture is then demonized, converted into some kind of "Other," particularly if it represents a threat to economic interests. This kind of resistance, then, is quickly subsumed by commercial aggression, with the "Other" simply becoming a novel style within consumer culture, thereby losing almost all of its revolutionary character. Examples of this process, from Rap music to hippie fashion, abound.

A number of geographers attend to the (re)structuring of places and the international economy resultant from commodification (Relph 1976; Peet 1986; Harvey 1989; Zukin 1991). The commodification of surfing has ramifications for many places, primarily through tourism (Cohen 1988; Urry 1990), but also as a result of its strongly gendered affect on surf culture. I believe that the result of this commodification in surfing is an emphasis of traditionally masculine myths and stereotypes which serve to eliminate or limit the possibility of resistance, by both men and women, to a global industry based on the consumption of stylized representations of a lifestyle and the places it inhabits.

The most obvious and incontestable effects of this commodification in surfing are the growth of professional competitive surfing and the growth of the surfwear industry. The transformation of surfing from an individual act into a competitive sport appealing to the masses required some radical changes. First, competition had to be introduced. Rules for surfing and judging had to be standardized. Sponsors with mass appeal had to be attracted. Budweiser’s Association of Surf Professionals (ASP) Surf Tour is the most famous of these.

In the process of professionalization competitive surfing focused on those elements of sport most associated with the masses (i.e. violence, competition, masculinity). The result is a nearly continuous conflict between the ascetic aesthetic of the upper class surfer and the mass appeal of the competitive and aggressive surf hero. In the 1997 documentary, Liquid Stage, the act of surfing is compared to the performance of a graceful dance in a fluid, natural theater. This idea is contrasted with the more aggressive notions of surfing depicted in most surfing contests, magazines, and films. Interestingly, Bourdieu argues that dancing, of all sports, is "the most accomplished realization of the bourgeois uses of the body" since it demonstrates the most successful mastery of one’s own body - measured, self-assured tempo of movement versus a working-class abruptness in speech and action (Bourdieu 1991:372). As we will see in later chapters, the masculinization of surfing developed largely from its association with commercial interests. In the modern economic system, the commodification of ideas and the commodity fetishism surrounding products is essential to their inclusion in this system. However, surfing is unique among the individualistic sports I listed in that it involves lifestyle choices which are potentially reactionary. Commodification of surfing, therefore, acts as an important control of these potentially dangerous ideas. May (1996) and Jackson (1991b) are among a small group of geographers who now direct their attention to the commodification of cultural difference. In particular, they have noted the power involved in the process of ‘eating the Other’ (hooks 1994), whereby wealthy professionals revel in ethnic foods, even ethnic faces, in their neighborhoods, but do this in a very controlled and unequal way. As with surfing, commodification of difference helps to control and limit its influence.

Surfing in the United States was initially regarded as rebellious, even radical, by both surfers and outsiders. The commodification of surfing reduces surfing to sex, machismo, and the conquest of nature and the less developed world. This process continues today and appears to be accelerating. Tom Frank, in a recent article for the Utne Reader (1997), cautions that the symbolic use of youth, alternative, and hip subcultures in the advertising of mainstream and corporate products, "the ultimate corporate takeover," is vital to the current acceleration of commodification. The world is increasingly dominated by large, often multinational, corporations and the standardized products and workplaces they create. At the same time, there is an increasing proliferation and sophistication of media delivered to us each day. The solution for many, in today’s postmodern consumer culture, is a consumer desire for the illusion of individuality. Niche products, such as surfing paraphernalia, present the ability to act on this desire. More and more we set ourselves apart from our peers through the symbolic use of the products we buy. These products are organized conceptually into broad categories supposedly reflecting our identities and lifestyles.

Surfing and Gender

Much of the media representation of surfing capitalizes on heroic battles of man against nature. Big wave surfing dominates the media and has been used to gain market share and a commercial foothold for surfing products. Hollywood surf movies such as Big Wednesday (1978), Point Break (1991), and the recently released In God’s Hands (1998) all dwell at length upon the theme of men conquering "Mother Nature", alone, and without the traditional constraints of home, family, or work. Furthermore, there is a long tradition within surf media, both in print and film, of surf adventure and exploration stories. Endless Summer, the most commercially successful surf film, featured just this kind of masculine voyage. Scores of travel stories in the surf magazines, particularly Surfer, provide rich material for the consideration of recent geographic work on gender, masculinity, and mobility.

My thoughts regarding gender are drawn from work by a number of feminist geographers who brought attention to the pervasive division of the world into oppositions by means of dualistic, gendered linguistic structures (Rose 1993; Massey 1995). Dualisms, such as work/play, technological/primitive, thinking/feeling, public/private, aggressive/passive, and many others have been the mainstay of our ideologies for centuries (See Table 1). These metaphorical divisions are applied to spatial relations as well, coding some spaces as masculine, and hence valuable or valid, and others as feminine and exploitable. Moreover, by reducing all things to dichotomies and classification we miss much of the subtlety inherent in the world. More importantly, we build systems of knowledge which linguistically and ideologically condemn people and ideas to hierarchically structured roles within a system of power:

Dualistic thinking leads to ... the structuring of the world in terms of either/or ... Moreover, even when at first they may seem to have little to do with gender, a wide range of such dualisms are thoroughly imbued with gender connotations, one side being socially characterized as masculine, the other as feminine, with the former thereby being socially valorized (Massey 1995:490).

Table 1. Surfing Dualisms

Surf Culture	Mainstream
Violent and Aggressive	Passive
Play	Work (Masculine) or Play (Feminine)
Magical	Mundane
Spiritual and Cyclical	Rational and Linear
Individual	Community
Feeling (Hedonism)	Thinking (Rationality)
Primitive	Technological
Nonconformance	Obedience
Mobile	Sedentary

While most authors focus on the gendered restrictions such systems place on women, Peter Jackson (1991a) discusses the sometimes equally powerful control such ideologies exert upon men. An obvious example is the outright hostility towards homosexuality in our culture, but the control exercised over men is much more pervasive and insidious than the mere existence of such taboos.

A number of geographers show scholarly interest in the gender implications of exploration and travel (Katz and Kirby 1991; Gregory 1994). These writers draw attention to the intimate relationship between the consistent feminization of the natural and less-developed worlds and the concomitant subjugation and economic development of these places.

Surfing and Mobility

Geographers also discuss the symbolic role of masculine travel and mobility in the media, examining both literature (Porteus 1987; Cresswell 1993) and film (Kennedy 1994; Aitken and Lukinbeal 1997). Porteus examines how manhood, in the autobiographical novel Ultramarine (Lowry 1933), was depicted as an obsessive sea voyage, a rite of passage, for the protagonist, repeating the predominant view of the masculine adventure. Tim Cresswell (1993) explores Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) in an effort to understand beatnik travel as resistance to patriarchy. However, he argues that Kerouac reproduced some of the dominant norms of his day, constructing, for example, travel and mobility as masculine, while home and place were feminized - a wonderful example of dichotomous patriarchal thought. Aitken and Lukinbeal examine a number of films, including Paris, Texas and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in order to demonstrate how space and scale act, through individual travel and mobility, as "important aspects of political and sexual identity" (1997:357).

I argue that surfing discourse includes elements which attempt to resist patriarchal norms, particularly through individual mobility (escape from sedentary patriarchal roles) or alternative notions of work and community but that these elements are most often overwhelmed by commodified images of surfing which are masculinized (i.e. reproduce patriarchal norms) or are simply fatuous and meaningless. Furthermore, the traveling surfers themselves reproduce many elements of the traditional, patriarchal culture which in other instances they reject.

Travel and exploration have been mainstays of geographic work from its inception. Only recently, however, did we become reflexive about the role of Western explorers in the periphery. A number of geographers direct their attention to the writings of European travelers. Cindi Katz and Andrew Kirby (1991) examine the journals of Scott and Amundsen in their respective races for the South Pole. Their analysis touches on, among other themes, nature, myth, and the romance of plundering exploration. Derek Gregory, in Geographical Imaginations (1994), examines the epistemic function of the journals of early explorers in the Pacific, including James Cook and Joseph Banks. In a more recent article, Gregory (1995) specifically reads the journals which emerged from the Nile Valley travels of Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert in order to illuminate the complex intersection of Orientalism with patriarchy, sexuality, and colonialism. My work on the traveling surfer draws heavily from these authors and particularly from Gregory’s investigations of "imaginative geographies," a term he borrows from Said’s (1978) work on the discursive practices of the West regarding the Orient.

Surfers were represented as nomads as early as the 1940s, when influential California surfers began to live in used cars, dedicating themselves for months or years to the search for empty waves and a lifestyle that was spatially and temporally reactionary. However, as the sport increased in popularity and commercial success, increasing globalization made the world seem smaller and more accessible. The increasing accessibility of the jet airliner brought international destinations even closer to the California surfer and the search went international. Travel stories were passed by word of mouth prior to the foundation of Surfer Magazine in 1960, but articles in Surfer, films such as Endless Summer (1963), and the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ Safari soon opened up a world of travel and fantasy for the American surfer. Many of these travel stories revolved around the search for waves. These quests, often to the less developed world, also provided escape from American norms. Surfers travel to get away from crowds, but they also apparently travel to fulfill fantasies about themselves and "foreign" places. In fact, for many surfers, travel to "the third world" is a rite of passage, after which they take on elevated status in the subculture. As any number of authors demonstrate, there is in the West a long history of fascination with the Periphery. Western authors actively imagined and imaged the peoples of the periphery, inscripting values and meaning onto places and peoples in order to satisfy the cultural, economic, and even psychological needs of the West (Said 1978; Gregory 1994). What, then, is the meaning of all this questing? What needs are being satisfied?

I believe that surfing culture, through films, travel writing, advertising, and travel is involved in active and aggressive "Othering." In the process of representing these quests, surfers are engaged in exactly the kind of uneven and unequal processes of inscription that Gregory and Said illuminate: "figurations of place, space, and landscape that dramatize distance and difference in such a way that "our" space is divided and demarcated from "their" space" (Gregory 1995:29). The political blindness of The Endless Summer and the blatant feminization and fetishism of foreign places in In God’s Hands which I discuss in a later chapter are examples demonstrating that the discourse surrounding surf travel functions to depoliticize and even encourage unreflective penetration deep into peripheral places and cultures.

Surfing Places

Geographic work includes a long tradition of landscape studies. In past decades the emphasis of these studies shifted from mere description to attempts to discern the sense of a place, often by analyzing the symbolic elements of landscapes. In surfing, experiences of place are integral to tourism as well as the everyday practice of the sport, thus geographic work on sense of place is relevant. While early work on tourism was involved primarily in economic flows or the logistics of tourist resort management (Squire 1994), a great deal of work done recently addresses the imagining of places and the creation of tourism mythology. Efforts by individual geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), David Lowenthal (1975), Peirce Lewis (1979) and Larry Ford (1984) have helped to bring place back into the core of geographic research. While these authors are primarily interested in the individual interpretation of landscapes, a number of authors address the creation of tourist places via advertising and the media (Thurot and Thurot 1983; Cohen 1988; Butler 1990; Urry 1990). Obviously, the reason a tourist visits a particular place is a product of the complex fantasies he has adopted and created regarding that place. Urry’s (1990) The Tourist Gaze, analyses tourist ways of seeing, tracing the development of the European desire for the beach resort, while reflecting on the social creation and representation of "foreign" places. John Goss (1993), in a study examining tourist advertising of Hawaii, shows how the tropes of paradise, marginality, liminality, and femininity are used in a spatializing discourse which serves to signify Hawaii as alterity (i.e. foreign; alien). Hughes (1992) argues that the commodification of places results in a discourse where myth and reality blend.

One of the more obvious examples of this kind of process in the United States is the widespread myth that cowboys remain economically important in a traditional American "Wild West." Much of the pleasure and sense of adventure a tourist derives from travel in the American West is a by-product of such fantasies. Similar, but infinitely varied, myths and images create tourist demand all over the world. With surfing, the myths tend to revolve around notions of alterity (particularly paradise, the past primitive, femininity, and adventure). David Lowenthal (1985) argues that travelers to the periphery often imagine that they are seeing the past. The "backward" technology of the developing world provides an opportunity to imagine our own past as much as it does a chance to be present somewhere else. I argue that surf travel represents a kind of neocolonialism and that this neocolonialism functions by means of very particular ways of "seeing" the world and its places.

The Home Break: Reexamining Familiar Places

There is another side to the surfer’s interaction with place, however. Surfers uniquely engage their local environment. Through daily contact they are literally immersed in the landscape. References in the surfing media to a more intimate and everyday experience of place, while less common than the dominant views I have discussed, provide a contrast to the placelessness and consumption that is encouraged by surf travel and surfing style. These views suggest that elements of surfing’s reactionary past may persist.

In the last decade geographers found themselves in the center of larger debates in the social sciences about space-time compression, the symbolism of imagined and spectacular places, globalization of markets, and migrations and identity. Many of these debates center on changes in human communication and mobility resulting from new technologies. There is even talk of the demise of geography at the hands of telecommunications. However, geographers continue to demonstrate that there is an intimate relationship between people and the places they inhabit. Places are both physical and symbolic and people give meaning to places as well as derive personal meaning from them. Places serve to limit and control the individual’s access to resources, ideas, and other people and, thus, help to shape the individual’s worldview. Particular identities are still constituted through place, even if these places are constantly being changed and their borders continuously reshaped and permeated (Surber 1998).

Much of this new work on place is a result of influences from the British school of cultural studies initiated by Raymond Williams (1961). Williams’ work stressed the importance of lived experience to the creation of identity. This focus on everyday life shifted his emphasis away from "High Culture" and instead to the various forms of popular culture, wherein most people construct the meaning and values of their lives. In particular, he developed a notion of culture he termed ‘structure of feeling." This view of culture, less deterministic and rigid than the concept of ideology, argues that a given culture’s beliefs, values, and practices color and shape the responses of its members (Surber 1998:238). The goal of the analyst or critic of culture, then, is to discover the underlying structure of feeling of any culture. Moreover, by linking identity to the specifics of a locality, Williams’ work is a starting point for issues of local resistance to dominant culture.

In geography, authors such as Don Mitchell and Peter Jackson utilize Williams’ emphasis on lived experience and the shaping of identities by place to understand particular places as bases of resistance. Don Mitchell (1995), for example, traces public debate about the uses of People’s Park in Berkeley, California to show how the meaning of places can be highly contested. His work suggests both that places can be sites of resistance and that dominant forces will attempt to exercise control over space in order to limit the creation of such oppositional places.

Jackson’s (1991b) work on local culture in many cases focuses on issues of gentrification in urban settings. Drawing upon diverse theoretical sources ranging from Raymond Williams to Stuart Hall, Pierre Bordieu, and Clifford Geertz, he attempts to problematize simplistic models of neighborhood change and historic preservation. He addresses the intersections of economy and culture inherent in urban reinvestment projects. How is it that certain elements of a "locality" come to be considered "economic" or "cultural" resources and others do not? He suggests that the cultural and economic spheres are generally separated as if they were independent when, in reality, they are tightly intertwined. Jackson suggests, for example, that the transformation of the lofts of SoHo, in New York City, from "worthless" industrial space in 1962 to chic boutiques and upscale dwellings for the urban elite by 1974 "may be better understood as raising a series of questions about representation rather than as involving a stark choice between genuine preservation and deliberate misappropriation of an "authentic" urban past" (1991:224). Importantly, he suggests that such gentrification may represent a symbolic appropriation of working class history. Both of these authors are concerned with the contests of representation that are a central element of cultural change. While Mitchell is largely concerned with the legislative processes that eliminate public spaces and Jackson focuses more on the role of meaning and representation in localized changes, both authors share the belief that resistance to dominant (hegemonic) ideologies is often tied to localized identity and in this way are relevant to my study of surfing subculture.

Geography and the Media

The geographic study of culture, which historically involved field study of foreign cultures, is now both more expansive and more reflexively political (Shurmer-Smith and Hannam 1994). Studies of culture now often address the politics of popular culture at home. Moreover, culture is understood to be complex and contested. Initial geographic forays into popular culture used literature as their data. Today cultural geographers regularly utilize films in their investigations of place and political identity (Aitken 1991; Natter and Jones 1993; Ford 1994; Kennedy 1994). This literature will be explored more fully in chapter V.

Conclusion

The many theories I draw upon to inform my analysis of surfing subculture are not in complete agreement with one another. Nonetheless, each of these authors offers to me some insight, some avenue, into critically understanding popular culture and surfing subculture, in particular. To Gramsci, for example, I owe an understanding of ideology as something complex and contested, while Bourdieu provides a structure for understanding the social importance of image and style. Dick Hebdige has contributed his model of the commodification of radical subcultures. From Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, and Peter Jackson, I gain a sensitivity to the linguistic oversimplification of gendered dichotomous thinking, as well as an awareness that patriarchy has always had geographical implications. Stuart Aitken and Tim Cresswell open up new avenues for cultural critique in geography by complicating discussions of travel, mobility, and gender. Derek Gregory and Edward Relph inspire me by demonstrating textual analysis which is literary, historical, and emancipatory. Humanistic works on sense of place, by authors such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Larry Ford, encourage me to not underestimate the importance of place to the individual. Finally, the works of Raymond Williams, Don Mitchell, and Peter Jackson counter that the meaning of place is often contested by both groups and individuals.

Thus, the following chapters are structured around these theoretical avenues for investigation. In chapter V, I utilize the concepts of hegemony and commodification, as well as the literature on film, to investigate mainstream representations of surfing subculture. Chapter VI examines the character and importance of surf travel using the literature on travel, exploration, and mobility. In Chapter VII, I test the literature on gender and its relationship to nature against representations of nature in the surfing subculture. Finally, in Chapter VIII, I analyze elements of resistance and transgression in the surfing discourse. I can do none of this without first elaborating on a somewhat naïve historicization of contemporary surfing cultures. This mapping dominates my discussion in the chapter that immediately follows.

CHAPTER IV

HISTORY AND ORIGINS OF
SURFING SUBCULTURE

Surfing has a long history in Polynesia, but it is a relatively recent arrival in much of the rest of the world. The practice of surfing and the social meaning associated with it were dramatically transformed over the last two centuries via its diffusion from Hawaii and its eventual adaptation by the West. The modern practice of surfing involves myriad rules, roles, myths and institutions which collectively create a distinctive subculture. However, this modern culture retains only suggestive fragments of its Hawaiian roots.

This first chapter briefly outlines how a ritual element of a pre-industrial culture on the most geographically isolated island in the world diffused throughout the world to become a highly visible and successful element of Western culture and economy. In particular, I will focus on the emergence of a distinctive subculture and mythology centered around Southern California surfing and the lifestyle it represents in the mass media. Surfing is now more than just a sport. It is a lifestyle, one of the hundreds of themed niche commodities which shape the mass market which is American popular culture. In short, the story of the development of this subculture is tied intimately to geography, colonization, mythology and economics.

Ancient Beginnings

Surfing apparently originated in Polynesia when the ancestors of the Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders started to move eastward out of Southeast Asia to colonize the Pacific. Their cultures were centered around the ocean and their famous ocean-going canoes which allowed a remarkable diffusion across vast open expanses of the world’s largest ocean. The evidence we rely upon today to date the emergence of surfing comes entirely from accounts of early European explorers and thus any attempt to accurately date surfing’s emergence is largely conjecture. Assuming that it developed early in the culture of Polynesia would place the date as early as 2,000 B.C. More likely, the sport reached its full technical and ritual development, including the riding of waves while standing, hundreds of years later in those places where geography conspired to create the best conditions for large surf, namely Hawaii and Tahiti. The first European explorers to see Hawaii and Tahiti found rich traditions of surfing already in place (Lueras 1984; Finney and Houston 1996). Archaeological evidence suggests that Hawaii had been reached by no later than AD 400 so we can safely assume that surfing existed for at least a thousand years in Hawaii before the Europeans invaded (Finney and Houston 1996:21).

The role of surfing in pre-contact Hawaii was central. Men, women, and children apparently participated with almost equal vigor. While the surfing abilities of King Kamehameha and his wife Ka’ahumanu were memorialized in ritual songs and chants, ordinary Hawaiians practiced the sport with equal relish (Lueras 1984; Kampion 1997). Westerners commented on the importance of the surfboard as personal property and one missionary even suggested its possession was as important to the Hawaiians as was the ownership of a light carriage to the Englishman of the day (Stewart, quoted in Finney and Houston 1996:27). In retrospect it is clear that European impressions of surfing reflected highly misguided notions about both the practice and meaning of surfing in Hawaii. Early engravings show the islanders in awkward, often impossible positions on the waves. Many of these engravings depicted naked native women (Figure 1).

Most commentators simply categorized it as a sport in the European sense of the word: a recreation. They missed the point entirely. The Hawaiians relied on the sea for much of their livelihood and their relationship to the sea was probably the most important element of their spiritual life. Finney and Houston (Finney and Houston 1996:27) suggest that surfing was "the center of a circle of social and ritual activities that began with the very selection of the tree from which a board was carved and could end in the premature death of a chief - as was the result of at least one famous surfing contest in Hawaiian legend." In short, surfing was a central element of ancient Hawaiian life and was important to both sexes and all classes as recreation, ritual, and celebration.

European "Discovery" of Surfing

Regardless of when it originated, by the eighteenth century surfing had developed to a degree that amazed the European explorers and missionaries who first came into contact with it. The very first European descriptions of surfing come from the journals of Captain James Cook. While at anchor off Tahiti, Cook noticed a Tahitian in a dugout canoe catching and riding waves. Cook first suspected that the man had stolen something from one of his ships and was rapidly attempting an escape, but when the man paddled back out to do it again Cook began to understand: "I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea" (Cook 1784, quoted in Duane 1996b:18). Later on the same voyage, Cook’s first lieutenant, James King, excitedly recounts watching Hawaiians ride standing on the surf: "their first object is to place themselves on the summit of the largest surge, by which they are driven with amazing rapidity toward shore" (1784, quoted in Finney and Houston 1996:21). Daniel Duane in his book-length essay on surfing culture, notes that Cook even mentions the apparent disregard of the surfer for the Europeans, despite the awe-struck gaping of many other Tahitian villagers. Duane argues that Cook and King were essentially correct in their analysis of surfing, attributing to it "words and thoughts that still cluster around it - absorbed in a clean swell , that eighteenth century Tahitian has no use for wealth, no yearning for greener grass, no fear of the imperialism at his doorstep" (Duane 1996b:18). Duane sees surfing as a kind of escape and he seems thrilled that Cook noticed this as well.

Whereas seamen like Cook and King saw the excitement and joy in surfing, most of the earliest European witnesses inscribed Western ideas onto surfing, categorizing it as either dangerous or unproductive. The missionary, William Ellis, hiking around the island of Hawaii in the 1820s notes that "the thatch houses of a whole village stood empty...daily tasks such as farming, fishing, and tapa-making were left undone while an entire community - men, women, and children - enjoyed themselves in the rising surf and rushing white water" (1831, quoted in Finney and Houston 1996:27). Already we see the conflict with Western notions of work and productivity that will cling to surfing throughout its history. Drew Kampion, in his history of surf culture, Stoked (1997: 33), argues that ‘surfing’s association with nakedness, sexuality, wagering, shameless exuberance, informality, ignorant joy, and freedom were counterproductive to the designs of the church fathers who, curiously, wound up owning most of the land in the islands." In addition to these notions of hedonism and pagan immorality were interpretations which focused on danger, bravery, and other masculine notions. One of the first of these comes from another missionary, George Washington Bates, who described surfers as "borne on the foaming crest of the mighty wave with the speed of the swiftest race-horse toward the shore, where a spectator looks to see them dashed into pieces or maimed for life" (Bates, quoted in Duane 1996b:18). Duane astutely suggests that these early European interpretations which focused on "risk, daring, and conquest" were more reflective of Europe than anything in Hawaiian surfing: "...the tropes of Western writers scrambling to give an alien sport familiar meaning" (Duane 1996b:19). Richard Henry Dana, the young Harvard dropout turned romantic seafarer, in his Two Years Before the Mast encounters a group of ‘sandwich Islanders," Hawaiians, living idly on the beach at San Diego. Although Dana does not recount any episodes of surfing, Duane (1996b:35) feels "safe assuming they used driftwood planks or felled trees as surfboards, or at least bodysurfed." When Dana’s captain attempts to hire the Hawaiians he has a remarkable conversation with them that again suggests surfing’s conflict between Western and Pacific Islander economic thought (Dana, quoted in Duane 1996b:124):

"What do you do here, Mr. Mannini?" asks the captain.

"Oh, we play cards, get drunk, smoke -- do anything we’re a mind to."

"Don’t you want to come aboard and work?"

"Aole! aole make mokou I ka hana. Now, got plenty money; no good, work. Mamule, money pau -- all gone. Ah! very good, work! --maikai, hana hana nui!"

"But you’ll spend all your money in this way, " says the captain.

"Aye! me know that. By-"em-by money pau -- all gone; then Kanaka work plenty."

So, in the middle of the eighteenth century, we see certain familiar ideas attaching to surfing and Polynesian culture - indolence, gluttony, and diffidence.

Mark Twain was probably the first tourist to actually attempt surfing while on a visit to Hawaii and write home about it. With his usual pluck and humor Twain paints a romantic picture, replete with references to naked heathens, for his stateside readers:

In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen...would wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its family crest and himself upon the board, a here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!...I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me (Twain 1872, in Finney and Houston 1996:101).

Finally, he concludes that "none but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly."

Such dispatches would eventually be part of the reason for surfing’s growth, but in the middle of the eighteenth century surfing was actually in an acute state of decline. Disease combined with missionary zeal against "pagan" practices, which included surfing, conspired to virtually eliminate most aspects of ancient Hawaiian culture. By the turn of the twentieth century only a handful of people practiced the little known sport of surf-riding. In 1892, Nathaniel B. Emerson, an author with an interest in the decline of native Hawaiian traditions stated that:

There are those living...who remember the time when almost the entire population of a village would at certain hours resort to the sea-side to indulge in, or to witness, this magnificent accomplishment. We cannot but mourn its decline. But this too has felt the touch of civilization, and today it is hard to find a surfboard outside of our museums and private collections. (Emerson 1892, quoted in Lueras 1984:54)

This was just two years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and six years before the U.S. military annexation of Hawaii in 1898. Most authors agree that the sport barely survived colonization (Lueras 1984; Kampion 1997), but the seeds of surf culture, which included a healthy dose of resistance to Western norms regarding work, family, and spatial and temporal regimentation, would bear fruit during the sport’s 20th century renaissance.

Surfing’s Rebirth

The origins of a revolution that would change surfing from a largely Hawaiian sacred act into a haole recreation can be traced to Waikiki Beach on Oahu. It was here that the deliberate promotional efforts of a handful of Hawaiians, both haole and native, and the writings of journalists and advertisers, including Jack London, brought the sport to the attention of the West and an emerging tourist industry.

At the turn of the century the Waikiki beachfront, one of the original centers of ancient Hawaiian surfing, had already begun to be developed for tourism. Hotels were starting to crowd the beachfront. Among the few remaining surfers were a number of well connected haoles including journalist Alexander Hume Ford and local Irish-Hawaiian beachboy George Freeth. These men, along with a handful of native watermen including Duke Kahanamoku, would be instrumental in the sport’s survival.

During his visit to Hawaii, Jack London happened to befriend both Ford and Freeth. The two Hawaiians introduced London to surfing and in 1907 he published "A Royal Sport: Surfing at Waikiki" in Women’s Home Companion. Later, in 1910, Ford, concerned about increasingly limited access to the beachfront, organized the world’s first surfing association, The Outrigger Canoe Club. Ford secured a twenty year lease on an acre of beachfront property, built a symbolic grass hut, and charged annual dues for surfboard storage in lockers. The club’s stated purpose was

to give an added and permanent attraction to Hawaii and make Waikiki always the Home of the Surfer, with perhaps an annual Surfboard and Outrigger Canoe Carnival which will do much to spread abroad the attractions of Hawaii, the only islands in the world where men and boys ride upright upon the crests of the waves.(Ford, in Lueras 1984:70-71)

Here already are the signs of a dramatic change in the sport from its Hawaiian past. First, surfing in Western culture was immediately linked to the marketing of place and the promotion of tourism. Furthermore, women were no longer included. The Outrigger Canoe Club, though it did eventually include a number of women, was an avowedly male realm. Finally, as Drew Kampion (1997:36) points out, "the Outrigger was an almost strictly haole organization." In fact, three years after its formation a number of renegade members broke off and started a rival club called Hui Nalu. This new club was overwhelmingly composed of native Hawaiians. Although we can only guess at the motivations of Duke Kahanamoku, Hui Nalu’s first captain and founder, it seems apparent that a divide between the haoles and the more traditional surfers had emerged. Surfing’s association with wealthy white men had begun.

Jack London’s writings on surfing only deepen these initial themes. His report on surfing was characteristically masculine and did much to promote the sport in the United States. As in all of his works, London seemed to be unable to view nature, the sea in this case, as anything other than a realm for conquest and Men as nothing less than Judeo-Christian Gods:

Why, they are a mile long, these bull-mouthed monsters, and they weigh a thousand tons, and they charge in to shore faster than a man can run...And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white...appears the dark head of a man...He is a Mercury - a brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea. In truth, form out of the sea he has leaped upon the back of the sea, and he is riding the sea that roars and bellows and cannot shake him from its back... He has "bitted the bull-mouthed breaker" and ridden it in, and the pride in the feat shows in the carriage of his magnificent body as he glances for a moment carelessly at you who sit in the shade of the shore. He is a Kanaka - and more, he is a man, a member of the kingly species that has mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation. (London 1907, quoted in Finney and Houston 1996:106)

London eventually published much of his surfing material in The Cruise of the Snark (1911), further cementing surfing’s image as an extreme sport of conquest for men.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century surfing became a recognized part of the image of Hawaii sold to well-to-do travelers throughout the world. Cruise line travel brochures, carnivals, and even silent films helped to solidify the image of Hawaii and its people as exotic and different (Figure 2). Cruise line and hotel promotional brochures of the period focused on themes of paradise, difference, and implied sexuality (Goss 1993).

Many of these advertisements depict white tourist women surfing with Hawaiian beachboys (Figure 3), a tradition that continues to this day and which still has an association with sexuality, even male prostitution (Bone 1994). Many others simply show tourists posing with surfboards, the ultimate evidence of having been to the Other side of the world.

Helping to solidify and spread this image were the exploits of a young Hawaiian athlete, Duke Kahanamoku, the founder of the aforementioned Hui Nalu Club. Duke led a life that likely did more to promote surfing and Hawaii than the efforts of all the others combined. Duke was first and foremost a fantastic athlete. Without training he broke numerous world swimming sprint records and he did this by impressive margins. Eventually, he broke the 100 and 200 meter sprint records and went on to astound the world at the 1912

Olympics, winning a gold medal while looking over his shoulder to see how far behind his opponents were. He did all of this without any formal training and stories about his remarkable abilities spread by newspaper to the U.S., Europe and Australia (Lueras 1984; Kampion 1997).

Duke’s real love, however, was surfing. He was a founding member of both of the world’s first surfing clubs and became so well known that he is now generally considered the "grandfather" of modern surfing. After his Olympic wins, Duke toured the world giving swimming and surfing demonstrations, visiting much of Europe, Australia, and both coasts of the United States. Despite all of this fame, his promotion of the sport, and Hawaii, became muddied by his association with Hollywood. Filmmakers decided he was the perfect figure for all sorts of swarthy foreigner roles - Arab kings, Apache and Hindu chiefs, and so forth. As a result Duke ended up spending nearly twenty years of his life living in and around Hollywood playing bit parts in major motion pictures. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t until 1948 that he actually played a Polynesian when he was cast opposite John Wayne in The Wake of the Red Witch (Figure 4).

While Hollywood used Duke to represent the generic Other and rarely featured his surfing talents, surfing’s depiction in film can be traced back all the way to silent films. In the next chapter I focus in depth on the link between films and surfing as commodity, but in 1910 it was still almost fifty years before the advent of the surfing film and professional surf journalism. Expositions and tourism were still the most significant factors in surfing’s growth and worldwide diffusion (Figure 5).

Diffusion to California

It was during this period of press promotion and tourism that surfing spread to California, where the new commercial culture of surfing would eventually take final shape. This ironic reversal was linked from the start with the necessary expansion of capitalism and tourism. As we shall see, this pattern was to be repeated over and over

again throughout the subsequent spread of surfing. It was actually three Hawaiian princes attending military academy in San Mateo in 1885 who were probably the first persons to surf in California. They visited Santa Cruz and had redwood boards shaped so they could test the waves at the San Lorenzo rivermouth. Although Santa Cruz would become a beach resort soon thereafter, it seems that the exploits of these three Hawaiians went largely unnoticed and unexploited.

It was George Freeth who successfully transferred the idea of surfing to California when in 1907 he promoted the opening of the Los Angeles to Redondo Beach Railway by giving wave-riding demonstrations in front of thousands of spectators at Redondo Beach. This was the same year that London’s article appeared and the fortuitous combination, combined with Duke Kahanamoku’s first visits to Southern California in 1913, guaranteed that surfing would prosper. However, they also further linked surfing to commercial interests and the marketing of beachside places. All of this promotion increased the number of surfers in both Hawaii and California. In 1928 Tom Blake, inventor of the hollow surf board, organized the Pacific Coast Surfriding Championships at Corona Del Mar and in 1936 the Palos Verdes Surfing Club became California’s first surfing organization. According to Drew Kampion (1997), San Onofre became one of the first centers of the emerging California subculture.

He notes that in the years after the Depression surfing was one of a limited number of opportunities for recreation among the young people of Southern California. As the economy improved and cars became more common, a core group of surfers started congregating at the beach, camping sometimes for weeks, in a deliberate attempt to recreate the Waikiki beach scene, replete with grass skirts, ukuleles, and palm frond hats. Kampion’s description of this group notes the centrality of a symbol that remains an important element of surfing places to this day: "the surfers found a grass shack left behind by a Hollywood movie company, and that became a focal point" (Kampion 1997:48). Grass and palm frond shacks of this sort are constructed all over the world by surfers. Their importance as symbolic centers of surfing culture and elements in the promotion of tourist destinations was made particularly evident in 1998 when the San Diego Historic Site Board voted unanimously to designate a palm hut at Windansea beach in La Jolla, California a San Diego Historic Site (Figure 6). An application for its recognition as a National Historic Site is now in progress (Rodgers 1998a).

The construction and occupation of beach huts by surfers in California led almost immediately to confrontations with mainstream authorities who felt threatened by this appropriation of space. Evidence of this can be seen in the architecture of the Windansea hut itself. The Windansea hut, constructed originally in 1947, is unique in that it has no side walls. The architect of the hut explained that this was in order to prevent its destruction by police who had torn down similar shacks in Pacific Beach under the pretense that illegal "drinking and cavorting" were taking place inside their thin walls (Rodgers 1998a:B3).

Shortly after the emergence of San Onofre as a center of surfing culture, a new spot was discovered just north of Los Angeles. Malibu, a small point which faces south and receives the summer South Pacific typhoon swells, eventually would become the most influential focal point of Southern California surfing. However, in the early years of this century the point was the private property of the Samuel K. Rindge estate. His widow fought the construction of the road that is now State Highway 1, in the courts and with armed cowboys, but in 1926 construction began. For years access to Rancho Malibu was still limited to property owners and their business partners. Eventually Marblehead Development Company purchased and developed the land just north of Malibu and bit by bit the old Ranch was sold off, including tracts purchased by the state that would soon become Leo Carrillo State Beach. Many early Malibu surfers claim to have sneaked onto the Rindge property at one time or another, always keeping a watchful eye on Rindge’s armed ranch hands. Despite this early exclusion, by 1950 Malibu was the place to be if you were a Los Angeles county surfer, especially in the summer. Although the crowds were still small, they were growing. Throughout the boom time of the 1950s, a highly mobile and varied youth culture began to emerge. More and more young people, buoyed by greater access to expendable income and automobiles, were heading to the beach.

Hollywood Discovers Surfing

When this emerging beach culture was portrayed by Hollywood in Gidget (1959) and other beach films during the 1950s and 60s, surfing exploded in popularity. Brian Wilson and the music of the Beach Boys (who did not actually surf) reached even more of America. When the classic surf travel film The Endless Summer was nationally distributed in 1963, there were only a handful of countries where surfing was practiced. Today, as the result of the very successful commodification of surf culture, virtually every country that has a coastline has surfers and hosts surf-tourism and surfing themed products are used to sell everything from internet services to luxury sport-utility vehicles.

Gidget is the film that most dramatically changed everything for California surfing. Old time surfers talk today about a sea change in the water between 1959 and 1960 (Liquid Stage 1997). Prior to Gidget a Malibu surfer could pretty much ride any wave he wanted. Crowding was virtually unheard of and every surfer knew every other surfer at the home break. Gidget changed all that in one season by making surfing seem sexy and adventurous to millions of moviegoers. What is more, Gidget placed surfing within the reach of anyone. After all, apparently even a girl could do it. One year there were about twenty surfers at Malibu, the next year there were hundreds. Gidget was so popular that it led to five sequels and two television spin-offs. This is the film that many argue cemented America’s fascination with the mythical Southern California beach lifestyle. Surfing was now growing fast and becoming big business too. What’s more, the whole atmosphere of surfing changed. Crowding, territoriality ("localism"), and travel increased.

While the rest of America was watching Hollywood’s simplistic surf films and dancing to the music of the Beach Boys, surfers were making their own films, presenting them on the "four wall circuit" in high school gyms and community centers all along the California coast. The first of these low budget films to take on national importance was The Endless Summer, a film many still consider the only truly authentic surfing film.

Bruce Brown introduced The Endless Summer in 1964 in Santa Monica. It was a huge hit with the surfing crowd, but Hollywood distributors wouldn’t touch it. To prove it would sell to mainstream America, Brown rented an auditorium in downtown Wichita, Kansas, smack in the geographic center of the country. In spite of frigid winter weather conditions, the film sold out and was a smash hit for two solid weeks, outselling the theater’s previous engagement of My Fair Lady. Buoyed by his success, Brown debuted the film next in New York and critics raved. "the Fellini of the foam" said one; "Bergman of the boards" cried another (Lueras 1984:49).

Reportedly produced on less than $50,000, the film eventually grossed $30 million. Brown personally reaped around $8 million and became surfing’s first mogul. The film is technically simple. There is no dialogue since Brown, like other early surf film directors, generally performed live commentary while touring with his films. The plot is even simpler: two young California surfers set off to travel around the world following the summer and the surf. Filmed in a "down-to-earth" documentary style with a healthy dose of humor, the film apparently started a mad rush of surfing related tourism. The search for "the perfect wave" was on. Surfing magazines, the first of which was John Severson’s Surfer in 1960, soon made travel articles about "the search" a staple. Since then, his magazines have steadily increased their travel and international coverage.

The Surf Media and the Growth
of Professional Surfing

Magazines provided another means for the dissemination of surf culture. The circulation of Surfer went from around 5,000 in 1960 to roughly 100,000 in 1970. Today Surfer is one of an increasing number of specialized surf magazines, including Longboard, Surfing, Surfer Girl, Wahine, and The Surfer’s Journal, as well as numerous foreign publications. Most of these magazines dedicate the majority of their copy space to the coverage of professional surfing, which emerged during the 1970s.

The lineage of surfing competitions can be traced to ancient Hawaii, but it wasn’t until CBS discovered surfing in 1969, with the help of a young surfer named Fred Hemmings, that surfers could hope to make any money at their sport. The total prize money offered that first year was only $1,000 but surfing would never be quite the same and a deep split developed in as a result of the sport’s new competitive professionalism. At various times all three television networks would cover professional surfing, but television marketing was soon surpassed by the sponsorship of surf clothing and equipment manufacturers. By 1984, about $500,000 in total prize money was available on the international professional surfing tour (Lueras 1984). That figure has since risen to dramatically, with the top surfers earning hundreds of thousands each year. Moreover, lucrative sponsorships and apparel endorsement contracts now routinely exceed $1 million. But even more important than the money paid to the surfers is the surf media’s emphasis on professional surfers and the products these surfers promote.

While few surfers will ever compete in a contest, virtually all the articles and photographs in the surf media focus on professional surfers. In addition, extensive magazine advertising and the sponsorship of contests and individual athletes by surfing retailers and manufacturers creates a massive industry focused around the marketing of surfing style to the world of consumers. The surf wear industry alone is now worth $1.7 billion and includes such familiar names as Gotcha, Billabong, Quicksilver, Rusty, Stussy, Mossimo, and Pacific Eyes and Tees (Earnest 1999:C1). All of these companies, along with the successful movie makers and magazines, managed to capitalize on the symbolic appeal of surfing and in turn they helped to shape the image of surfing, transforming an iconoclastic subculture into a powerful element of what some commentators are calling "liberation marketing" (Frank 1997:44). Even very mainstream products are now often marketed with surfing imagery (Figure 7).

Conclusion

Surfing has experienced a geographic and cultural transformation. The sport was practiced for untold centuries by ancient Polynesians, survived attempts to destroy it by Western colonizers, was dismissed as mindless play by much of middle class America, and was, in the end, glorified and exploited by sophisticated twentieth century marketing. Throughout all of this surfing acquires the status of a prominent element of American mythology, a subculture apparently peopled by a diverse group of eclectics, entrepreneurs, consumers, and image makers. In the following chapters, I delve more deeply into the political and spatial implications of this commodification .

CHAPTER V

HOLLYWOOD AND THE COMMODIFICATION
OF SURFING SUBCULTURE

In this chapter I explore the depiction of surfing subculture in American films. I begin by reviewing a number of geographic works that focus on film. Since I am explicitly interested in film’s role within larger social structures which encourage particular ideologies, I also discuss some of the recent work on the commodification of cultural difference. Films are often intensely personal statements, reflecting the imaginations and biases of their writers and directors. However, as commodities and important elements of popular culture they also reflect the zeitgeist of their times. I turn first to a discussion of these wider historical and political contexts. I elaborate why I chose to analyze these particular films and then I discuss the narrative of each film in detail, noting those instances where each film exemplifies various insights from the geographic and social theory literature. In the end I suggest that these films use the powerful tools of visual, spatial, and chronological "re-presentation" (Aitken and Zonn 1994) to serve ideological ends. By focusing at length on a number of these films I unpack and critique stereotyped portrayals in order to illustrate their ideological character.

The Geography of Film

Despite a marked hesitancy by geographers to take up the geographic implications of film, there has been real growth in the area for more than a decade now (Burgess and Gold 1985; Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997). Much of the hesitancy derives from the complexity and uncertainty inherent in the analysis of films. Rarely is the meaning of a film or a scene in a film explicit or incontestable. In addition, unlike much literature, a film is a product of multiple authors. Moreover, it is difficult, even impossible, to untangle the intended messages in film from their infinite variety of possible interpretations by individuals, particularly since many films are distributed across traditional national and cultural boundaries. Then there are concerns about the relative importance of film as an indicator of the social, since most films are explicitly commercial in nature and are sometimes dismissed as "mere" entertainment (Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997). Despite the aforementioned concerns, geographers find film a particularly rich source of data for investigations in three areas: landscape and place, environmental perception, and the politics of identity. Burgess and Gold’s (1985) Geography, The Media, and Popular Culture was the first extended treatment of popular media by geographers. Aitken and Zonn’s (1994) Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle was a book length text devoted entirely to the geography of film.

The difficulties of film interpretation are reflected in the variety of methodological approaches in the literature. Kennedy and Lukinbeal (1997) suggest that approaches to film in geography roughly paralleled trends in the discipline. Thus, they trace the emergence of film studies first to humanistic approaches to the landscape (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; Meinig 1979; Ford 1994) and then to interest in cognitive psychology and transactional approaches to environmental perception ( Zube and Kennedy 1990; Aitken 1991; Aitken and Zonn 1993; Kennedy 1994). Most recently, geographers of film turned to postmodern and social theory approaches which acknowledge film’s role as an institution which "mediates social knowledge, reinforces ideological constructions of the status-quo and is an active agent of hegemony" (Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997:34). It is these latter works which set the stage for my own investigations.

Postmodernism is a much contested and often muddied concept, with various authors using the term in widely varying contexts and with often contradictory meanings. It is variously applied to recent developments in everything from art and the media, to architecture, literature, academic theory, and politics. I use postmodernism to refer to a perspective which denies universal truths and all-encompassing scientific or social explanations and instead values a diversity of perspectives. In art and architecture, postmodernism may combine multiple themes and traditions in a single "pastiche" or collage. In academia, the postmodernists talk of the "crisis of reason" and the abandonment of metanarratives and metatheories. In film studies, as Kennedy and Lukinbeal (1997) suggest, there is a need to bridge the bipolar concepts of individual agency versus societal structure, to connect cognitive theory with social theory and political identity. One of the primary insights of postmodernism is that