Abstract
Why surf gigantic, life-threatening waves? Big wave surfers give what may seem like a rather obvious answer: “because it’s fun!” The question remains: how are we to understand the phenomenon of “fun”? In the past couple of decades, it seemed as if psychologists had cornered the market on scholarly research that focused on such lifestyle sports as surfing and mountain climbing, evidenced by the popularization of the concept “flow,” which now seems ubiquitous in the rapidly growing field of sports studies. Accomplished surfers and mountain climbers do what they do because they seek an experience of flow, which provides a certain kind of pleasure, according to psychologists. But what about fun? Is fun contained within the experience of flow, or do we need another theoretical framework to make sense of the fun aspect?
With the publication of Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers, Ugo Corte has provided a long overdue sociological perspective for the interpretation of “extreme” lifestyle sports like big wave surfing. While it can be argued that the pursuit of flow by surfers and free solo mountain climbers is a strictly individual endeavor, Corte persuasively argues that fun, unlike pleasure, is social, which suggests we venture out of psychology and into sociology as a means to develop a more thorough understanding of what is at stake in big wave surfing. Indeed, Corte makes his theoretical intervention by drawing on concepts from classical sociological theory like Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence,” and contemporary sociological theory, including Randall Collins’s notion of “emotional energy.” Both of these concepts are used to explain how fun is social, and this is what makes Corte’s work an important theoretical intervention into the study of lifestyle sports like surfing.
While Dangerous Fun is an important intervention in the growing field of surfing studies, it is also a welcome addition to the field of sociology, especially in the United States. Unlike in Australia, where surfing is highly respected as a sport, in the U.S. surfing lacks the status of the main sports like football, basketball, and baseball, in spite of the fact that surfing is a billion-dollar industry and has been a mainstay in popular culture since the late 1950s. This might explain why sociology in the United States has not given surfers and surfing the same level of attention as sociologists in Australia. There are very important exceptions of course, like Kristin Lawler’s (2011) book The American Surfer, but it remains the case that surfing has largely been ignored by sociologists in the United States. There is also a bit of irony here, however, because Corte himself is not an American sociologist. He is associate professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway. But his approach to the study of big wave surfers finds a home in the classics of U.S. ethnography and micro-sociology, drawing inspiration from works by George Herbert Mead, Howard Becker, and Erving Goffman.
Corte’s important book will have crossover appeal not only between academic fields like sociology and psychology, but between academics and non-academics, especially surfers who are intellectually curious. This is because Dangerous Fun is an engaging participant-observation ethnography written in a style that fits in with the best of the classic ethnographic works in the field of sociology. The reader is immediately drawn into the book because the characters are so interesting and because Corte does a great job explaining the feeling of the thrill found in big wave surfing. Corte is himself a surfer, so this obviously helps to draw the reader into the topic at hand. In addition, for those who are outside of the surfing cosmos, it’s always enjoyable to learn something new about a subculture that seems exotic from the outside looking in, and Corte does a great job at helping us look through a window onto another world, the world of big wave surfers. The publication of Dangerous Fun is perfect in its timing, as big wave surfing has garnered worldwide attention in recent years as surfers are now surfing waves as large as 100 feet, something considered crazy if not impossible to earlier generations of surfers.
Chapter Three, titled “Fun and Community,” is the best chapter my opinion. “While fun typically involves pleasure for those involved, it extends beyond mere satisfaction, comforting embodiment or agreeable affect,” argues Corte (p. 81). In other words, the experience of fun cannot be reduced to the domain of the individual. Rather, fun “results in two main outcomes: the kind of positive feeling Collins describes as emotional energy (drive, enthusiasm, confidence) and a sense of solidarity among those who share it—an aftermath of what Emile Durkheim, in his study of religious rituals, identified as collective effervescence. Shared fun, and thus social acceptance and the delight in becoming and realizing oneself within the social, as Aristotle would put it, promotes bonding among friendship groups” (p. 81). The bonding aspect and the creation of feelings of solidarity is what Corte brings to light in his ethnographic study of the subculture of big wave surfers. Indeed, this is where his book shines.
What is of particular interest is the difference between the subculture of big wave surfing and the conventional culture of “regular” surfing, or the surfing of medium-sized surf. In conventional surfing—where waves are medium-sized—localism has become a plague on the lifestyle sport, as many of the most popular surfing spots around the world are now dominated by men who poison the experience of surfing for others with a toxic masculinity that often manifests in violence. As Corte reveals, it is in big wave surfing where the original aloha spirit that gave birth to surfing so many centuries ago in Hawai’i still exists today. The reason why the aloha spirit lives on in big wave surfing is primarily because the community of surfers who are skilled enough to ride gigantic waves is very small. More importantly, when a surfer risks their life taking off on a huge wave, and when they share that experience with others who do the same, it does more than change their individual life. The sharing of the experience of surfing gigantic waves creates very strong bonds that last a lifetime.
In short, with the publication of Dangerous Fun, Corte has achieved three admirable goals: he has revealed to sociologists in the United States why surfers are worth studying, and he has provided sociologists outside of the U.S. with insight into what surfing looks like when framed by sociology that has roots in the U.S. Lastly, he has written a book that will bridge the gap between academic and non-academic readers.