Episode 149 - Surfing

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:19] David: The podcast, where two philosophy professors put philosophy and dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:24] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:27] Ellie: To support the show and get access to extended ad-free episodes lives with Ellie and David. That is us. And more subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

David, when I first proposed this episode to you, you had some questions for me. I might be a California native, and we might both live in the state, but neither of us regularly surfs. So why would we devote an episode of our philosophy podcast to this somewhat specific activity? But then I shared with you some research I had found about surfing and the good life, much of which is written by philosophers, and you started to come around a bit.

So how are you feeling about it now that we've actually agreed to do this episode?

[00:01:09] David: I know I was a hater at the beginning. Now I'm obviously going to become a surfer. But you know, it's shocking how my view of something will do a complete 180 as long as I like, allow myself to think about it philosophically and more rigorously.

And that definitely happened with this topic. But at the beginning I was skeptical because surfing does seem like such a random topic for us to cover on Overthink.

[00:01:33] Ellie: Yeah. And I think, okay, so there's this book I Surf, Therefore I Am: A Philosophy of Surfing which begins by, I think, framing whom the book is for in a way that I think precisely indicates whom our episode is for.

It's for three kinds of people, curious, non-surfers, for surfers and for them it's a manifesto.

[00:01:54] David: Oh my God.

[00:01:54] Ellie: And I wannabe surfers. So you're maybe a wannabe surfer or a curious non-surfer. I would consider myself in that same boat. And you know, we really did our homework for this episode because like I said, there's actually a surprising amount of philosophical literature on surfing.

And if any of our listeners might still share David's initial skepticism around this topic, maybe you're not any of these three categories, you're actually like a non curious nons surfer. I wanna share this quote from Timothy Leary, the psychologist and countercultural icon of the 1960s. Leary says surfers are quote, truly advanced people who have become almost mystics.

The act of surfing he says is quote, almost Daoist poetry, almost einsteinian.

[00:02:42] David: My God, I love how he has to temper his enthusiasm with the word almost like it's almost the best thing that you can do as a human being.

[00:02:51] Ellie: Yeah, it's like a hyperbolic statement potentially. So he's like kind of walking it back a little bit.

But I mean, I really think even almost being there like to say that surfers are truly advanced people who have become almost mystics. And there's something almost Taoist or almost Einsteinian is, you know, quite a significant claim to make. And closer to our own discipline, the contemporary philosopher Aaron James, argues that we should take surfing seriously, and by we, he means like really everybody.

And he begins by talking about one of our most serious thinkers. So now speaking directly to philosophers, that is existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. James notes that in the middle of Being and Nothingness, Sartre has a seemingly random excursus on water sports. And he starts by talking about skiing, which Sartre uses as an example of free movement over the material world.

So you're gliding over the material world when you're skiing, but then Sartre says, well, skiing is basically just an example of sliding over water. It's just like hard water, solid water that is not technically hard water, solid water. And so water sports exemplify this movement over the earth, even better than skiing does.

So then he moves on to boating and water skiing, and James writing in our contemporary period in recounting this passage from being nothingness says, you know what? Sartre would've loved what would've been an even better example than water skiing or boating. Surfing.

[00:04:15] David: But I wonder about that because, you know, Sartre did have this deep seated phobia of. Sea creatures. Crustaceans, like crabs and lobsters. So I don't think he would've loved to be in the water.

[00:04:27] Ellie: You know that. Okay. But the thing is, in surfing, you ideally are above water. Of course, you're also sometimes beneath it.

If you wanna hear more about Sartre's phobia of crustaceans, check out our psychedelics episode because it indeed was the result of a bad trip that start became terrified of crustaceans and persecuted by them. So yeah, no, fair, fair point. I don't think that's something that James addresses here, at least not as far as I recall in the book.

[00:04:56] David: Today, we're talking about surfing.

[00:04:58] Ellie: How does surfing reveal the connection between flow and freedom?

[00:05:02] David: Is surfing the pinnacle of human activity?

[00:05:05] Ellie: And how might we consider surfing in terms of the philosophy of sport?

[00:05:18] David: If you are not a surfer, like us, you might originally think that surfing is just an activity. It's something that people do maybe for sport or for leisure, but if you talk to any surfer, somebody who has committed themselves to this activity, they will tell you that it's much more than that, right?

It's a culture, it's a way of life. And the surfer's way of life, I think, can be captured by the expression, going with the flow. That's what surfers do, kind of literally and metaphorically. And that's why this stereotype that we have of the surfer as this like laid back dude who's like smoking weed, who doesn't worry about , whatever's happening in the world.

And I mean, we're gonna return to that character later in the episode. But I think this is where it comes from. It's a character that goes with the flow and relinquishes this need for controlling all the variables in their lives. I think that idea of the surfer as a laid back character also shows up a lot in the lingo that you find in surfer communities.

Like, you know, the idea of hanging loose, which often comes with the like little hand sign, like just hanging loose, man.

[00:06:28] Ellie: The way that rolled off your tongue was like the least hang loose kind of way. Oh my.

[00:06:33] David: I told you I'm not a surfer.

[00:06:35] Ellie: The idea of hanging loose as the chill surfers say, like it was Wow.

It was giving uncle for sure.

[00:06:43] David: Well, what do you want me to like impersonate a surfer? That's even worse. So no, but essentially it means relaxation. Like that's the point here.

[00:06:52] Ellie: I think one thing to note at the get go is that this is actually sort of surprising at first when you think about the physical activity of surfing.

The idea that surfing as a culture and a way of life is associated with relaxation is perhaps at odds with the fact that surfing is an intensely demanding and skilled physical activity,

[00:07:12] David: which is why we don't do it

[00:07:13] Ellie: Well, no, actually, truly for me it's scary.

[00:07:16] David: I agree.

[00:07:16] Ellie: It's just scary to me. I tried surfing a couple times when I was younger, you know, like nineties Blue Crush era growing up in California.

Had a great time, but I'm just like straight up too much of a scaredy cat. I'm even too much of a scaredy cat for skiing these days too, so sadly surfing maybe out of the picture for me, unless I like, really wanna become an enlightened being like Timothy Leary says. But you know, you mentioned earlier that there is.

The sense that surfers have to relinquish control of external circumstances. And so obviously that relates to the idea of going with the flow, but relinquishing of external control over conditions or control over external conditions rather. That goes hand in hand with a kind of intense micro control over one's bodily conditions, right?

And so modulating, if you're riding a wave, you have to modulate your physical activities precisely to the conditions of that wave itself. And you also have to make very difficult, sometimes life or death decisions under intense, rapidly changing conditions. There's a modulation of the body as well as a responsiveness to very high stakes situations that we see in the practice of surfing.

[00:08:31] David: Yeah. And I think for a lot of people it might be surprising that surfers make these life or death decisions. with that go with the flow mentality. You know, when you think of life and death, you think, I want precision, I want control 'cause I don't wanna risk injury or death. But that go with the flow attitude actually does make really good sense as a way of approaching surfing when you keep in mind the material conditions under which surfing happens, which is the movements of the ocean, right? The waves, waves are nothing but movements of nature that we can't control.

And so it makes sense that surfers would relate to that environment precisely through that relinquishing of control rather than by trying to cease power over nature. And I think a lot of surfers do report that the experience of surfing brings into focus for them their lack of power. Right? Like it clarifies that there are things in the world that they cannot control and that's what ultimately encourages this lighthearted approach to life.

This going with the flow literally in the water, but also more broadly in connection to life.

[00:09:41] Ellie: Yeah. It's like once you experience the intensity of surfing, nothing's that serious. Right? And even the surfing itself, surfers will report David's doing the hang loose symbol. David's hanging loose as we speak.

Yeah. So there's like a sense of, yeah, actually I'm riding the waves and even in the activity of surfing, having a great time, right? And letting go even under these really intense conditions. Yeah. I think that speaks to really why philosophers find surfing so interesting as well. The philosopher Aaron James, who's also a longtime surfer, so he has, we're gonna be de referring to him.

We might not be longtime surfers, but Aaron James is and is also a philosopher. He has a sustained analysis of this in his book, Surfing with Sartre, which we mentioned a few minutes ago. And I'm really excited to talk about this book because basically James concludes that surfing is the pinnacle of human life and nothing has more profound lessons to teach us than surfing.

He says that surfing is the zenith of all human endeavors. It's up there with arts, friendship, love, music, even sex for him.

[00:10:47] David: Jesus, we're really leading a very impoverished life out here. We might have the other ones, but we don't have surfing.

[00:10:53] Ellie: Like you said, you wanna take it up after this?

[00:10:55] David: I honestly, I really might, but I, I like that he leans so hard into the significance of surfing for human life. And as I was reading his work, it was like I was compelled by it.

[00:11:06] Ellie: Absolutely. And I did not expect to find from this book that surfing is basically the key to all of our personal, not to mention social problems. We'll get there in a moment. Let's start now though by discussing James's key claim in the book.

Essentially, he thinks that the experience of surfing changes how we should think about freedom. Jean Paul Sartre is his opponent here. So when he says surfing with sart, in some ways he's like surfing Contra  Sartre because Sartre thinks that human freedom is a radical power of choice. Every choice we make, every action we undertake is an act of determining who we are, right?

There's no core self. Our self is created through our activities, and those activities or choices are free. So to be human is to experience the agonizing need to make choices every day. But James thinks that this is a quite gloomy outlook, and that  Sartre really overemphasizes the radical nature of our freedom.

In surfing, we have an experience of freedom as emerging through flow. To ride a wave is to experience the utmost freedom. So there it's like a maximal freedom, but it's not the freedom of making choices in the face of a meaningless world, right?  Sartre's freedom is kind of like out of this nothingness You invent a choice and James says, no, we should be thinking about the freedom of riding a wave as like the central experience of freedom because this is the freedom of being born along by circumstances outside of yourself and feeling your body totally in sync with them. In short flow comes before freedom.

Whereas for  Sartre, freedom is foundational as the absence of a foundation to our human existence.

[00:12:45] David: This is really interesting to me. You know, how we conceptualize freedom relative to constraint. And so let's get into how surfing gives rise to the sense of flow and then what that flow actually looks like.

Because James isn't thinking about flow in the way maybe psychologists typically think about flow, which is as a mental state or an experiential state as in like the flow state, like being the flow or being in the zone, like, you know, with like a musical performance or like in athletics,

[00:13:12] Ellie: not to be confused with hanging loose.

[00:13:15] David: Yeah. He's thinking about flow as. Exercise of skill where you're being active relative to the world. So you are attuned to the environment, paying attention, and tracking the movements of your surroundings. So think about this in the most literal way possible in connection to surfing, right? You're paying attention, obviously to the water, to the movement of the waves.

You're also paying attention to your body and your body's position relative to the surfboard. You might also have to pay attention to where other surfers are relative to you in space. So there is this whole constellation of ecological and social dynamics that you are tuning into. In fact, if you're a good surfer, you might also have to pay really good attention even to what you cannot see, right?

To like what's underneath the water, especially if there's like coral that might really mess you up if you don't know where to be in the water. And so James uses a term to capture this kind of relationship to the world that surfers need to cultivate, and that is adaptive attunement. And so you are attuned to the environment and also responding to it in a flexible, adaptive manner.

So you're jumping on the board, you're paddling, you're letting a wave pass, or maybe you're riding the wave. You're making all these decisions depending on your interpretation of how the conditions are presenting themselves to you in that moment. And so there is a kind of skilled consciousness, according to James, that is essential to the activity of surfing. And yeah, you are carried by the wave. So in that sense, we could say that you are passive. Right? There is a lot of images of passivity in surfing, but the reason that you are being carried by the wave is because you have adapted your body to the conditions of the ocean.

And in a sense, you are actively letting yourself be taken by the wave. And that's the essence of surfing. So I think it transcends the distinction between activity and passivity.

[00:15:19] Ellie: Yeah. And this is also why James thinks that surfing is so important to consider philosophically. Attunement isn't just the essence of surfing, it's also for him, the essence of what it is to be human.

He considers human nature to be adoptive attunement.

[00:15:35] David: What I find really interesting about this is also what it tells us about the kinds of knowledge that are so important to the human condition and to being human. Because of course, we often emphasize knowledge, ways of knowing that are theoretical, right, that are conceptual and rational and linguistic.

And James notes that surfers do develop a really good knowledge of the world, of nature, of the ocean, of the waves. But that knowledge is not really the kind of conceptual or declarative knowledge that we often expect from knowers. Right. It's not our typical image of what it means to know something, rather it's a kind of knowledge that is more embodied.

It is preconceptual, it is passive rather than theoretical. In psychology and in philosophy, we often use this distinction between knowledge how, like knowing how to do something, a kind of embodied knowledge of things and knowledge that, you know, when you can declaratively, indicate and pass information to other people.

And he says,

[00:16:40] Ellie: and can I just quickly give it like an example of that?

[00:16:42] David: Yeah.

[00:16:42] Ellie: So I might know how to drive. But I might not. No, well actually maybe this is a bad example. I'm like, lemme give an example to, oh, language is perhaps a better example. I might know how to use a proposition, a sentence, but I might not be able to explicitly articulate like what, how,

[00:16:58] David: like all the rules?

[00:16:59] Ellie: The rules that go into that. Yeah.

[00:17:01] David: And like people have pointed out that are knowledge of syntactical rules is actually something that we don't know. We know how to use them, but we don't know what the rules are. Yeah. But driving is a good example. You know how to drive, but you couldn't say like, my foot has to be three centimeters this way you,

[00:17:13] Ellie: yeah, exactly.

[00:17:14] David: Exactly. Yeah. So it's embodied rather than conceptual. And in connection to surfing in particular. Now, to bring it to the topic, James points out that surfers servers really are the experts of interpreting and measuring waves. Again, movement patterns in water. And in this way, they are the embodied counter image to the scientific study of waves because there is a science, there is a branch of science that is dedicated to like measuring waves objectively. It's called bathymetry. I have never heard that term, but in a

[00:17:49] Ellie: 'cause of the waves that you, that are generated when you're taking a bath, obviously.

[00:17:55] David: Yeah. And so the surfers have a kind of embodied  bathymetrical knowledge of the world. And what we need to do is actually learn to reclaim the value of that kind of non declarative knowledge. And there's a lot of philosophers who have tried to do that. You know, there is Wittgenstein, there is Heiddeger.

Practically all of the pragmatists also came to the defense of this know-how rather than know that.

[00:18:21] Ellie: Yeah. And this is to a large extent how we go about our lives as well. Right. So much of our knowledge is below or beyond. Our own rational understanding. And also, so much of our lives is out of our control.

When you catch a wave, you have the sense that all the factors have conspired together to make things work well for you. James says that this is in part a matter of luck, right? And so surfers have a strong sense of the role that luck plays in their lives on his view. You can't be a control freak in a surfer.

[00:18:53] David: You cannot be a control freak. But I think at the same time, we have to keep in mind that fear is a kind of central emotion or the surfer. So surely we have now this picture of the surfer as somebody who just goes with the flow, doesn't stress out, but. Because there are those high stake life or death decisions, injury, not injury moments. The dominant affect, especially if you're learning how to do it, it's very scary, is fear. You know, it's really scary to be in the waters, to be in the surf because danger is a part of it.

[00:19:26] Ellie: Yeah. And in fact, the lifelong surfer, William Finnegan writes beautifully about this in his classic, I learned in my research, his classic memoir, Barbarian Days, a Surfing Life.

And he says that for him as a young surfer, waves were the playing field. They were the goal, they were the object of your deepest desire and adoration at the same time. They were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, but it was also a hostile wilderness. I love this passage and as a changing natural phenomenon with high degrees of unpredictability as we see here.

The waves are something you can never totally master. Right. And so to that extent, I mean, the way that he's describing this here, mortal enemy, your nemesis, like, there's not an explicit mention of fear there, but I think it's undergirding this sense of the existential risk that surfing poses to you in virtue of its dangerousness.

[00:20:23] David: Well, and the hostility of nature, right to like human life and human interests. But I really love that surfing as an activity and as a way of life has this very wide range where it's like. It can be about relinquishing power, but it also can be about like dominating your greatest sphere, which is your fear of death. And so the surfer can go all the way from like hippie character all the way to like macho man as the one who confronts the greatest dangers of all.

You know, like it's, it's a lot of range for the surfer.

[00:20:53] Ellie: Yeah. And speaking of range too, another thing that Finnegan mentions in that same passage is the way that surfing has. Isolating quality to it. So on the one hand, surf culture is very communal. And Finnegan had surf buddies from when he was a young boy onward.

That's like a big theme of this book. There's a deep culture of idioms rules and norms in surf communities. So we have this very communal aspect of it, but at the same time, the actual experience of surfing, and especially when you find yourself in conditions that have become scary is really individual.

And Finnegan says, when the waves got big, there never seemed to be anyone around. So you have this Yeah. Kind of opposition of the communal and the isolating individual aspects of surfing.

[00:21:35] David: Yeah. We need a new romantic image, which is not like the climber at the top of a mountain. We just need a surfer in the middle of the ocean.

But I think this connects to another point that James makes about surfing, which is that if we start paying more attention to surfing, philosophical attention specifically. Surfing might lead us to reconsider not only like our own life projects as individuals, but also to reimagine social issues.

You know, collective problems, political problems. And I think maybe that's connected to this issue of isolation that you're talking about. Because I can imagine that surfing, by pulling us away from the social world and putting us in this isolated or solitary relationship to the waves, creates a bit of a break or creates distance between us and the social world so that we can start

[00:22:25] Ellie: literally going from land to you're out on the water.

[00:22:26] David: Yeah, exactly. It might give us the mental space to start questioning actually life on land. You know, why do we do these things? Why are we committed to these values? Why do we carry out these practices as a matter of habitus? And so it gives us a space for thinking and for questioning.

And I think that's how it can lead us to a kind of political interpretation of surfing. And James himself specifically talks about the politics of work because he advocates a 20 hour work week. He says, you know, like we live in a world where we should be able to just work half or a third of what most of us work.

And that involves, of course, resisting the productivity culture of capitalism as well as the ravaging of nature by capitalist forces. And he kind of traces it all back to this ethos Yeah. Of surfing.

[00:23:19] Ellie: Yeah. As I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about how I, maybe we have like a little subcategory of overthink episodes that I might call gerund episodes.

You, made hanging loose a gerund, like, but we have a few Jaron episodes. We've got like walking, driving, surfing. We've talked about hiking. Maybe we'll do hiking at some point. And then we have like writing, although maybe that's in a slightly different category here, but I think one thing we found in those episodes is that a physical activity actually has like deep social and political implications.

I think our walking episode got into that in really interesting ways. I still, yeah.

[00:23:50] David: And it was very popular.

[00:23:51] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. One of our most popular and still one of my favorite episodes. But I think it nonetheless took me by surprise when I read in James' book just like how political and social he thinks surfing is, and not social in the sense of Yeah. Just like the communal aspect. Yeah. But kind of how resistant it is to our social and political way of being. 'cause I think you rarely hear such explicit social political proposals in books of the type that he's writing, which is a kind of like philosophy for a popular audience type of book.

And I found this really intriguing. So he notes that most surfers have full-time jobs, but it would be a lot more pleasant for them if they could meet their needs with less work so they could have more time for surfing. Hardcore surfers sort of live and work in order to surf, and he thinks that this is because they understand that surfing is basically the best thing that you can do as a human.

But in general, whether or not you're surfing, he thinks our society should support more leisure time, including more leisure time for surfing. But in general that the surfers have a sense that work should just be a means to enjoy our lives. Rather than the end goal of life itself. And, you know, he, he goes into great detail about how we should really be rethinking how we're spending our time. And ideally spending less of it on work, as you mentioned, like supporting a 20 hour work week.

[00:25:16] David: Yeah. Well, and I think, honestly, this is why many of us, even if we entertain a kind of judgey attitude about surfers as like juvenile countercultural people who don't wanna grow up and refuse to contribute to society, I think deep down we envy them.

Because despite what we might think about them as individuals, we recognize that surfers as a whole are kind of walking the walk or like riding the wave. You know, about their political values. And they're trying to align their mode of life at its most fundamental level with the things that they believe in.

And that's something that we all aspire to, but we can't always say we succeed at.

[00:25:57] Ellie: Surfing is often associated with American surf culture and the idea of the surfer bro. But this is only one small part of the story when we're talking about surfing's philosophical significance, and above all its history, it's essential to recognize that indigenous people across the world have been wave riding for thousands of years.

These practices are most associated with Native Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures, but they were also present in indigenous cultures from Peru to Australia.

[00:26:25] David: Yeah, and I think the indigenous roots of what we now call surfing are often forgotten, which is part of the reason why we wanted to do this episode.

And it's really important to recognize that modern surfing is the product of indigenous knowledges that predate colonization. So these are knowledges about how to harvest the right kinds of trees that produce the right kind of wood for floating on water traditions of carving wood, the knowledge about how to ride the surf itself.

And even more broadly, just the general art of seafaring, which has a very, very long history in many, many places. And we find specifically very sophisticated traditions for knowing the ocean and for traveling the ocean in Hawaiian Polynesian, Australian indigenous cultures as well. There is a book by the historians, Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul called The World in the Curl, which is a reference of course to the breaking of a wave over a surfer.

And in it they talk about specifically the significance of surfing for Hawaiians. And they point out that surfing had a social dimension. Of course, it was also used for religious festivals. But one thing that really surprised me about their account was the role of surfing in the expression and consolidation of political power in Hawaiian culture. Because they point out that many Hawaiian chiefs back in the day were expert surfers, right? Like they devoted themselves to surfing. And surfing for them was not just an interest, it was a way of making a public display of their personal strength and also their leadership skills.

So surfing was a kind of proxy for assessing somebody's ability to lead. Their community. And, this is not surprising given that many chiefs were, you know, members of the royal family. And so they had a lot of leisure time and so they were the ones that could devote a lot of time to surfing.

So yeah, they were like the most impressive surfers in the community. And beyond that, whenever the chiefs would go out to serve, they would have these servants who were kind of the original cheerleaders whose job was to stand on land and chant to the honor of the chiefs while they were surfing.

And so surfing did have this kind of ceremonial dimension, where it was about proving the strength of the leaders before the eyes of the community. And I didn't know any of this history before reading about it.

[00:29:04] Ellie: Yeah. And also I think part of what's interesting here is that in spite of the massive role that it played in the consolidation of political power and among chiefs and royalty, it also was something that average community members would take part in as well.

And so surfing what, or what we now call surfing would've been common across, you know, the sort of wide spectrum of the community, including being practiced by women. Women were like, as into surfing as men were.

[00:29:30] David: The practice of surfing has all these meanings, symbolic, social, political gendered, but Europeans had no idea that all of this was happening until the 17 hundreds.

And so there is this very famous historical scene that gets traced back to Captain James Cook coming to Hawaii in the 1770s. So he lands in Oahu in 1778. Then the following year, he comes back a second time. And then when he goes back to Europe, he writes about what he was watching or what he saw in Hawaii, and that was a lot of locals riding waves in all these very complex ways.

And in the travel journals, there is a quote that I wanna share, because it paints the scene of what this European observer sort of sees upon arriving in Hawaii. He writes, the men sometimes 20 or 30, go without the swell of the surf and lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plank about their size and breath.

They keep their legs close on top of it, and their arms are used to guide the plank. They wait the time of the greatest swell that sets on shore and altogether push forward with their arms to keep on its top. It sends them in with a most astonishing velocity, and the great art is to guide the plank so as to always keep it in a proper direction on top of the swell.

If the swell drives them close to the rocks before they are overtaken by the break, they are much praised.

[00:31:11] Ellie: Okay. David, congratulations. You've been out geeked by Captain Cook. Like you might not have sounded super chill mentioning the well-known phrase hanging loose, but captain Cook really outdoes you in terms of just like major uncle vibes here.

[00:31:29] David: I know it took me, it took me so much focus to be able to read the sentence 'cause it's written in such a 1700 style.

[00:31:34] Ellie: It's like with their legs close on the board. Okay. Okay.

[00:31:39] David: And so this account from Captain Cook became hyper influential in Europe. For starters, it just, you know, tapped into all these stereotypes of noble savages living in the tropics.

And so we can think about that, but it also shaped European thinking in really interesting ways. So in their book, the World in the Curl, Westwick and Neushul out that this specific image, like this quote from Captain Cook from the 17 hundreds about Hawaiian surfing led enlightenment thinkers to start giving pleasure a more central role in their accounts of the good life.

So there is like this clear connection between enlightenment thinking, enlightenment philosophy, and surfing in Hawaii.

[00:32:27] Ellie: This is such an interesting claim. You know, that indigenous wave writing managed to influence European thought, even if it's through the colonial gaze and Captain Cook of course's. Not especially exciting style of writing.

And then I wanna move forward a little bit to the late 18 hundreds because that's when surfing was really introduced to European and American society. So in 1885, three Princes of Hawaii rode the waves in Santa Cruz, California. So they came over on a visit. And now Santa Cruz is a worldwide hub for surfing, and that really starts in 1885 when these three Hawaiian princes come over.

And finally, the success of the native Hawaiian Olympic swimmer, Duke Kahanamoku pushed surfing into the international spotlight, giving swimming and surfing exhibitions.

[00:33:16] David: Yeah, we definitely need some lessons before we go out and break into the surf. But because of these developments, captain Cook in the 17 hundreds and then the actual bringing of the practice to Europe and North America in the 18 hundreds, the received wisdom in sort of like traditional accounts of surfing has been that surfing was invented by Hawaiians and then introduced to the rest of the world, especially in the wake of this travel log by Captain Cook.

And that is true, right? So I'm not gonna suggest that that's inaccurate. But one of the things that we have learned, from historians who specialize in the history of surfing is that even though surfing is and should be interpreted through Hawaiian history and culture, there were other precursors to what we now call surfing that emerged independently in other places because there have been wave riding cultures in various parts of the world. You know, you mentioned earlier some other places like Peru, but also West Africa, that's been a place that has been also named as having had its own wave riding culture that we could call surfing.

[00:34:28] Ellie: And in some ways this is surprising given how associated surfing is with Hawaii. And you know, not so much with Peru or West Africa, but on the other hand it's not that surprising that other cultures would've developed similar ways of interacting with the land in devising tools to navigate on water. Right? Like similar boats were created in different parts of the world, in this case, similar boards for gliding on the water.

[00:34:53] David: There's a book that talks about this specifically in connection to West Africa that I want to mention, and that is a 2018 book, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora by the historian Kevin Dawson. And he talks about how the earliest written reports of surfing in West Africa actually predate the account of Captain Cook by a hundred years.

So the accounts of surfing in West Africa go all the way back to the 16 hundreds, specifically the 1640s. And he notes that when you look at this tradition, people in West Africa would make these boards that were almost like somewhere between a surfboard and a flat canoe that they would use primarily for fishing.

And in order to understand the significance of these tools, you have to keep in mind that in West Africa, in order to get to the place where there are fish, where you can like extract fish from the ocean, you have to cross the surf. Right. Like the place where the waves are breaking. And so people had to develop knowledge and talent for riding the waves in order to be able to fish.

And so there is this tradition. That if that's not surfing, then you know what do we mean by surfing? And so he notes that there is this African knowledge of the water that is and should be part of our official histori-geographies of surfing.

[00:36:21] Ellie: Yeah. That's fascinating. And I think that also pushes against the, unfortunately still live stereotype today in the US that like black people are either afraid of water or like don't swim, which has a racist history really comes from black people being displaced from pools and beaches in the early 20th century. And so this also seems like in addition to being intrinsically interesting, I think from a sociopolitical perspective in the us, like it also helps to push against stereotypes that are only rooted in our racist history without people realizing it.

[00:36:53] David: No, for sure. And he talks about how, of course with the transatlantic slave trade people who were enslaved and were brought over to the new continent, they brought with them these traditions and ways of knowing the water. And in fact, they used them in places like the US and the Caribbean to create a culture and to connect with one another.

And so sometimes they did a lot to keep those traditions alive, but then also they relied on those traditions to themselves lead better lives. To like survive under these racist conditions of the institution of slavery. And he gives these really fascinating, I had no idea about this examples of enslaved people literally surfing their way to freedom.

Especially in the Caribbean, where they would like make a canoe slash surfboard and they would go from one place to another one in search of freedom. So he talks about how there were people who served from the US to the British Virgin Islands, from there to Puerto Rico between Jamaica and Cuba, between Florida and The Bahamas.

And they even had a name for these individuals. They were called Maritime maroons. Like people who gain freedom through water.

[00:38:08] Ellie: Oh my God. If only Maritime Maroons had been like, okay, I feel like that's the name of an early two thousands indie band who's just like taking, you know, it's like the decemberists, the Beirut, maritime Maroons.

Thank God like a group of white dudes didn't discover that in the early two thousands. That is a fantastic name for a band and also just a cool phrase. And you know, in our episode on Black Women's Magic, recently we talked a bit about African water cultures and how those then manifest in the US in slavery. And we also mentioned the Underground Railroad there. When enslaved people were escaping plantations, they would often go underwater because then their sense couldn't be tracked by dogs. And so they're encouraged to like lean into their skills as swimmers and interpreters of bodies in order to escape the slaves.

[00:38:56] David: There's a film also, that I ran into over the course of doing research that traces all of this history that we're mentioning. The origins in West Africa, the arrival of these wave riding ways of knowledge into the US and the Caribbean. Then the subsequent incorporation into black communities here and then how that led to this kind of racist like way of thinking about black people's relationship to the water and the film is called Wade in the Water by David Mesfin. And it talks about

[00:39:29] Ellie: a really classic spiritual song.

[00:39:31] David: Yeah, exactly. And it is about the black politics of surfing and he himself is a surfer and it's this reflection on history, but also on his own relationship of having come to the US as a teenager, I believe, from Africa, landing in California and then finding. This resonance between his African roots and this practice of surfing in California. Even though in California there is this stereotype of the white surfer dude. And the exclusion of black people from the beach.

[00:40:04] Ellie: And one of the things that I would've loved to hear a lot more about in the James book is these historical and global dimensions of surfing 'cause he really doesn't focus on that at all. But I think if we put some of what we've just been saying about the history in dialogue with that book, we get a picture of just how James' idea that surfing is, the zenith of human activity isn't just like random. I think if surfers are listening to this episode, they probably won't think it's random.

They'll be like, yeah, no, this is like the best thing ever.

[00:40:34] David: What we've been telling you.

[00:40:35] Ellie: And I think that's James's point here. Right. But I think if you're not a surfer, it can be easy to ask. Well, why this specific activity? Or even some consider a sport. We'll come back to that later.

And it's clear that what we now call surfing has had just like a giant role to play in many cultures over the course of history. And so I wonder, David, if you think that means that people have been on to the sort of expression of freedom, this like adaptive attunement that James talks about over the course of history in ways that maybe have gone unrecognized through the practice of surfing.

[00:41:13] David: Yeah. I would say yes, because in the historical research that I did, which included West Africa, also Hawaii and Peru, in no place was surfing just a sport or just an activity of leisure. It always had these other dimensions, spiritual, political, economic.

And so it's no surprise that it would have, or that it would be a site for the pursuit of freedom, for the pursuit of meaning and for the like. For the good life more generally in all of these places.

[00:41:49] Ellie: Alright, David, let's talk surfer stereotypes. You mentioned the weed smoking laid back, bro. We said we'd return, we're returning. When you picture the stereotypical surfer, what do you picture?

[00:42:04] David: Honestly, I picture you as a man at the beach with abs.

[00:42:12] Ellie: Dude, when Blue Crush came out, my little sister, we were like kids when the movie came out, but my little sister like really looks like Kate Bosworth the main character of that movie. And so everyone was like, oh, you're so Kate Bosworth and Blue Crush to her, not to me. I was like way too nerdy for that. I mean, I will say growing up in Southern California, even though we weren't really surfing the, the nineties, were a major moment in surf culture.

Thanks in part to Blue Crush, but also things like Rip Girls, amazing Disney Channel original movie,

[00:42:39] David: oh, I don't know that one.

[00:42:40] Ellie: Johnny Tsunami. We gotta have a watch play. Johnny Tsunami, I think that was also a Disney Channel original movie that was like so popular among kids at the time. I'm flattered that you think that I would look like a stereotypical surfer 'cause they do have the reputation of being hot. But I'm not flattered that you don't think I have abs.

[00:43:01] David: Yeah. I don't know if you do or if you don't have ab That's true. I'm sorry for having made a judgment about your body.

[00:43:05] Ellie: I don't, I don't really, although I have been working out more recently. But that is story for another time

[00:43:10] David: for our working out episode. Coming next.

[00:43:13] Ellie: Well, dude, we already did our exercise after episode.

[00:43:15] David: Oh yeah, we did. We did. Okay. No, but back to the stereotype. Very quickly.

[00:43:18] Ellie: Wait, can you tell me, so when you say me, but as a man with abs, can you elaborate on that?

[00:43:23] David: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day. The surfer is a surfer, bro, so it's white male, athletic kind of young usually and muscular. That's for me the stereotype.

[00:43:38] Ellie: But the only things that pertain to me from that are white and kind of young.

[00:43:41] David: And blonde.

[00:43:42] Ellie: Okay. Blonde. Yeah. I feel like that's the operative.

[00:43:44] David: Yeah. With like disheveled hair. Because they just came out of the water.

[00:43:51] Ellie: Disheveled hair. Okay.

[00:43:52] David: Have you ever seen a surfer with like a perfectly coif hairdo? No.

[00:43:56] Ellie: No, no, no, no. You're totally right. I'm just like laughing because you said it looks exactly like me, which means that you think I have disheveled hair.

I do naturally have kind of like a be the beach wave. I did smooth my hair a bit today, so maybe I'm a little bit less surfer today. But yeah, no, I think that the hair is an essential part of it.

[00:44:15] David: Yeah. I can't see the abs, but I can't see the hair. I said, I said what I said.

[00:44:20] Ellie: Okay. Well, given that you said that, it kind of looks like me, this next part should be interesting because I wanna tell you about the work of the indigenous Australian scholar, Aileen Moreton Robinson. Because she has a really interesting analysis of the stereotypical surf bro, especially when it comes to, you know, their aesthetic, which is as you described, and she argues that it's not a coincidence that the surfer is often represented by an image of white masculinity.

So beaches are seen as iconic symbols of leisure and sport. But Moreton Robinson reminds us that their first and foremost important places for many indigenous coastal peoples sovereign territories. And they have been for millennia. And she argues that we have to think about how indigenous presence is erased and how surfing and beach culture participates in this erasure.

The idea that like the stereotypical surfer looks like me, but like a man with abs is tied to indigenous erasure.

[00:45:21] David: Okay, so I do definitely wanna hear more about this because it brings us directly into the present. And you know, if you think about indigenous relationships to the land, and especially the indigenous struggle for sovereignty over the land as a thing of the past, then yeah, you might like not flinch at the fact that the beach is constructed as a white male space.

But when you think about the fact that this is an ongoing struggle, then surfing and the, maybe we can say the whitewashing of the beach as a space then takes one on completely different meaning. Right. Because indigenous sovereignty is not, in fact a thing of the past. A lot of indigenous communities maintain and affirm an important relationship to the land that can be also the beach.

And so I want to hear more about how this construction happens in the present, because it means that the place where surfing happens, the beach is now. Being contested here. From a , settler, colonial perspective.

[00:46:20] Ellie: Yeah. And essentially, Moreton Robinson argues that the white male body has a performative function in colonization.

And so this is not performative in the sense of just performance or artifice, but in the technical sense of performative. It produces a new state of things. Right? So to say that the white male body has a performative functioning colonization means that it has like actually a quite significant role in colonization.

So possession and ownership of land can be pretty abstract things in legal terms, they're determined by treaties and titles and deeds. But in colonial context, the document doesn't come first. The story of Cook is a great example of this, of how a white male body has to come and assert ownership violently or through other coercive means.

Because Cook wasn't just writing cute little narratives of the people he saw surfing.

[00:47:14] David: He was a captain.

[00:47:15] Ellie: He was coming in guns blazing. Yeah, and colonizing Hawaii. And even though most beaches are now privately owned or owned by the state, white bodies still perform the same function of asserting possession even in the absence of explicit violence.

You really see this in beaches in California where there's, like, recently a friend of mine was like, oh, why don't we, like, why haven't we really gone to that beach? I've never heard of that beach before. And I was like, Ugh that's because that's like the beach where the people of color who live inland go.

And so there like, there's a really weird kind of, and, and she had heard, she was like, yeah, I've never heard of this beach. And I was like. Yeah, no, it's literally because there's this weird sort of segregation that happens at California beaches. So, anyway, that's like perhaps the story for another time.

But Moreton Robinson argues that the white male body performs the possession of indigenous land by the colonial state through asserting ownership. And you know, I think that the flip side of this is the California beaches, like Huntington Beach is a great example of this. Some of the best waves in southern California, the most conservative coastal town in California as well.

And like an extraordinarily white space.

[00:48:20] David: Yeah. And I think it's important how this happens through the assertion of play. Like this is our playground, this is our place for leisure, for white communities. And this is not directly related to surfing, but it is connected to white ownership of beach fronts essentially.

You know, in Mexico growing up, I always knew that Mexico had passed a law to prevent white people from owning beach front property because there is a long history in the 20th century of Americans and Canadians coming down and just buying up all of the beach land or all the beach property, privatizing it, closing it up with fences, turning it into privatized place spaces. And then Mexicans didn't have access to it. And so nowadays you can't really buy beachfront property if you're not a Mexican national, and I think it, it connects to this as well.

[00:49:07] Ellie: Wow. I was in Cabo recently and I have,

[00:49:10] David: buying property.

[00:49:10] Ellie: I'm curious- girl, no. But yeah. I'm interested in, yeah. Now I wanna look into that further.

[00:49:18] David: Yeah. But I mean, it, it also is significant that the places that we associate with surfing Hawaii, California, Australia, have these long histories of settler colonial power.

[00:49:28] Ellie: Exactly. Exactly. She makes this really interesting point about how surfing itself changed when it was appropriated by white settlers.

The language used to describe surfing transformed to reflect this logic of possession. So surfers began to be described as conquering or attacking waves rather than flowing with 'em.

[00:49:48] David: Oh, whoa, the damn white people dominating nature out here through play and leisure.

[00:49:56] Ellie: To James' credit, he talks about flow, not about conquering or attacking.

[00:50:00] David: Yeah, so I think this is a really fascinating history. Thanks for talking about this, because it highlights one of the ways in which surfing is institutionalized. It's institutionalized as a colonial project. I also wanna bring up, and here I'm gonna pivot. It's a hard pivot, another way in which surfing has been institutionalized and how that has created a lot of controversy, within the surfing community, and that is through its sportification, through it becoming like an official sport.

Because that has not been an easy road for surfing. So at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, the governing body for the Olympics voted to make surfing officially an Olympic sport. And so that meant that at the next Olympics it was going to be included. But then there was you know, the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Then they were postponed because of COVID to 2021. But that was the first time that surfing then made its appearance on a national stage already with the stamp of sportification. And I think that we also can think about the politics of surfing through that form of institutionalizing maneuver.

I do wanna think about this because the olympification of surfing was controversial and it was controversial for two very different reasons, and in the eyes of two very different communities. So it was controversial for more traditional athletes who were like, oh, surfing is not really a sport. It doesn't meet the conditions for athleticism that we want a sport of an Olympic stature to meet.

But it was also really controversial among surfers themselves who worry that the institute, the transformation of surfing into a sport with rules and regulations and judges would deform and denature surfing itself. Because at its core, surfing is not meant to be competitive. Right? So even when you think about really advanced surfers who have been doing it for a long time, there might be other surfers around, well,

[00:52:10] Ellie: or there might be like cheerleaders on the shore if you're a chief.

[00:52:13] David: Yeah. If you're a chief, but you're not really competing with them. Right. It's not like you're looking, it's like I'm gonna go faster, or like, I'm gonna like ride more really. Right. Like you might share the experience with them, but there is no direct one-to-one competitive relationship.

[00:52:29] Ellie: Okay. See, I'm feeling like, oh no, there absolutely is. But maybe that's because I've been like filled by the sportification of it where you can get scores. In Blue Crush, for instance, you can get different scores for your way riding. But yeah, that's like, yeah,

[00:52:41] David: but that's because it's already like treated as a sport. It's competition.

[00:52:44] Ellie: Right. I know. So I think that's where skepticism is coming from, is the fact that I'm just like used to thinking about it as a sport.

[00:52:48] David: No, no. And so the worry there is that it takes away the counter-cultural ethos of the activity.

[00:52:54] Ellie: With sportification also comes a host of other things that might be antithetical to this, like countercultural identity of surfing. And I'm thinking here about capitalism for instance, the kind of professionalism and careerism that surfers have to have.

The fact that they're then reliant on things like sponsorships and branding. They have to do a lot of competitions in order to qualify, which becomes like a form of athletic tourism. I think contravene the anti-capitalist tendencies of surfing, which is like. Not to individually judge any of these surfers for getting sponsorships and branding.

They're like incredible. Yeah. We in incredible athletes. But at the same time, I think that speaks to the way that the sportification sort of is in tension with the way of life.

[00:53:45] David: Well, and in connection to sports, even the separation by gender of these new athletes, it was a source of debate because as you mentioned with Hawaii, men and women were surfing And so in the wild also, like quote unquote in the wild, like in these beaches with long settler colonial histories. It's not as if like surfing communities separate themselves by gender. That is an artifice of the sportification of surfing. And so it raises the question of what is surfing at its most basic level, right? Is it a spiritual activity? Is it a meditative practice? Is it a sport and that last question of whether or not it's a sport, really depends. And this is something that Daniel Brennan talks about in his book philosophy, I'm sorry, Surfing and the Philosophy of Sport

He goes into really interesting detail about this question of whether it can or cannot be sportified. So Brendan points out that in order for something to count as a sport, what you really need is a standard for assessing who wins. You need to have that criterion for winning and losing, and there are two ways in which you can generate that criterion.

So one of them is just to focus on a superlative understanding of competition. Who is the fastest. Who scored the most points, who lifted the most weight? And so it's just about who did the most of a certain thing or reached a higher level, and then that's the person who wins. That's the standard that we use in most sports, the superlative, but not all sports actually follow that criterion for competitiveness.

There are some sports where it's not about the most, it's actually comparing. Two competitors to a standard that becomes the baseline or the ideal for judging their performances. So think about gymnastics, right? You don't just win because you jumped higher necessarily. You win if your performance best matches the ideal execution of that skill.

And so you're being judged not just in comparison to your opponent, but in relation to an ideal. And that ideal must be stable and not change. Now Brennan points out that the problem with surfing is that it doesn't fit under either of these conditions for being a sport, right?

Like you don't win as a surfer just because like you went faster on the water. It's not a race and you don't win just because like you stayed on the surfboard longer. Also, the problem with the second condition is that in surfing, you actually don't have an ideal to use as a measuring tool because by definition, surfing happens in the water and the water is highly unstable.So every ride is fundamentally different. There's no standard.

[00:56:46] Ellie: Okay. 'cause at first I was inclined to say, no, no, no. We would be able to compare it to an ideal, because I'm thinking about, oh my God, we talked about our fear of surfing. Earlier I watched the movie, or sorry, the TV show, a hundred foot wave a few years ago.

My palms were sweating that entire time. And so I was thinking, okay, well, you know, these giant waves in Portugal, the ability to ride those seems like it really would be the ideal of surfing. But even if we did come up with, okay, that is the hardest wave to surf where this is the hardest maneuver to make.

Yeah. Now I'm realizing, well, you wouldn't be able to reproduce those conditions. Exactly. Unlike in the gymnastics space where you can have the, you can have reproducible conditions, you can have the exact same conditions for different gymnasts, and so it's unfair in the case of surfing, because it's happening on the backdrop of these unstable conditions to compare people. You're against that ideal.

[00:57:42] David: Yeah. So you're always comparing apples and oranges. No matter what you do, because if you just judge by the wave, then what? Whoever happens by luck to get the better wave or the bigger wave is gonna win. Then that's not athletic at all. It's just random luck.

Yeah. Or even the performances themselves, it's really hard to know which one was better. Because the background conditions are different. It would be like judging two gymnast floor events when the floor is lava and it's completely chaotic and moving and you're like, I don't know who was better because the backdrop was not stable. And that has to do with the material conditions under which surfing happens, which we talked about earlier.

[00:58:24] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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[00:58:47] Ellie: We'd like to thank our student employees, Aaron Morgan, Kristen Taylor, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene, and Yuhang Xie, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

[00:58:56] David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.