in the United States, “extreme sports,” as promoted in ESPN’s X Games.13 Windsurfer and sports scholar Belinda Wheaton prefers the term lifestyle sport because in her ethnographic research she found that this is the term that participants themselves used and that they actively “sought a lifestyle that was distinctive, often alternative, and that gave them a particular and exclusive social identity.”14 My ethnographic work with surfers agrees with Wheaton’s—play (playing music, sports play, and so forth) and lifestyle choices are ultimately about core issues of identity. For example, surfing musician Brandon Boyd of the band Incubus does not like to consider surfing a sport but rather a lifestyle.15 Similar debates about whether surfing is a sport or an art have been going on since at least the 1950s.
To take on a surfing lifestyle is a voluntary proposition; it is to enter an affinity group. Affinity groups form around volunteer participation in cultural practices rather than through the genetic, heritage, or location ties (sometimes called “involuntary affiliations”) that drive most discourses on ethnicity. In some cases, affinity groups may become ethnicities over time; for example, certain religious groups tend toward this progression. Other affinity groups briefly burn brightly and then disappear or move into a subcultural scene. Individuals may move into affinity groups at will, perhaps lingering for some time and then moving away, reframing their identity with other affinity groups, or even as former members of an earlier group: “I used to be a surfer . . .” Surfing is demanding, however, in that a reasonably high level of fitness must be maintained if one is to participate. As Wheaton notes, with most lifestyle sports active participation is key. Still, even deep involvement in a sport may be just a part of any individual’s multiple identities. This is an important quality of what I am calling affinity groups. An individual may move in and out of several affinity groups, even daily. For example, seeking job security, I hid my identity as a surfer from my colleagues in the music department during my first years as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but then would surreptitiously shift into my role as a surfer as I walked the few hundred feet from my office to Campus Point to go surfing. As we all do in our everyday lives, I performed different versions of myself—or foregrounded certain identities—depending on the demands of the moment.16
There are three primary characteristics of affinity groups as I am using the term. First, a cultural practice draws the group together: a particular type of musical practice, a penchant for dog shows, a love of gardening, or a singular dedication to participating in a sport. Second, the most salient feature of an affinity group is that the individuals in the group are connected by desire—not by obligation born of family ties, religion, place of origin, shared history, or anything else. Yet more often than not such groups invent histories, origin myths, family ties, and even a sense of spiritual connection that approaches religion. Third, since participation is driven by desire, it is also voluntary and often temporary, as already noted: members may leave the group at some stage, or move in and out of the group. One can imagine cases where desire leads to voluntary participation that then becomes involuntary through the compulsion of addiction or even economic necessity. Thus even affinity must be seen as a sliding, fluid notion, perhaps a point on a continuum somewhere between attraction and obligation or addiction.
THE FEELING OF SURFING: ONLY A SURFER KNOWS
It is an article of faith among many surfers that only a surfer knows the feeling of, well, surfing. The phrase “only a surfer knows the feeling” has been used as a successful advertisement slogan by the Billabong surfwear company, and is uttered by surfers regularly (much to the delight of Billabong; see fig. 1).17 Both my conversations with surfers and items written by surfers reveal that the meaning of the phrase goes beyond the tautology that only surfers know what it feels like to surf. Surfers describe feelings of euphoria from surfing, and this feeling is often spoken of in mystical terms: they speak of its healing power, and some find surfing spiritually redemptive. Steven Kotler takes a long look at the feelings of euphoria and spiritual awareness that surfing generates in his book West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief.18 He discovered that similar feelings of euphoria and spiritual awareness were generated by a range of extreme experiences, not just by surfing, but he starts and ends with surfing, as I do here.
The feeling of surfing is summarized by some surfers with two related but distinct terms: stoke and flow. According to Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, the term stoke comes to English from the seventeenth-century Dutch word stok, meaning to rearrange logs on a fire or add fuel to increase the heat. Surfers adopted the term in California in the 1950s. As its derivation suggests, it means to be fired up, excited, happy, full of passion. As a description of emotional experience, stoke is complemented by another term, flow, suggesting an obvious kinesthetic play of moving bodies—the movement of water and the movement of the surfer through or over water. But flow goes beyond the obvious and into the realm of optimal experience, as theorized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.19 As Csikszentmihalyi explains, the mental state of flow is achieved through intense focus and concentration so that distractions disappear and one feels in harmony with one’s surroundings and oneself. One can experience flow when doing any number of things (including the antithesis of surfing for most surfers: working). However, I suggest that three definitive qualities of surfing create flow, and the interrelated feelings of stoke. These qualities help explain why so many surfers try to express or even replicate that surfing feeling (emotional and embodied) with music. These qualities are risk-taking, waiting, and submission.
The first definitive quality of surfing is risk-taking. The cultural act of surfing takes place in the highly volatile liminal zone between open ocean and dry land (see fig. 2). One rides a wave along a thin line of transition between a harmless swell and the dangerous impact zone of a crashing wave; the zone of bliss is balanced between safety and despair. In that zone, one generally does not make music; even conversation is minimal. Instead, it is a place of waiting and watching for the choice swell that will become the crashing wave of a surfer’s desire. Once a surfer has caught the wave and is up and riding it, she or he often compounds the risks. Experience-enhancing maneuvers, such as seeking speed in the steepest sections of a breaking wave, or even stalling to place oneself in the volatile barrel of a wave that pitches its breaking lip out over the surfer, puts the surfer at risk of a violent wipeout. It is much safer, if less exhilarating, to ride well ahead of the breaking whitewater, and to kick-out (exit) the wave early. And many surfers seek ever-larger waves that occasionally prove deadly for even the most experienced.
FIGURE 2. The liminal zone of surfing. Photograph by Chris Burkard (burkardphoto.com).
Waiting is a second quality that defines surfing, and perhaps surfers. Surfers must wait for swells, preferably generated several thousands of miles away so that the strong winds that created them are not present when the waves reach the surfers’ beach. No beach offers waves on demand. In his book Dancing the Wave, Jean-Étienne Poirier wrote that “[t]he sea has no schedule; it must be taken when it offers itself. It has its moods, and it is the surfer who must yield and accommodate them.”20 Thus, like a coy lover, the sea plays with its surfer courtiers, withholding favors or offering them at awkward times that demand sacrifice. No wonder some surfers will cancel appointments, miss work, and skip classes when the waves are good—a tendency celebrated in Holland-based surfing brand Protest’s “Drop-It-All” ad campaign (fig. 3). In my own experience, surfers struggle to balance school, jobs, relationships, families, and domestic duties with their love for the fickle ocean. Still, there is some truth in the stereotypes of surfers who are unreliable when the waves are good. The unpredictability of surfable waves does distinguish surfing from many other sports where one might schedule an outing unless the unpredictable happens (we will ride bikes Friday afternoon, unless it rains . . . ). Instead, the surfer waits for the unpredictable, the unusual—for most places—weather conditions that produce good waves.21 The surfer waits.
When the waves are good, the surfer waits
