The readings of week 2 made clear to me that when you take a look at the history of surfing, it is not just sports and fun, but it's also a history of racial struggles, cultural identity, and personal fate.
The article "The Transformation of Tom Stone" tells the story of a man, who is passionate about the culture of his ancestors and who is trying to keep this culture alive. He is struggling in his youth, getting into conflict with the law and hanging out with criminals and drug addicts. This depiction of a young rebel, paints a picture of the surfing scene as outlaws, as a counterculture movement gone bad. (It somehow reminded me of the very beginning of the biker scene, as they are for example described in the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, slowly transforming from counterculture to a "bad boy image" and later becoming full time criminals.) But the story also shows how Tom Stone sees surfing as a remedy to all the bad things he has done in his life. To go surfing for him is a connection to his ancestors and his native culture that has suffered under segregation in Hawaii. He embraces to study the old methods of his relatives and wants to establish them as an academic discipline to inform a broader community of the origin of the surf culture and the Hawaiian culture as well.
The chapter from "Waves of Resistance" on the other hand shows how problematic the situation in Hawaii was and how the cultural, spiritual practice of surfing got affected by racial segregation. I even get the notion of some kind of white cultural imperialism that happened in the early 20th century towards the Hawaiian surf culture. Segregated surf clubs were being founded and white men claimed they had perfected the "primitive" methods of the traditional Hawaiian sport. The text shows how the culture is basically stolen away from the native population and how this furthermore supported racial tensions. Also very interesting in this case is the gender issue: before surfing became a sport widely known by white people it was equally practiced by men and women (women might even have surfed more frequently then men). But in the early 20th century surfing was considered to be "not ladylike" and therefore women were encouraged not to engage in its practice.
Generally speaking the readings showed that surfing contains a lot of spiritual, cultural, and racial issues as well as gender problems. I think it is really interesting to learn about the history of a sport that is so deeply rooted in a certain culture and the tensions that derive from that.
Dennis, I think you have a great point about the white imperialism and surfing. Having stated that they were the ones who "perfected" the "primitive" native sport, the whites retrospectively look very slanderous. I strongly dislike the fact that such tension was brought on by the whites basically trying to take ownership of the surfing sport.
ReplyDeleteDennis -
ReplyDeletegroße Einblicke! You've got an excellent grasp of the various facets and tensions at play here and I look forward to your thoughts when we will focus on localism in our future readings. I really appreciate your connection to Hunter S. Thompson and the Hell's Angels as well - one of my primary positions concerning surf culture is that it's a reimagining of the old west mythos of mastering nature and incessant exploration. The two figures that I believe took the mantle of the cowboy in the American imaginary are the surfer (it is visually explicit in John Van Hammersveld's poster of "The Endless Summer") and the biker (there is a scene in "Easy Rider" where they are fixing their bikes in a barn which visually aligns the motorcycle as usurping the place that the horse once held on the frontier). Excellent readings - keep it up!