STOKED TRUTHS
Joy, absurdity, and belonging in ethnographic ‘writing-up’
"Surfing, alone among sports, generates laughter at its very suggestion, because it turns not a skill into an art, but
an inexplicable and useless urge into a vital way of life."
Matt Warshaw
INTRODUCTION
“You know that video interview, funny surfer dude?”
“… (Laughs) oh man, absolute classic. ‘WAPPAH!’…That guy was so high.”
“Do you think though? Think they did some follow up with him somewhere I saw, and he actually wasn’t.”
“Nah that can’t be for real. Just smokin’ on some tasty slabs then...? Best video though...”
Logan feeling the joy // Porthcawl, Wales // December 2021
“I mean, think about it, like the way we sound to normal people after a hefty session – as in, obviously it’s extreme
but it’s like that no?”
“We sound high?”
“(Laughs) Or just nuts? A little atleast. Man! I mean… if you actually get into it it’s f**king weird. You’re like
hey Nature, I’ve got this little flat stick here, ‘I’m gonna ride you!’. And then mostly Nature’s like, ‘No you’re not’
(laughs). And you just get wiped out so bad. But the one time it works, it works… (trails off). Like almost flying.
And then it’s like, all you can think about. But… such a weird thing.”
Logan and Charlie // Porthcawl, Wales // December 2021
The wind catches the tops of the waves and throws spray spinning off into the air,
chilled and thick with salt. We’re watching, waiting for the third in each set – neater and
larger than the rest. The first two roll in and we adjust our hoods, bracing ourselves for
the inevitable icy slap around the face and nose-full of freezing saltwater. I look down the
break. A line of black figures against a peach sky, silently gazing outward, standing in the
whitewash, and fading into the haze of spray hanging in the air. Occasionally there’s a
glance towards a neighbour, half grim commiseration, half elation: a hybrid emotion we
both know we share.
The outlines resemble Alberto Giacometti’s L'Homme qui marche I: a surrealist
sculpture of a man, mid-stride, body braced for movement and arms at his side. He
appears distant and weightless, the equilibrium of his stride representative of what
Giacometti termed “man’s own life force”. What was it that brought us here, each
solitary dark figure braving an onslaught of wind and water just to chase that fleeting
high, that embodied life force? And what brought us here together? Each in pursuit of their
own wave, yet also seeking to share something intangible with others: an emic
understanding and experience of joy – in short, we came to be with other people who
just know.
It was that question, why we were here, that summarized the initial goal of my
project. Why were some people so drawn to surfing, particularly along the cold Welsh
coastline during winter? How might they describe their experiences in the water and in
the surfing community? And what was it that kept them coming back - even when doing
so involved facing freezing temperatures, fearsome winds, and bitterly cold columns of
saltwater crashing onto you as you stood facing out, alert, scanning, hoping for that
perfect wave?
I intended, using this miniature enquiry as a launchpad, alongside concepts raised
in Kirin Narayan’s How Native is a “Native” Anthropologist (1993), to examine
methodological questions surrounding ethnographic writing from a position of
belonging. Narayan explores complex facets of her own identity, and how various
elements of it are foregrounded or backgrounded in different spheres of ethnographic
work. In my case, as a local surfer myself, I applied the concept of being a ‘native’ to the
surfing community – I was an insider and writing from that position would have varied
implications.
METHOD
So here I sat, next to my participants, huddled around a table in Rest Bay Café in
Porthcawl, Wales, all of us clutching our hot coffees as if our lives depended on them to
sustain us against the cold. I had spent the morning ‘participant observing’ a group of
surfers I was familiar with – or, more plainly, I’d gone surfing with friends and called it
research. I intended to gather my data through participant observation alongside a few
semi-structured interviews discussing the kinds of questions previously outlined.
Quickly however I realized that trying to contrive a delineated interview with a
participant would be a mistake. My presence there as an ‘ethnographer’ was already the
source of incredulity and amusement. Firstly, I was already known to my participants as
a friend or co-worker. My sudden adoption of a ‘researcher’ role provoked generally
bemused responses. Additionally, the idea that I could be engaging in any degree of
academic analysis of surfing, surf culture, and even more inexplicably, them (my
participants) caused confusion: surfing is not typically viewed as standard academic
fodder. Further reflections on this will be explored below - I refer to this now to clarify
my choice to change method: rather than forcing an interview that would likely feel
artificial, I decided instead to use the group conservation as a form of unstructured
interview with multiple participants, posing an initial question and observing the
discussion developing fluidly from there. My first lesson, then: listen to what the field is
telling you and be prepared to adjust course.
BELONGING
In Writing Culture, James Clifford refers to a work by Richard Price (1983), First
Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, documenting the author’s fieldwork
among the Saramakas of Suriname. Featuring a Saramaka folktale and the mode(s) of
communication of “First-Time” knowledge – a process characterized by complex
techniques of revelation, then secrecy – Price comments that “knowledge is power, and
that one must never reveal all of what one knows” (Price 1983: 14). Clifford points out
that deliberate processes of concealment, both within a group and without, play social
functions in limiting access to certain knowledge(s), where this is perceived appropriate
(Clifford and Marcus ed. 1986, 7).
“I feel like you can’t know and you shouldn’t know like, you can’t take a book out on it right? You can chat about it
to, like, a normal person but there’s no clue there – which is cool because they haven’t done it. Which means I can
talk to you and people who surf and I have a friendship based on something because of that, you know.”
“Yeah I mean, similar to kinda, if you surfed Nazare you earned the right to get what that feels like. But all these
punters will watch the videos on Insta and like, read it on Carve and everything and it’s cool that there’s that
interest but… Like none of us are gonna be doing that either! Those guys up there are on another level. There’s all
these levels… ”
“… like ‘what’s surf culture?’ (Laughs) I don’t know man, come surf. That’s surf culture.”
Harry and Logan // Porthcawl, Wales // December 2021
Whilst I neglected to force elaboration here, my understanding of Logan’s use of the
term ‘levels’ referenced a similar exclusionary attitude to knowledge, and knowing –
relevant both to those within the ‘surfing community’ and outside of it. Essentially, the
fact that you can’t know something until you’ve earned it with experience was a
desirable thing, and access to different knowledges were privileged and expressed in
stratified levels of belonging to that community.
My position of belonging, albeit on a ‘low level’ as a casual surfer, raised issues
regarding my access to, and writing about, such knowledge. Does writing about things I
know as an ‘insider anthropologist’ undermine community integrity where knowledge,
and sharing knowledge, is privileged? Belonging to a community presents a dilemma of
loyalty in this respect: on the one hand, as student and aspiring anthropologist, I am
committed to the virtues of knowledge exchange and articulating aspects of human lives
which further academic explorations within anthropology. On the other, could I write
too much – trafficking shared knowledges into academic commodities? In her article on
ethnographic refusal, Audra Simpson grappled with similar questions in her fieldwork as
a ‘native anthropologist’ with the Mohawks of Kahnawake. Not all silences, she writes,
are passive omissions: ‘refusal’ can be an active practice, claiming sovereignty over
collective community knowledge and discourse (Simpson 2007: 72-78). Retaining
knowledge may serve the function of retaining community identity, essentially “we know
something you don’t because of who we are, and that also makes us who we are”.
‘Other’ is a dirty word in anthropology. As students we are taught repeatedly
about the ‘anthropological other’ and ‘othering’. The word is suggestive of a fraught
disciplinary wrestling of a colonizing, orientalising past - conjuring images of the
keyhole-peeping white male anthropologist trafficking in the difference and exoticism of
far-off peoples, all recorded in ‘scientific’ fieldnotes. As a first-time fieldworker I am
terrified of making Other - ‘studying’ the subjects of my research as objects of difference
and writing conceptual lines around people where there are in fact none.
And yet one of my participants had now twice explicitly used the signifier “normal
people” to refer to those outside of the surfing community. United by this shared
belonging, my participants collectively juxtaposed our group identity with that of those
outside, making ourselves Other rather than them, deemed “normal”. We were the
abnormal ones, and I was included in that ‘we’. This was a striking dynamic, as it
reversed the conventional ethnographic binary of Self/Other on its head. I was cast in a
role as a translator, writing about ‘our people’ for the “normal people” to understand.
Narayan, too, reflects upon this role as a “culture broker” (Narayan 1993: 674), and the
active role one’s participants play in foregrounding certain facets of your (the
ethnographer) identity depending on their perceptions of you and your role.
ABSURDITY
“(Laughs), Logan man, bet you didn’t think this would ever be happening! Hallowed halls mate.”
“You’re like one of those bloody science experiment monkeys mate! All the Oxford geeks pokin’ and prodding.”
“F**k sake… not just me hey it’s everyone! You gonna write about how much of a tool he is though? (Gestures to
Charlie) Did you see ‘im on that second last set?! Absolutely scorpioned it, and his arms were all over the place like
this! (Imitates Charlie, flailing his arms in the air) …that’s proper Kook Slams material man (laughs)…
(Turns to address me) … yeah Rosie I’m not gonna lie, it’s not exactly the WSL feature I was hoping for.
(Winks) Nah I’ll take it, I’ll take it!”
Logan and Jazz // Porthcawl, Wales // December 2021
In Writing Culture, Mary Louise Pratt refers to the issue of the ‘sheer
inexplicability of the ethnographer’s presence from the standpoint of the other’ The
ambiguity of this resultant relationship between the researcher and the studied is, she
claims, ‘one of the great silences in the midst of ethnographic description itself’ (Pratt, in
Clifford and Marcus ed. 1986: 42). Often this ambiguity becomes densely integrated into
the structuring of power relations between the two parties, notably when involving an
ethnographer from the Global North, researching a community from the Global South.
That ‘studying’ itself can render subjects almost like museum objects, akin to static
exhibits of ‘culture’ standing for their portraits.
Even in a setting where a colonially suggestive, exoticizing power dynamic was
absent, my participants still found my presence absurd – essentially, no one readily views
themselves as a cultural ‘object’ ripe for study. The incredulity associated with my
position thus made certain adjustments necessary: as detailed above, I deemed it more
appropriate to ‘de-formalize’ my previously intended interview process, and shift
techniques instead to a group conversation in which my participants largely talked to
each other, rather than to me directly.
The notion of absurdity played another role – in this case when it came to
discussing the motivations behind surfing themselves. As suggested in the opening extract
– “such a weird thing” – most of my participants found it challenging to articulate or
rationalize what the purpose was to their surfing. As I attempted to dig down to concrete
explanations for the behaviour, the more we collectively struggled to legitimize it. It was
itself an absurd, inexplicable thing – and it struck me that this might be applied to many
human behaviours across cultures. In searching doggedly for ‘reasons’ and ‘purposes’
behind certain practices, perhaps we might miss other revelations.
JOY
“I think that nature has a lot to do with it. And even more in the cold – all your energy goes into that physical
sensation and you don’t have space left for any of the sh*t if you get me. Like – once I challenged myself to think
about something during a session and I literally couldn’t. (Laughs) Genuinely!”
“It’s like, you can but it’s a sort of removed state – I mean I guess it’s similar to a lot of sports in that whole physical
process thing but being in the water has this whole other element that changes the energy of it…”
“… The waves have energy man. Like there’s always gonna be an element of fear there and adrenaline – when you
drop in you don’t know. You make the drop and get this epic rush or you just get rolled and messed up. That’s
releasing this energy and it’s like… (trails off) You can’t describe it.”
“Yeah you have to be aware of something bigger than yourself or, bigger than whatever sh*tstorm you’re in.
Everything else disappears. There’s just joy.”
Harry and Jazz // Porthcawl, Wales // December 2021
The sensation of surfing is so notoriously difficult to articulate that surfing subculture appropriated an entirely new word for it – ‘stoke’: a word to express the
inexpressible. What couldn’t be written about or described became central in my
methodological reflections: how do you ‘write up’ something that cannot be written
about? With it’s focus on linear analysis and narrative, writing as a mode of discourse
struggles to represent the many sensory, ephemeral aspects of human lives.
In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said criticized the ‘textualization’ present in
ethnographic (and other) accounts of non-Western cultures, conferring discrete
identities and visions of totality where there were none. The imagination of the West is,
according to both Johannes Fabian (1983) and Frances Yates (1966), strongly visualist,
yet much knowledge is embodied, urging a necessity to valorise the senses as
epistemologically relevant, and accordingly work towards more sensory modes of
ethnographic representation (De Sousa Santos 2018).
An efficient way of communicating why surfers brave the cold to surf along the
Welsh coastline would after all be to get any ‘readers’ of research exploring those
questions to come surfing themselves! This sentiment was found in the comment, “…
like ‘what’s surf culture?’ (Laughs) I don’t know man, come surf. That’s surf culture.” The
answers lie in physical spaces of knowing, and an ethnographic approach to such
questions would need to not simply show a way of life but attempt to show how it might
feel. Clifford raises similar concerns regarding the limitations of textual analysis, urging
for a move away from the ‘ethnographic gaze’ and towards a sensorially engaged
‘ethnographic body’ (Clifford and Marcus ed. 1986 :12).
Undertaking this project demonstrated the unavoidable errors and omissions in
representation I was bound to produce when ‘writing up’ any account. Lucien CastaingTaylor summarizes this brilliantly: “Ambiguity, or any kind of aesthetic opacity that isn’t
readily translatable into the limpid clarity of expository prose, is somehow lacking for
anthropologists, in their quest for “cultural meaning”, which they’re hell-bent on
linguifying. And as often as not, out of all recognition. Clarity for me is an illusion, a
product of a certain kind of cultural textology” (Cox, Irving and Wright ed. 2016: 154).
Whether it was embodied joy that defied description, the unexpressed
ambiguities of an ethnographer’s presence amongst participants, or deliberate omissions
pertaining to group identity, silence was a recurrent theme throughout this project.
What couldn’t be written about emerged as the central challenge I faced in approaching
the creation of an ethnographic account and prompted reflection on where this was a
dilemma to resolve, and where such silences might in themselves be productive,
empowering spaces.
In the early afternoon, worn out from hours in the surf, most of our group waded
out of the waves and onto the expanse of sand stretching uphill toward the lifeguard
station. Harry and Logan stayed out, carving around in the green waves beyond the
break, so the rest of us sat waiting on the beach, exhausted and elated. Beyond the odd
word, no one spoke – instead we shared a reflective, laden silence, a sort of collective
meditation. Mark Rothko’s famous words rang true: “silence is so accurate”.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (ed.), 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.
Cox, R., Irving, A. and Wright, C. (ed.), 2016. Beyond text? Cultural Practices and Sensory
Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
De Sousa Santos, B., 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: the Coming of Age of
Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Narayan, K., 1993. ‘How Native Is a "Native" Anthropologist?’. American Anthropologist,
95(3): 671-686.
Price, R., 1983. First Time. Baltimore u.a.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr.
Said, E., 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Simpson, A., 2007. ‘On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’
and Colonial Citizenship’. Junctures, 9: 67-80.