The Local Surfer - University of Exeter

One of the first sociologists to bring to light the relationship between surfing
and subculture was Kent Pearson in 1979. Based in Australia, Pearson began
surfing in the late 1950s and competed successfully in the Australian Surf Life
Saving (SLS) movement. However, in his time the SLS was being threatened
with the surfing lifestyle that had travelled over from California in 1955.
Pearson took the opportunity to compare the Surf Life Savers with Surf Board
Riders in 1979 when he published his book Surfing Subcultures of Australia and
New Zealand and in 1981 in a chapter entitled Subcultures in Sport within Loy et
al’s text Sport, Culture and Society: A Reader on the Sociology of Sport. After the
death of Kent Pearson in 1983, progress within the sociological world of surfing
paused. However interest became renewed in the 2000s with researchers such
as Booth who devoted several studies to the topic (Booth, 2001a, 2001b, 2003,
2004). At the same time surf journalists such as Kampion wrote several
sociologically informed popular surfing books (1989, 1997, 2003, 2007) and
edited prestigious surfing magazines such as Surfer, Surfing, Wind Surf and
Wind Tracks (Kampion, 2006).
Simultaneously, research into the so-called “extreme sports” subcultures or
“adventure sports” subcultures became a growing area of interest as the
importance and growth of these sports and pursuits in recent years was
increasingly observed (Wheaton, 2004b). Belinda Wheaton‟s text Understanding
Lifestyle Sports (2004a) is indicative of this recognition with particular interest in
the chapter by Douglas Booth entitled Surfing: from one (cultural) extreme to
another. Therefore, while interest has increased in recent years into “extreme
sports” such as surfing, there remains an opportunity in which to continue
growth on subcultural work within this area.
The Roots of Surfing
Although surfing dates back to before A.D. 400 (the speculated date of
migration by the Polynesians to Hawaii by Margan and Finney (1970) and
Finney and Houston (1996), its emergence as a subculture began after surfing‟s
renaissance in California during the 1950s. Surfing before this time was deeply
embedded in Hawaiian mainstream culture and it is worth giving a brief
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