Search

This book examines the surfer, one of the most significant and enduring archetypes in American popular culture. Lawler sets the surfer against the backdrop of the negative reactions to it by those groups responsible for enforcing the Puritan discipline, offering a fresh take on the relationship between commercial culture and counterculture.

This volume moves beyond the typical way in which academics have, historically, tended to label surfers and skateboarders as relative-fringe deviants, part of a larger social science discourse on subcultures situated either in the tradition of conventional American Sociology conceptualized first by the Chicago School in the early 20th Century, and then later by Robert Merton's mid-Century theory of deviance (for example, see Irwin, 1973), or, in the British Cultural Studies' more recent view of "spectacular" subcultures, a perspective most well-known in the work of Dick Hebdige's (1979) now classic text, Subcultures: the Meaning of Style (for example, see Stratton, 1985). In both cases, previous generations of academics have viewed subcultures as having inadequate - if any - politics. This is because in the first case, subcultures are viewed as apolitical due to varying degrees of social pathology - in other words, an inability to be integrated into the institutions of conventional society. In the second case, if subcultures did have politics, said politics were interpreted by sociologists as a failure of sorts due to an inability to leave the realm of symbolic protest, thus leaving structures of oppression intact. While previous academic paradigms did sometimes view deviant subcultures as forms of resilience, if not resistance, their conclusion was that subcultures generally lack the power necessary to effect changes in social structures. Alas, these older sociological paradigms are no longer capable of making sense of the significance of the cultural politics of surfing and skateboarding today, since the globalization of these cultures has included effective challenges to repressive social structures. This collection of essays is, in part, an attempt to contribute a small part to what might be a new paradigm of subcultural studies by taking seriously the history and politics of skateboarding and surfing subcultures.