As I established above, interpretivism posits that there is no objective
epistemological relationship between subjects and anything else. As Gray puts it, ‘there is no, direct, one-to-one relationship between ourselves (subject) and the world (object). The world is interpreted through the classification schemas of the mind (Williams and May 1996)’. (Gray 2014:23). A subject interprets reality according to her unique subject position, informed by her life experiences and the discourses with which she comes into contact. Therefore the researcher who adopts this approach must examine the unique responses of individual subjects in specific historical and cultural contexts. ‘Researchers have to study a subject's actions, objects and society from the perspective of the subjects themselves. In practice, this can mean entering the field setting and observing at first-hand what is happening’. (Gray 2014:24). Ethnography, then, is an appropriate methodology for the interpretivist, and is one that is widely adopted
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in material culture studies (Miller 2008 et al) suggesting its usefulness in the study of clothing culture.
Sociologist Karen O’ Reilly begins an overview of ethnographic methodologies by admitting that ethnography is ‘difficult to define because it is used in different ways in different disciplines with different traditions’ (O’Reilly 2011:1), but goes on to agree with social psychologist Stephanie Taylor (2002) that it should essentially involve ‘empirical work, especially observation, with the aim of producing a full, nuanced, non-reductive text, however that is defined or interpreted by each author’ (O’Reilley 2011:1). She concludes that
ethnography at least (in its minimal definition) is iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods, involving on direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions and producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory, as well as the researcher’s own role, and that views humans as part object, part subject. (O’Reilly 2011:2).
O’Reilly’s ‘minimal’ definition provides a useful introduction for the remainder of the chapter, which, having already established the role of theory, provides a more detailed, ‘maximal’ account of how an ethnographic approach is applied in this study.
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From Methodology to Methods
As O’Reilly states, ethnography does not generally work from a pre-selected hypothesis, rather lets one emerge from fieldwork. This hypothesis can then be operationalised, tested and modified. With this in mind, having conducted the majority of the literature review that appears in chapter two, I set out to
undertake primary research for this study with an open mind, hoping to look at the clothing culture of a specific area. At the outset my focus was broad, with the aim of answering the first of my research questions: how are surfing
identities constructed through clothing cultures in Cornwall?
The preliminary stage of my research took me around the region seeking out appropriate locations for more in depth ethnographic observation and
participation whilst continuing to gather information from museums, archives and collections (see appendix 4). I conducted interviews with local historians and well-known figures in surf culture that could provide information about the development of surfing in the region. This led to a more focused ethnographic study in St Agnes, a village in North Cornwall, which, along with continued archival and associated secondary research, helped to answer my second research question: how do cultural and commercial communities mediate between local, global and virtual cultures of surfing? Assisted by theory,
purposeful sampling at pre-selected events in St Agnes helped me to tackle my final research concern: the interplay of influence between the clothing culture of surfing and wider cultures of fashion and style, both in and out of the water.
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Contextual Research and Early Fieldwork
Whilst a wealth of information was available in my university library or through inter-library loan, visits to more specialist libraries and archives were necessary to gain detailed contextual information with which to interrogate established narratives around surfing. Throughout the research process I made use of the British Library in London. Additional material was found in the Library of Cornish Studies, the Royal Cornwall Museum, Penlee House Museum in Penzance, the National Railway Museum in York, the Fashion Museum, Bath, the archives of the Worthing Museum and innumerate online archives that are listed in the bibliography. I made several visits to the Museum of British Surfing in Braunton, Devon and the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth. Additionally I visited a number of private collections of surf memorabilia and artefacts. See also appendix 4 which details the research locations in list form.
Further material was gathered in support of the artefacts and documents gathered from museum and archive work through recorded interviews with individuals who are known to have an interest in surfing activities in the region. These included collectors, local historians, retailers and designers of surf apparel and equipment, publishers of surf related magazines and books, surf photographers and artists, those involved with Surf Life Saving
Associations (SLSAs) and the Royal National Lifeboat Association (RNLI), surfers, watermen and beachgoers. A table of interviewees appears in appendix 1. Each of these early interviews was pre-arranged by telephone or email, conducted in their place of work, and lasted around thirty minutes to an hour. In each case an information leaflet and consent form (appendices 2 and
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3) was given to the respondent and their permission was asked to record the exchange. The interviews were semi structured, with a range of questions prepared in advance to encourage the interviewee to expand on aspects of the development and current state of surfing in the UK, their particular connection with it, and where relevant the artefacts they had collected or the work they had published on the subject. However, these long interviews also provided ample opportunities for the respondent to introduce any subject they felt relevant. The interviews ended with a request for an introduction to a potential further source of information.
The method of selecting and recruiting interviewees initially used was snowball sampling, which ‘identifies cases of interest from people who know people who know what cases are information rich’ (Miles & Huberman 1994:28). Also known as opportunistic sampling, this method, useful for ‘reaching difficult-to- access or hidden populations’ (Tracy 2012:43) begins with a single source of information, in my case the surfer and historian Roger Mansfield, as a point of entry into the field of research. Individuals are recommended as knowledgeable by the original source and are deemed to be valid sources by virtue of this recommendation. As Sarah J Tracy points out, the method ‘can quickly skew to one type of group, clique or demographic (as participants tend to suggest others who are similar to themselves)’ (Tracy 2012). However, since this approach was confined to the collection of contextual information and purposive sampling was used for the material culture analysis, snowball sampling was an
appropriate method for this part of the research. In addition, the
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introduction, persuading sometimes reluctant interviewees to spend time with me on the project.
The picture that began to emerge from reviewing the literature and the
contextual research was of a region with a clothing culture that was as diverse and fluid as the surfing activities, bodies and identities which to some extent both constitute and are constituted by this regional culture. Therefore a specific site for an ethnographic study had to be identified in order to avoid
generalisations about ‘the South West’ and instead to provide a thick description of a far smaller sample area.
.
Many of the surfing activities enjoyed in the region make little impression on the critical literature around it, as I commented in the Literature
Review. Bodyboarding and its variants are seldom discussed in academic or
popular texts on surfing. As I explained in the introduction to this thesis, it
became clear during the early contextual research that bellyboarding is a variety of wave riding which precedes stand up surfing in the UK by at least forty years and is still practiced in Cornwall today; the history of the activity is explored fully in the following chapter. In order to address the gap in the literature by
acknowledging the significance of this marginalised form of surfing, the location selected was one with strong ties to both bellyboarding and stand-up surfing, and is discussed below.
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The Ethnography
The ethnographic tradition developed following the work of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) in the Trobriand Island group in the
Melanesia. Malinowski was unable to return to his studies at the London School of Economics (LSE) after an earlier research trip in New Guinea owing to his Austrian citizenship at the outbreak of the First World War, but these circumstances prompted the Austrian government to fund his ongoing anthropological research overseas for the duration of hostilities. Malinowski lived ‘in the field’ with the islanders for four years, making detailed records based on what he termed participatory observation. His insider perspective provided the insight required to understand complex social structures and rituals among the local people that had heretofore been obscure, and to extrapolate from them profound theories on the exchange of gifts. Malinowski’s participant observation fieldwork has subsequently become the gold standard of
ethnography and has been increasingly applied to culture-sharing groups much closer to the home of the ethnographer, such as Paul Willis’ biker gangs in
Profane Culture, first published in 1978, and Loic Wacquant’s Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2003) discussed earlier.
As David Gray explains, ‘according to Hall (2000), the best the ethnographer can achieve is to negotiate a position which one is in some way "at home" and considered as "one of us" without being completely immersed’ (Gray 2014:445). Just nine miles from Truro, the town in which I lived before and during the
research, St Agnes is one of four surfing locales which Truro residents would term ‘local’, the others being Perranporth, Porthtowan, Portreath and Holywell
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Bay (see map, figure 3.1), accessible in less than an hour’s drive and surfed regularly by some Truronians. Therefore I was in the position of being ‘one of us’ as a local resident, but not a resident of the village per se. The Geordie accent I owe to my birthplace in Newcastle has softened considerably in the twenty or more years I have lived elsewhere but still identifies in me in Cornwall as hailing from ‘upcountry’, roughly defined as anywhere beyond Plymouth. But it is certainly not the case that all residents of St Agnes share a regional Cornish accent; indeed, many have travelled from far afield to live in the local area and have been able to immerse themselves in the community as I have in nearby Truro, a theme I explore in chapter five, Space and Place. As an occasional warm weather bodyboarder, I am as much of a surfer as several of the people I interviewed and many of the residents of the area, in that I occasionally take part in an activity that is broadly categorised as surfing, but I was not so ‘completely immersed’ in surf culture that I was unable to find any degree of objectivity.
John Cresswell has it that ‘in ethnography...well-defined studies of single culture sharing groups [are conducted] with numerous artefacts, interviews and
observations collected until the workings of the cultural group are clear’ (Cresswell 2007:128). The study was already defined as a material culture study, because as Victor Buchli suggests, ‘the production and waste of objects and their constitution and dissipation are the two sides of the larger processes of materialization that facilitate the terms of social life, perpetuating its
inclusions and exclusions as well as reworking and challenging them’ (Buchli (ed) 2002:17). The focus was to be on clothing, since dress is both visual and
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material and in contemporary Western society is purchased and discarded with increasing frequency, making it a fruitful area of material culture study; in
addition it has been an area of interest to the theorists whose ideas underpin this study, from Simmel’s dyad of individuality and conformity (Simmel 1903), through Bourdieu’s (1977) comments on French fashion in the 1970s, to Miller’s work with Sophie Woodward on the uses denim (2010).
The culture sharing group was more difficult to define and demarcate. As noted in the literature review, subculture might not be a fully applicable term to surfers but clearly surfing is a minority pursuit. But does one have to surf in order to participate in surf culture? As I established above, the existing literature on surfing legitimises stand-up surfing, excluding a range of activities such as body-boarding and bellyboarding. There is significant overlap in participation in these activities in the South West as a whole, with the narrower definition of surfing puzzling many of my interviewees who disliked or failed to understand the reason for distinction between one kind of wave riding and another. This broader definition that encompasses the range of surfing activities still fails to incorporate many of the individuals participating in surf culture, or the activities around surfing.
115 Figure 3.1
Map of surfing locations in Cornwall showing Truro (inland, to the East) and the proximity of St Agnes on the North coast
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In Wacquant’s study of boxing gyms in Chicago (2003), non-boxers and women are absent, because the gymnasia are male-only facilities in which all workers and clients share an interest in boxing, from the janitor to the participant observer anthropologist. This is clearly not analogous to surfing communities, much less prescribed and more amorphous interest groups with no official membership, a range of commercial and non-commercial affiliations and participants invested in the activity for just an afternoon, as a professional
athlete, or as a non-participant who is nevertheless steeped in surfing in support of loved ones. It seems to me that the culture of surfing in Cornwall is shared by all who come into more or less regular contact with any of the artefacts,
endeavours and activities around any of the forms of wave riding practiced in the area. Therefore the culture-sharing group had to reflect this inclusive definition of surf culture.
I will provide a rich description of my research location, St Agnes, in the chapters that follow, but it is worth discussing its relevance from a
methodological perspective here. St Agnes was selected as a sample site because it is a community bound together by a shared love of surfing. Home to 3,900 year-round residents, much of the commercial activity in the village is related to surfing. St Agnes also boasts a longstanding local surfing heritage. Prior to St Agnes’ Surf Life Saving Association (SLSA) being founded in 1953, there was only one in the UK: Bude, founded the year before. The club is twinned with the far better known SLSA at Bondi Beach, Sydney. Commercial surf schools and individual stand-up surfers share the water at the village’s two
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beaches with bellyboarders and bodyboarders as well as sea swimmers,
snorkelers, paddleboarders, canoeists, and others. St Agnes is also home to an international environmental pressure group, Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), and head office of Finisterre, a specialist surfwear company with worldwide online sales and a shop in London’s Soho. The village hosted the annual World Bellyboarding Championships (WBBC), sponsored by the National Trust until the event was officially discontinued in 2017. Surfer or non-surfer, contact with surf culture in the village is unavoidable and participation to some degree highly likely. Surfing is deeply embedded in almost all residents’ way of life.
In the tradition of Malinowski, anthropologists have spent long periods in the field, meaning their site of study, observing what people say, what people do, and what people say they do. Miller, for example, spent periods of time participating and observing in India (1985) and in the Caribbean (1994). But more recently his ethnographic focus has been on cultures closer to home, resulting in fascinating studies on the lives of au pairs in the UK (Burikova & Miller, 2010) and the uses of social media in an English village (2016). The techniques employed are no different when observing an ‘exotic’ culture to one that is more familiar, and assumptions must be avoided in either case; rather, close, uncritical observation of the minutiae of daily life must be conducted.
Thus I spent time in the village observing day to day life and events in the local calendar over the course of the research, beginning in early 2013. The
methodological approach discussed in the previous chapter suggested three areas to examine: consumption, embodiment and space and place. With these
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strands in mind, I attended community events such as clothes swaps, beach cleans and socials, beer festivals and other events in the local pubs, and local celebrations of national festivals such as the switching on of Christmas lights, Guy Fawkes fireworks and Halloween celebrations. I also went to annual local events such as the St Agnes Carnival each August, and Bolster Day in April, a folk pageant dating back at least two hundred years celebrating the defeat on the cliffs near the village of a fierce Cornish Giant (the Bolster) in local
mythology. I read local papers and magazines The West Briton and Cornwall
Today and the circular The Bolster, and subscribed to websites and social
media attached to as many St Agnes organisations and individuals as I was able to track down. My intention to create as rich as possible a picture of life in the town, the consumption practices that underpinned the clothing culture, its embodiment and the spaces and places in which it could be observed, and from these observations and interactions develop a hypothesis from which a
methodology would emerge for more purposive sampling to operationalise it.
In the course of the ethnography I made a large collection of field notes. In hindsight these notes lacked a systematic approach and were instead unstructured observations gathered in a range of notebooks with varying degrees of legibility depending on how cold my hands were. Again, in hindsight, voice recording and notation apps now widely available on smartphones could have been employed to more effectively gather data. However, the notes proved valuable in providing descriptive context for the village itself, and more importantly when what was said by participants in recorded interviews was at odds with my own assessment of a given situation
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or when a participant’s description of their outfit did not match my own. Here I was able to examine both the participant’s and my own bias, looking back on photographs that ‘objectively’ recorded the moment and reflecting on my own subjectivity and positioning in relation to the subjects under investigation.
Having assessed the literature around the subject and settled on theory in line with my own philosophical position and participated and observed St Agnes over the course of over two years, a hypothesis began to emerge. Surfing is widely considered to be an intrinsic part of the local identity of the South West by those inside and outside the region. It seemed to me that whilst surfing is