Making Friends With The Neighbours

Today, I've been reading Surf Rage: A surfer's guide to turning negatives into positives edited by Nat Young (and Derek Reilly). It is certianly an interesting comment on the issue of violence in the surf and why it occurs. It also contains several examples of blaring hypocisy and finger pointing! No-one wants to take the blame, no-one seems to want to be guilty. It seems that many of the contributors want to remain as alpha-male surfers, but to also stake their association with the historical development of the 'surfer's code'. There is a ridiculous amount of 'back in the day' postulation about their own experiences, with an emphasis on the 'authentic' experiences of earlier surfers and how they compare to the somehow less pure experiences that people have today. The way these men write, it's as if you weren't around in the scene in the 60s and 70s, the you don't know what it's all about. Is it merely a case of grumpy old men, ...

Sitting at home in the lounge room, watching Young Guns and As Is, drinking tea and hanging with Nicky while Elaine cooks him a b'day cake... Oh! And I'm looking through "'Getting There': travel, time and narrative" by Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska (1994), in Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement , edited by George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (WHEW!). It got me thinking... When we travel, we are inhabiting new physical, cultural and psychological times, spaces and locations than the ones we are accustomed to. We inhabit these new realities and try to understand them, but there is always a struggle to leave behind our cultural assumptions and to embrace the new. However... Let's consider surfing as a cultural location. From this position, is it possible that when surfers travel for specific surfing holidays, they are, in part, inahbiting the same cultural location as they do in t...

I'm sitting at home on my bed, listening to the (pouring) rain outside and going through some old undergrad essays from Anthropology. I'm reminding myself what it is about cultrual studies that is so useful. And I just remembered how much I love Clifford Geertz! Oh! Darling Geertz. What a man... From a D. Austin-Broos essay; The anthropology of Clifford Geertz underwent a transformation through his experiences of studying Balinese life. In his essay, Religion As A Cultural System , Geertz defines culture as “historically transmitted patterns of meaning embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life” (Geertz, 1973; 89). This definition belies Geertz’s optimism regarding the capacity of people to negotiate change within their own means and with their own agency. Symbols in such a definition are tools to be utilised by the indivi...

This blog is starting over again, so here is everything so far including an entry for today... Sitting on the floor in my ( very clean) lounge-room madly trying to finish this cursed ethics application so I can interview some folk (the mad tidying, re-organising, scrubbing and bleaching of the house has finally finished - since there is no surface left to clean. And considering there's no-one on MSN, procrastination has given way to actual work. Sigh.)... It has however, helped a LOT by making me think about the implications of this project and the reasoning behind it - validation, I think it's commonly called. Anyhoo, an extract... The proposed research project explores the ways that surfing culture builds a bridge between international communities. It explores the way that participation and inclusion in surfing culture develops a greater sensitivity to the surrounding world, both natural and human. With this in mind, there are several benefits to be identified. The first ...