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Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion
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Short Description: It may be surprising to find such spirituality associated with surfing. .... extension of a Hawai’ian-flavored surfing spirituality to California. Born ...
Content Inside: Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion Bron Taylor "Soul surfers" consider surfing to be a profoundly meaningful practice that brings physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits. They generally agree on where surfing initially developed, that it assumed a religious character, was suppressed for religious reasons, has been undergoing a revival, and enjoins reverence for and protection of nature. This subset of the global surfing community should be understood as a new religious movement--a globalizing, hybridized, and increasingly influential example of what I call aquatic nature religion. For these individuals, surfing is a religious form in which a specific sensual practice constitutes its sacred center, and the corresponding experiences are constructed in a way that leads to a belief in nature as powerful, transformative, healing, and sacred. I advance this argument by analyzing these experiences, as well as the myths, rites, symbols, terminology, technology, material culture, and ethical mores that are found within surfing subcultures. I am the ocean --Krish[n]a in the Bhagavad Gita 10:24 And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the Waters --Genesis 1:2.1 Bron Taylor, Department of Religion, 121 Anderson Hall, POB 117410, Gainesville, FL 32611-7410, USA. E-mail: bron@religion.ufl.edu. I wish to thank Greg Johnson, Arne Kalland, Whitney Sanford, Sam Snyder, Drew Kampion, Gordon LaBedz, Stewart Guthrie, and especially Kocku von Stuckrad, Glen Hening, and Terry Rey for (variously) their encouragement, comments, corrections, and suggestions, in response to earlier versions of this work. Mahalo! I also wish to apologize for having to eliminate some improvements that resulted from these consultations to meet this journal's space limits. I hope to remedy these omissions by producing a longer work on surfing as nature religion. 1 Quoted by Warshaw (2004: ixx). Journal of the American Academy of Religion, December 2007, Vol. 75, No. 4, pp. 923951 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm067 The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org Advance Access publication on October 19, 2007
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