MINISTERIO DE SALUD

Initially appearing in the field of sociology of science, Actor Network Theory (or ANT) was developed in the nineteen eighties and nineties by French

philosopher Bruno Latour and Michel Callon (1998) as a critique of conventional sociological theory. In We Have Never Been Modern, published in France in 1991, Latour rejects modernity's dualistic distinction between nature and society. He demonstrates that complex contemporary issues such as climate change cannot be easily classified as matters pertaining to either nature or culture. Indeed, Latour believes, this Modernist distinction has never been possible; thus we have never been Modern. He goes on to propose that the intricate webs of discourse around science, politics and popular culture which surround such issues must be studied with natural and 'social' phenomena, not as separate threads but as ‘hybrids’ (edition 1993:15). For Latour, surf culture

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would be just such a hybrid: it is a social phenomenon but one which is

dependent on the vicissitudes of natural phenomena. The development of surf clothing, boards and visual ephemera is explored and developed in discourses of science, fashion, politics, economics and even spirituality (Westwick & Neuschul 2013).

In his 1988 essay, “Expanding The Prince to Redefine Democracy”, Latour uses Machiavelli’s text to illuminate how, for him, ‘It is impossible to grasp the

modern forms of power if we do not first understand that what is called ‘society’ and what is (wrongly) called ‘technology’ are two artefacts created

simultaneously and symmetrically by analysts who have too narrow a definition of power to track down the powerful’ (1988:22). He goes on to ask, ‘why not delegate some powers to a few non-human actors that would thus be in charge of their fellow non-human actors? Why not invent a sociology and a politics of the things themselves?’ (1988:40) and suggests that the traffic light is designed to replace the policeman’s arms at a busy junction. However, for Latour, no one ‘thing’ − be it an object, a force of nature or a social phenomenon − can be simply replaced by another, particularly a ‘social function’ in order to explain what it expresses. Society, for Latour, is, after all, just another ‘thing’ as he later argues in Reassembling the Social (2005). The irreplaceablity of things he terms ‘unique adequacy’ (2000:112). It is this unique advocacy that provides the agency of all human and non-human actors.

Latour’s best-known example of this agency is the door, developed over a number of journal articles in the 1980s and 1990s. Humans need to move

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between enclosed spaces through ‘holes’ but, he explains, ‘the problem is that if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyone can get in and out (bears, visitors, dust, rats, noise). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door’ (Latour cited in Bijker & Law, eds 1992). The door, particularly the revolving door, encourages and allows people (and other ‘things’) to behave in particular ways; a different mechanism for controlling traffic in and out of the space would have different effects altogether. Therefore this non-human actor must have agency.

Such an actor might for example be a wetsuit. Without a wetsuit, cold water surfing, winter surfing or even surfing for prolonged periods in the summertime are impossible. It could be argued that the wetsuit has agency because it creates behaviours and relationships because of the opportunities it opens up. This might go some way to explain aspects of the St Agnes community and its clothing culture, for example the popularity of surfing today as compared to fifty years ago, before the development of the wetsuit. But it does not go far enough because ‘the wetsuit’ is worn all over the world by all sorts of people with social relationships that bear no resemblance to those in the ethnography. In this study, I am not as concerned with the relationship between ‘person’ and ‘wetsuit’ as I am between a specific person under scrutiny and her particular wetsuit, her options and reasons for selecting and using it and what it means to her and to others. These relationships are better explained by the more

nuanced examination of the meanings derived from consumption practices derived from Appadurai, above, and from the Material Culture Studies approaches below.

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Latour explains in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network

Theory (2005) that ANT is a means of thoroughly exploring the connections

between human and non-human actors in any given 'heterogenous

network'. These actors come together to create material and semiotic meaning. The relationships between actors must be constantly 'performed' if the network is to avoid collapse, and alterations between performances and relationships between actors in the network result in constant change in material and symbolic meanings.

The development of a clothing culture around surfing can be analysed as a network of symbolic and material meanings generated by the performances of related actors. Chapter four examines instances in the development of surf culture where changes in meanings occur, for example the period in the late 1960s when several local manufacturers of surfboards set up shop in the South West. Such alterations, Latour would have us believe, are the result of the introduction of new actors or the failure of existing relationships in the network. Therefore it was necessary to look into the seagoing crafts on which people took to the surf prior to this development and the status of their availability, as well as the individuals who set up shop and who bought these new products, and to take into account developments in the local economy (Callon 1988). In addition the discourses of science, craft and technology around board design, and of popular culture, travel and tourism, leisure and sport which contributed to the meaning of surfing in the area come under scrutiny throughout the study.

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However, from my perspective, Latour’s approach is best confined to the discussion of historical context and of limited use in the analysis of the

relationships between people, things and meanings that follow. As Daniel Miller explains, ‘by placing the emphasis on objects... rather than on artefacts, we do lose something of that quality of the artefact redolent with prior historical

creativity. It is the artefact which is the focus of habitus and indeed much of recent material culture studies’ (Miller ND). In other words, Latour’s approach is somewhat incompatible with Bourdieu’s.

Bourdieu’s approach was established earlier as an effective means of theorising the relationship between taste (in activities, often, but also in artefacts or

things), and relationships based on social class. Class is the focus of some of chapter six, Consumption, but chapters five and seven look at other

relationships between people and things, based on gender, age, ethnicity and regional identity. Whilst these are by no means distinct from class - all intersect with one another- Bourdieu’s work does not really explore them. Whereas Daniel Miller brings all of these concepts into material culture studies, providing a useful model for my analysis. According to Buchli, material culture studies derives from anthropology and deals with ‘the socially constituted and

materialised physical artefact' (Buchli 2002:11), in other words, with all aspects of what we can term ‘social’, which include, but are not limited to social class.