Alienated pleasure: on surfing in Portugal

Drawing on my fieldwork on surfing in Portugal, I zone in on a contradiction between surfing’s romanticized image as countercultural and (at least) at variance with capitalism by virtue of its association with nature and antithesis to work; and a reality of surfing’s comprehensive commodification, detrimental social and ecological effects, and buttressing of the very work-life it purportedly rejects. I argue that surfing’s representation as fun and liberatory is an alienated response to these entanglements in capitalism. Its packaging as a hard to communicate pastime whose appeal can only be accessed through corporal first-hand accounts reproduces precisely the obscuring effects of this alienation.