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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

This paper mobilizes the concept of the choreography of surfing to analyze networks of surfers, media creators, digital technologies, and development NGOs through which surfing becomes a device for sociopolitical and economic projects in Peru. Surf media, this paper’s object of analysis, includes all films, video blogs, and documents that incorporate surfing as a constitutive ingredient in their visual and discursive content. With the rise of online video-sharing platforms, surf media has become a digital world unto itself. This world is made through interactions among viewers, photographers, and their surfing subjects. Democratization of video-sharing platforms capacitates filmmakers to break from conventional techniques for the portrayal of surfing. Drone filming, water photography, and mouth-held go-pros produce immersive visuals, stylized for and formative of the global network of surf media. As settings for these elaborate productions, surf-breaks join a global geography of widely recognized stages for performance surfing. This paper focuses on the place of the north coast of Peru within contemporary surf media. It explores foreign vloggers (video bloggers), Peruvian filmmakers, and conservationist non-governmental organizations, which assemble novel images of surfing in Peru. Drawing from science and technology studies, media studies, and environmental anthropology, this paper examines: surf media’s sociopolitical significance; contested construction of northern Peru’s niche within surfing’s comparative geography; and surf media’s influence on the digital public image of Peru. I argue that independent filmmakers from Peru use surf media to engender ideas of the nation’s coastline as an equal counterpart to globally renowned surf regions, whereas vloggers and development NGOs work against this project by depicting Peru as unsightly, underdeveloped, and unamenable for investment.

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