Fluid: An Ethnography of Surfing and Tourism on Siargao Island, Philippines

Abstract

This is a thesis about surfing: surfing as a driver for tourism; global surf culture in local spaces; and surf-oriented lifestyle migration in the Global South. It sits within the nexus of anthropology, critical surf studies, tourism and lifestyle migration studies, and Philippine studies to explore what unfolds when roving Western surfers settle on a remote Philippine island, integrating into the local community and igniting growth patterns that see increasing numbers of Filipino men and women, girls and boys take to the water to surf. Through the lens of surfing, I explore the intersection of colonialism and neo-colonialism, North-South inequality, transnational relationships, gender and imaginings of Self and Other on Siargao Island. Over the past three decades General Luna, Siargao Island has undergone rapid social change brought about by surf tourism and lifestyle migration flows. Infrastructure has developed in tandem with the changing nature of tourism: tourist accommodation, ranging from relatively cheap hostels to high-end resorts, now line the concrete Tourism Road; and bars, restaurants, discoes and souvenir stalls provide various sources of entertainment and employment. The changing nature of local employment - from fishing and agricultural work to surf teaching and resort work - has contributed to social change at the local level, including intergenerational wealth accumulation. However, perhaps the more significant and enduring outcomes of surf tourism to the region has been local Filipinos' active adoption of a global surf identity and absorption into the global surf community; and the myriad of relationships (romantic, platonic and functional) formed between local Filipinos and Western lifestyle migrants. Within this context, I consider how overarching structures of tourism in the Global South can be exclusionary and produce negative outcomes for host communities; yet how in practice relationships, experiences and lifeworlds within tourism locales are fluid, dynamic, complex and contradictory. In these locales, binaries that position one group as subordinate or superordinate to another - such as colonised/coloniser, masculine/feminine, poor/wealthy or host/guest - are disrupted. For example, when surf tourism leads to a flourishing local surf population that challenges the primacy of Western surfers; or when tourism more generally results in distinct settlement patterns, as is the case with lifestyle migration. This thesis focuses on the reproduction and/or disruption of colonial ideologies, inequalities and relationships; while also emphasising local agency, vibrancy and social mobilities.