‘It's the sea and the beach more than anything for me’: Local surfer's and the construction of community and communitas in a rural Cornish seaside village

Abstract

This paper reports on a qualitative ethnographic study undertaken on a small rural village community in Cornwall, UK with a significant population of local surfers. It focuses on these local surfers' interactions with the wider rural community they co-exist with, and in which ways this group might contribute to the formation, maintenance and identity of that broader rural community. The analysis presented draws together a range of broadly agreed conceptual notions of community with Victor Turner's (1969) notion of spontaneous, normative and ideological communitas as dynamic emergent elements in what Whol (2015) refers to as a process of developing community sense through experiencing and communicating aesthetic judgments. Findings illustrate that notions of community were not restricted to a static and bounded geographical location. Rather, the village focused upon in this study was seen as a hub of a close and a wider de-territorialised community. Despite their obvious differences, there was a strong sense of communitas, community sense and aesthetic judgement between surfing locals and non-surfing locals, expressed through the sharing of experience of the inspired feelings of native place configured around relationships with the sea, the local beach, surf break and village life.