Remembering the Snowboarding Body

Abstract

Dating the birth of snowboarding is impossible. People have been standing on sleds and trying to slide on snow for hundreds of years; recent ‘discoveries’ include a board dating back to the 1920s and a 1939 film of a man riding a snowboard-type sled sideways down a small hill in Chicago. Snowboarding as we understand the activity today, however, emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in North America with a new piece of equipment that appealed to the hedonistic desires of a new generation of youth. In this chapter I offer a brief history of the development of snowboarding culture. This is followed by a critical discussion of the cultural politics involved in the construction and reproduction of this historical narrative, which examines how some snowboarding bodies are remembered while others are forgotten, and reveals the production of the snowboarding cultural memory as an implicitly political process complicated with various socio- cultural- economic factors. First, however, I offer some brief comments on the importance of history and context for understanding contemporary physical cultures.