A Review of Ugo Corte, Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2022, 272 pp.

Abstract

This ethnographic study of big wave surfing in Waimea Bay in Hawai’i by the Italian sociologist Ugo Corte discovers how this extreme sport involving risk-taking activity is performed interactively. The data from observations and interviews are interpreted in terms of the theory of interaction ritual, which claims that the key to understanding these group activities is the notion of emotional energy generated as result of the social interaction. Unlike his predecessors Еrving Goffman and Randall Collins, Ugo Corte does not proceed from theory, but from his empirical material, for the interpretation of which he uses comparisons with somewhat similar phenomena from different fields, from other sports to creative industries. However, the book’s theoretical framework is Collins’s thesis on affect as a driving force of social order, from which the ideas emerge about how the focus of emotion and attention in joint activity generates group solidarity. The book illustrates how a sociologist and anthropologist can address the issues of risk and danger, and also shows the ways in which modern interactionist sociology, armed with post-Goffmanian tools, is developing.