Representational affectivities in nature-based leisure: the case of game-angling

ABSTRACT

We explore affective registers that characterise game-angling, particularly fly-fishing, through a critical engagement with the discursive and visual strategies employed in a key game-angling periodical, Trout and Salmon magazine, across a period of sixty years. We examine how angling brands and textual utterances evoke the affective and emotional states of becoming and being an angler, and in doing so bring the sport into a state of being and becoming in which traditional and modern values work with, and in tension to, each other. We focus on three interconnected themes. First, the extent to which the practice of angling is mediated by specific brands and technologies which blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Second, the extent to which branded technologies and brand values foster angling practices that either adhere to or deviate from traditional understandings of what game-angling is and entails. Third, the ways in which dominant tropes conceptualise, frame, and canonise idealised game-angling spaces and spatial practices. We conclude with an exegesis that game-angling texts and brands tell us much about what it is to be human and animal in the choreographing and enactment of this ever-popular and ever-evolving, yet anchored, leisure world.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• branding
• technology
• representation
• nature

Introduction

Recreational angling is one of the most widely practiced leisure pursuits, with an estimated 220 million anglers worldwide (Cooke et al., 2017). In England, well over twenty million days are spent freshwater angling every year, contributing around £1.4 billion to the national economy and supporting 27,000 full-time jobs (Environment Agency, 2018). Despite its popularity, angling has received relatively little in the way of scholarly attention (Markuksela & Valtonen, 2019; Mordue & Wilson, 2022), arguably because compared to other leisure activities angling is relatively ‘invisible’. Stationed across a variety of rural and urban waterways, anglers are at once everywhere yet are away from public gaze. Compared to other blue-space leisure forms, such as wild swimming (Bates and Moles, 2022), the world of the angler is more muted and restrained. Yet, prior to the nineteenth century, angling was an everyday subsistence activity, practiced freely by those living near water. Since then, changes in land ownership and settlement patterns have had the effect of reframing angling as something to be experienced and enjoyed for its own sake as a proto-recreational activity, beyond being a source of food or income (Franklin, 2001). For many, particularly newly affluent industrial elites, the choicest game-angling waterways became off-limits as the bifurcation between elite game-angling – the pursuit of trout, salmon and other salmonid species with fly and lure – and its low-brow sibling, coarse angling – the pursuit of non-salmonid species such as bream, carp and roach with baited hooks – grew more ingrained (Lowerson, 1983, 1988; Mordue, 2009). Though today the angling market has democratised elite game-angling to some extent through the increased supply of affordable equipment and purpose-built game-angling lakes and other artificial water bodies (Eden & Barratt, 2010), it remains a distinctively ‘premium’ leisure activity (Mordue, 2009).

By its very nature, angling is a deeply embodied activity driven by powerfully emotive forces (Franklin, 2001). Eden and Bear (2011) posit that entering the world of fish means anglers physically, emotionally and imaginatively breaking through the water’s surface to ‘become-fish’ (c.f. Deleuze and Guattari (1998) on ‘becoming-animal’). This is a transformative process whereby anglers engage an altered animality as they attempt to reach a perfect state of angling being in which they ‘become imperceptible’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998) in the fish-human ‘contact zone’. This embodied state is riven with emotion and desire; a desire not simply to catch but to become something other, something more than human. The angling literature is rent with discussion of this ‘passion for angling’, which is often framed around the mystery and beauty of the sport rather than, say, a lustful passion for catching and/or killing fish (Mordue & Wilson, 2022; Yates et al., 1993). That is not to deny that a passion for angling is elemental, it is to emphasise that a whole complex of intersecting socio-natural forces come together at the most passionate of all moments: the moment when a fish takes the angler’s hook (Preston-Whyte, 2008). Preston-Whyte (2008) also agrees that this pinnacle moment is not about bloodlust but comes from a quest for abandonment that is interwoven to external forces and coupled to human delight in angling virtuosity.

That anglers of all descriptions seem compelled by an affective and emotional drive to take off to a suitable waterscape where they can engage their piscatorial passions has come to the attention of a growing number of social scientists in recent years (Djohari et al., 2018; Eden, 2012; Eden & Bear, 2011; Markuksela & Valtonen, 2019; Mordue, 2009; Mordue & Wilson, 2022; Preston-Whyte, 2008). In their various ways, all these efforts have sought to get closer to the visceral, emotional realities of angling, and to understand the agency and positionality of fish in the angling encounter. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the role of visual and discursive elements in constructing angling performances, despite the richness of the media and material cultures associated with angling that contribute to its evolutionary trajectory (Mordue, 2013). This silence reflects a move away from representational analysis in the social sciences over the last two decades as a counterpoint to criticisms of hitherto frequent lapses into ‘cultural idealism’ (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 438). By way of a major corrective to the dominances of representational orthodoxies, non-representational theory, as espoused by Thrift (2007), emerged to focus instead on the materialities of affective bodies, objects and spaces that work before, beneath and outside cultural inscription. As laudable and insightful as this important scholarship is, we would argue that the corrective has itself become something of an orthodoxy that is in danger of too neatly demarcating a material-cultural impasse even though representational practices do have affective power in the material and embodied constitution of human and non-human worlds (Anderson, 2019). In other words, representational practices are more than passive, they have agency and exert that agency over and with worldly affairs, and actually join forces with human and non-human others to compel and mobilise action (ibid.). Configured this way, representation and storytelling – including through brands and branding processes – are constituents in the varied ensembles of animals, environments, technologies and people that bring our world(s) into being.

It is this conceptual (re)corrective that underpins the contribution of this study, bringing, as it does, representational forces into the orbit of nature-based leisure as we trace how written and visual angling texts, particularly through branding, not only depict what game-angling is about but also actually play a leading role in game-angling’s materiality, its emotional drives, its enactment, its longevity, and its relevance in the modern world. Our analytical lens is focused on game-angling because of its performative specificity, which, we contend, is not just an immensely popular leisure form but a tellingly complex conduit of society-nature relationality. Our data come from the pages of the leading game-angling periodical, Trout and Salmon magazine, which complements brand performances with recounted stories, learning and opinions in the articles it publishes. The adverts and articles within its pages, we contend, do more than represent angling but significantly contribute to the production of affective angling states of being – thereby relationally and materially producing the ‘how of [angling] emotion’ (Thien, 2005, p. 450). We also posit that if this is true for game-angling, it is true for other forms of nature-based leisure, and we set an analytical scene from which others might explore how representational forces act materially on and through other leisured landscapes, natures and environments.

Trout and Salmon has been in print since 1955 and is by far and away the most widely known and exalted game-angling periodical in the UK, Europe and beyond. It both represents game-angling culture and powerfully evokes the affective and emotional forces that drive game-angling-practice. Our analyses derive from a critical engagement with the discursive and visual strategies employed by the brands most commonly featured in Trout and Salmon, and in a selection of articles that exemplify important messages on what game-angling is about. Through this, we delve deep into game-angling’s driving forces as a culture, as an industry, and, more importantly, as an apparently innocuous leisure practice that in reality is a complex and carefully choreographed means of human and non-human entanglement and becoming.

In the first part of the paper, we review how the representational lens has been marginalised by the recent academic centring of bodily ways of knowing and doing, particularly in geographical enquiry that has a major influence on the social sciences more broadly. This said, we remain deeply attuned to the non-representational mission of recent scholarship, though we do intend on bringing a ‘representation-in-relation’ approach from the margins of that scholarship to the centre (cf. Anderson, 2019). In the second part, we introduce our methodology and analytical approach. In the third, we outline our findings and consider their implications for the scholarly understanding of game-angling and, by extension, related nature-based outdoor pursuits. We conclude with an exegesis that game-angling, and angling more generally, is a uniquely effective and emotionally charged activity; an activity that is simultaneously embodied and storied, and one which tells us much about what it is to be – and to strive to be – human and animal in the watery spaces that crisscross and penetrate our fluid emotional and material worlds.

Embodying and placing representation

Recent scholarly efforts to recenter the body as a focus of interest have been united by the conviction that the body is more than just a ‘blank slate’, patiently awaiting cultural signification (Shilling, 2003). This work, which includes detailed studies of leisure practices as different as running (Collinson & Hockey, 2007) and snowboarding (Edensor & Richards, 2007), have placed the body as a self-acting force in its own right, and not something obediently propelled by cultural codes and frameworks. As important and pathbreaking such efforts have been, their foregrounding of bodily agency has sometimes had the effect of obscuring the formative and enduring role of cultural, and indeed emotional, factors in shaping bodily and social behaviours. This is something contemporary feminist and affect scholars have noted for some time, with many mindful of how, in a modern market economy, the performance of ostensibly innocent everyday practices can exercise control over identity formation (Anderson, 2019; Butler, 1990; Haggard & Wearing, 1992; Thien, 2005). An important dynamic in this respect is how affect and emotion are discrete but fluid relational presences that interweave individual and shared human constructions of, and actions on and in, our world(s) (see Pile, 2010; González-Hidalgo & Zografos, 2020; for detailed discussions). As already mooted, non-representational theory has been majorly influential on this topic, as it positions affect as a pre-cognitive force that is energised and transmitted by bodies in and through space (see Thrift, 2007). Affect is thus a presence in itself that is not conjured through the human imagination or emotion or by any other sort of consciousness, but is a forcefield brought into being by bodies’ shared capacities to transmit affective energies to each other. Those affective energies register first with the body in its precognitive state but are quickly translated into recognisable feelings and emotions. And emotions are themselves ways of knowing, being and doing, all the while mediated by socio-spatial relationships (González-Hidalgo & Zografos, 2020; Pile, 2010). Though emotion can be represented and socially constructed, affect cannot be represented, though it can be manipulated through deliberative human actions (Pile, 2010; Anderson, 2006). While we accept the above formulation, we also argue that representational practices – such as textual practices – play their parts in this relational mix and can serve to powerfully guide affective and emotional flows towards highly charged material outcomes. Not least the ways in which human bodies are interconnected with and affect other bodies whether they be human, animal, technological, cultural or ideological (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2013).

On this we are drawn to Butler (1990), a major feminist thinker on performativity, who conceptualises the material and the discursive as mutually constitutive. For example, she argues that the body has no ontological status in itself ‘apart from the acts which constitute its reality’ (p. 136). Thus, the human body becomes a subject through performativity, which is not simply an act or a performance but is enabled by repeated acts that produce and reproduce norms. This enabling is discursive in that the subject or subjects who speak(s) are constituted by the language spoken (Butler, 1997). In this, discourse and discoursing are not simple instruments of expression and representation but are active acts in the material construction of the subjective body, and by extension the world it inhabits. Touch is fundamental here because it animates embodied subjects to a sentient apprehension of the world, not only in a singular sense but also through the collective agency of ‘technologies, structures, institutions, an array of others both personally and impersonally related, organic and life processes’ (Butler, 2015, p. 14). While Butler is sometimes charged with linguistic monism and determinism (see, for example, Vasterling, 1999), her insights can be put alongside the others we have discussed to inform our contention that the way representational practices have the power to affect our material and embodied doings has been underplayed by affectual scholarships in recent years. We offer this study not as a means of decrying these approaches but as a means of shedding some specific empirical light on how representational strategies can and do affect material-qua-cultural practices, in this case the emoted performance of the nature-based leisure that is game-angling.

Material-cultural enabling takes at least several interrelating forms in angling. Bull (2011), for instance, describes how the growing popularity and rapid evolution of game-angling has seen it spill out into environments that are increasingly man-made [sic] and artificial. For Eden and Barratt (2010), such developments reflect a growing inclination on the part of leisure anglers towards convenience, efficiency and reliability: so many anglers no longer ‘have to walk across fields, over stiles and along muddy tracks, sometimes for miles, to reach the legal or best fishing spots … access is provided right up to the water’s edge’ (p. 488). Second, fish – the focal actors around which all angling happens – exist within a vast array of species and cultivars that are increasingly subject to genetic manipulation in order to make them more sporting a quarry. Moreover, and despite often appearing solitary and individualistic, angling is effectively played out and constituted in and between the embodied and relational spaces of protagonists: at the water, in the pages of magazines and the sociality of angling clubs and such like (Bull, 2011; Mordue & Wilson, 2022). Angling spaces are thus private laboratories of discovery and innovation that are both physical and relational, individuated and shared, and communed via the telegraphs of various media where communities of practice and heterogeneous associations are formed, nourished, and maintained. While there are many media voices online, on TV, and in print, that engage the imagination of the angling body, Trout and Salmon magazine still stands as the voiced authority on all matters game-angling. Its pages are not only replete with stories of past angling adventures and how-to-do-it articles, but are brimming with tantalising adverts, infomercials and images of increasingly exotic game-angling locations (see Mordue, 2013). This is hardly surprising given that, as Austin et al. (2010) note, products – and we would include place-products in this – hold out the promise of new identities, reiterated established norms, more meaningful social interactions, and more authentic forms of bodily experience offering more fulfilling, natural lives.

That they do so is due in no small measure to brand performativities and branding strategies. As Pike (2009) says, branding is a powerful and pervasive process of commodification, entailing everything from the articulation of a brand’s value proposition in the global marketplace to its continuous reworking across space and time. Brands and branding processes are thus profoundly geographical, ensconced in ‘inescapable spatial associations’ (ibid., p. 619) that both contribute to and, on occasion, undermine the marketer’s work of cultivating positive customer sentiment and loyalty (see Pike, 2011). For Arvidsson (2005), these associations are crucial means through which brand equity is realised and safeguarded. And as Nogue and Vela (2018) note, these associations coalesce to constitute a powerful spatial-effective economy (Ahmed, 2004); an economy in which brands (and the spatial relations they imply) are rated as much on the basis of what they are supposed or purported to be, as to what they actually are (Olins, 2003).

As a crucial aspect of this, many brands are anxious to stamp their products with the magic of authenticity through, for example, claiming lineage and provenance – and thereby becoming materially grounded in time and space, and rooted in the minds and emotions of the consumer. This is especially apparent in the actions of brands in the leisure and tourism sector, where efforts to preserve popular imaginaries of place and space have been widespread (see Mordue, 2013). Moreover, Graham (2001) alludes to the ways in which tropes of authenticity persist in, among other things, place-based media and touristic representations that confer relatable products with an ‘undeniable authenticity as a pure expression of the “real”, the obvious, the natural’ (p. 60). By framing products in this way, brands not only instil products with inalienable values and emotional registers, they root technological advances as recrafted artefacts that uphold ancient lore while speaking to the performative demands of today’s knowing consumer. In this way, successful brands accrue a powerful effective energy and an emotional charge which electrifies their products to command significant premium in the global marketplace. Brands are therefore ‘relational effects’ (Law, 2009) with performative powers of their own that are reproduced each time a consumer interacts with them, and marketers try to understand those interactions in order to maximise their effective power over time and in as large a geography as is commercially optimal.

It is the relationality of branding and storying game-angling that drives this research, as it examines how game-angling is reproduced as a leisure culture, as a set of performative orientations towards nature, and as a long-established though ever-evolving industry that welds the materiality of business, nature and technology to the emotional vitality and imaginings of the angling body.

Methodology

Our empirical focus builds on the limited work done so far on branding in the performance of leisure. Specifically, we seek to examine how key game-angling brands have sought to perform their affective power over the decades, how those performances have evolved through technological change and market fluctuations, and whether the sporting values and narratives of game-angling and game-anglers have been shaped and altered by these shifts. The data presented in this article are drawn from a visual-textual analysis of editions of Trout and Salmon magazine published between 1968 and 2017, which Bauer Media describes as: ‘The world’s best game fishing magazine’, and ‘the next best thing to being there, on the bank” (www.greatmagazines.co.uk/fishing/trout-and-salmon-magazine.html). The readership mostly ranges between the ages of 45 to 70 years, who tend to be experienced ‘fishermen’, with more than half having been game-angling for more than twenty years. Readers also have much higher-than-average incomes and are noted for their propensity to spend large sums of money on high-quality products (bauermedia.co.uk; also see Mordue, 2013).

As discussed, we consider visual-textual analysis to be a powerful means of understanding the assembling agency of representational practices in (re)producing geographical imaginations, associated brand values, and leisure performativities in the physical qua relational spaces of game-angling. As Merriman (2014) puts it, representational artefacts can evoke a powerful embodied being-with-practice (see also Hannam & Knox, 2005), and our focus is on ‘what representations do rather than what they stand in for … [and] how representational practices are part of and constitute worlds’ (Anderson, 2019, p. 1122 emphasis in original). The ‘questions that animate this work are pragmatic ones: … what does something do? How are people moved, changed, or otherwise affected by a spoken word, a seen image, a text as it is read?’ (ibid.: 1124). We sought to answer such questions by sourcing and analysing the branding content and articled tropes of Trout and Salmon magazine over a 60-year period, with the late 1960s as our starting point because the 1960s was a pivotal decade in the development of modern angling. It was then that new manufacturing techniques and synthetic materials such as fibreglass – used in the making of rods – signalled a shift from traditional craftwork and the use of natural materials towards a (post)modern commercial angling world, a world also characterised by business expansion, amalgamations and take-overs. This 60 years coverage also provides enough of a timescale to examine how game-angling has evolved, and/or remained traditionally rooted in the (post)modern era. We began the analysis by engaging – separately to begin with – in a close reading of 50 magazines spread over, and thereby punctuating, the period (see Figure 1). We accessed these through purchases on the online auction site eBay; a surprisingly comprehensive – if seemingly not widely utilised – site of archival and historiographic reflection (see DeLyser et al., 2004).

Figure 1. Overview of sources consulted.

We then compared our notes and agreed on the content we would subject to further collective scrutiny. This amounted to 225 pages of text and images, of which 206 were in the form of adverts and 19 were in the form of advertorials or other informational content. All materials were selected and analysed both for their denotative (or literal) force – that which is conveyed through their literal and obvious meaning – and their connotative (or implied) content, which, framed within structures of meaning, alludes to deeper themes and ideas (Bell, 2004. This content was then scanned and coded into nodes using NVivo 12 (see Braun & Clarke, 2006), whereby our conceptual understanding of the data was elaborated through an inductive process of constant comparison in which data were examined and compared to one another (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Our earlier notes provided a preliminary structure for coding, and following numerous iterations a total of 6 main themes were distilled: episteme versus phronesis; authenticity versus novelty; rootedness versus rootlessness; control versus contingency; immediacy versus mediation; and economy versus luxury. In this paper, we explore these themes under two overarching, thematic headings: Science, innovation, status and craft; and Becoming angler, becoming animal.

We conducted the textual analysis fully attuned to the agency of consumers who engage this content knowingly and reflexively, as we were attuned to how the magazines and their adverts engage with their readership knowingly, thoughtfully and reflexively. Furthermore, in an effort to surface some of the relational complexity involved in choosing, purchasing and using angling products, in our presentation of findings, we move between a conventional narrative mode and a more performative mode of analysis. Thus, reflecting on our experiences of encountering and using these items as active agents ourselves both in our consumption and analysis of the data. We also carefully read key Trout and Salmon articles that captured the game-angling zeitgeist at particular times over the research period, this informed our analysis at the macro level and we have selectively sited some of that content to reflect important recurrent themes in the sport over the 60 years.

Findings and analysis

Science, innovation, status and craft

One of the most prominent themes to emerge in our analysis was the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity. On the one hand, many of the brands encountered continued to find meaning and value in traditional depictions of anglers and angling. Idyllic scenes of rural life were particularly commonplace, permeating the entire span of the visual-textual content we engaged, demonstrating near uniformity in depicting scenes of rural and countryside life in which nature, devoid of humans except for the occasional angler, takes centre stage. Such scenes are a familiar feature of touristic depictions of the British countryside, establishing it as a place of naturalness and stability – which it may be for some, but certainly not all (Duggan, 2022). On the other hand, many of these same brands sought to combine their allegiance to the past with a fresh and forward-thinking proclivity – either way the desire to exercise greater control over one’s circumstances is strongly represented. Thus, brand narratives imbued with a sense of objectivity and rationality were common and imparted a certain clarity and confidence in these brands’ attitudes to research and development and innovation. For all its apparent ‘arts and craft’ simplicity, fly-fishing is a highly technical activity requiring dedicated equipment and technique. This is exemplified perhaps most of all in the production of high-tech fly-fishing rods which are judged by their ‘feel’, ‘life’, lightness, and responsiveness in combination with the power to handle challenging conditions and the angling dream of landing a large fish. To achieve this ‘Holy Grail’ of qualities the drive for improvement is relentless and technically very demanding, with brands promising continuous product improvement and regularly exhorting customers to expect more, both from themselves and their competitors.

The Hardy brand is the pre-eminent British game-angling brand featured in Trout and Salmon magazine both in terms of its pinnacle position in the marketplace and in the frequency it features in the magazine. Moreover, Hardy continuously signals its commitment to rigorous research-based and practice-based development; not least by drawing attention to the patents on which its products are based and the royal warrants that attest to their technical excellence and in-use experiential superiority. For example, the Hardy ‘Sovereign’ range of fly-rods is a nomenclature reference to Hardy’s royal approval, linking such cultural capital to patented innovation in the carbon-fibre technology of the rods themselves. Lacking the same heritage and betraying, it seems, a need to compensate, the angling brand Airflo places great emphasis on technological capital by pointing out its products are not only built from rigorous in-house research and development processes, but also undergo rigorous peer review. With regard to its specialised fly lines for example, Airflo says ‘[i]ndependent research has proved that AirFlo lines are millions of times more sensitive than stretchy, traditional P.V.C lines’ which is ‘old’ technology they have surpassed (Trout and Salmon, March 1991). As with the much-demanded haptic qualities of the best fly-fishing equipment, particularly fly-rods, the reference to sensitivity is important here because the lack of stretch in the new Airflo line implies better ‘feel’ and touch, extending and deepening the angler’s presence and imminence at and in the water. Things which are seen in fly-fishing circles as crucial to enjoyment and success.

Further demonstrating how improved imminence in the field can be achieved from engaging with what is written on the page, several brands repeatedly over the years sought to emphasise that effectiveness in the lab is one thing but effectiveness in the field really is the ultimate test. While Hardy’s cultural capital is, so-far, unsurpassed, it is aware that it cannot sit on its technological laurels, so it is always mindful of (re)establishing its hard-earned credentials by lauding its rigorous research and development coupled to tireless testing of its innovations by expert anglers at and in the water. On the other hand, the Norwegian fly-fishing brand Guideline, which was established more than a century after Hardy, compensates for its more limited heritage by celebrating the exacting standards of its head of design, former fly-casting world champion Leif Stävmo, which resulted in ‘hundreds of rejected [rod] blanks, countless hours of testing, numerous sleepless nights and some very sore shoulders’ (Trout and Salmon, March 2011). Similarly, the middle-ranking brand Daiwa stresses it is anglers in the field who are the ultimate arbiters of performance: ‘So much for what the boffins at Daiwa have to say. But … .what can these rods do that others can’t? In search of the answer, we travelled up to the River Spey to talk to two of the finest fishermen in their fields’ (Trout and Salmon, July 1991). Not to be outdone here, Hardy too lauds expert and practice-based endorsements at every opportunity. For instance, in the June 1987 edition of Trout and Salmon, one of its adverts reminds readers that ’[w]hile others talk about innovations….it is only talk’. ‘The facts’, it goes on to say, as it references a slew of international awards, ‘speak for themselves’. Hardy consistently repeats the strapline ‘designed for fishermen by fishermen’ (see, for example, Trout and Salmon, March 1991), and the ‘Holy Grail’ for true game-anglers Hardy subtly stresses is not found through gadgetry for its own sake, but is arrived at through the haptics of equipment that allow the angler emotional, instinctual, imperceptible presence and imminence in the subterranean mysteries of game-fish.

Hardy’s positionality in this regard is rooted in a trope of technological advance being seemingly at odds with the foundational craft-based values upon which game-angling was built, particularly fly-fishing. As (Bratzel, 2006), p. 201) reminds us:

Fly-fishing is deemed upper-class and sophisticated, environmentally sound, and technology-free or, to put it another way, natural. Bass [and coarse] fishing, on the other hand, is the fishing of the unwashed, lower-class masses; it rapes the environment and suffers from all the excesses of technological consumerism.

Similarly, Hummel (1994) says that game-angling is more elitist, exclusive, and minimalist – preferring artistry, and being in nature over the technological fetishism of lesser angling forms. The language and images used by Hardy and its US counterpart, Orvis, project sophisticated knowing both on behalf of the brand and its consumers to overcome tradition-advancement and craft-technology dualisms. For example, in the early 1990s Hardy introduced its latest carbon, resin and nano technology infused Zenith fly-rod range; aiming to keep the magic of invention both wonderous and real, it stressed in the July 1991 edition of Trout and Salmon that the effectiveness of these rods ‘in the field’ surprised and confounded even them. In doing this, Hardy not only draws attention to the alchemy of their innovations, but that such endeavour is yet more evidence of their open-ended commitment to the long-held pursuit of angling perfection in all its emotional, experiential and technical purity.

By contrast, the very much less elevated brand Milbro consistently, and typical of its ilk, tended to emphasise much more the narrow utility value of its wares. An approach evident, for example, even in the relatively early days of fly-fishing’s mass-market expansion, when it extolled the ‘killing power’ of its ultra-premium fly-rod, the Trufly (Trout and Salmon, July 1969). Such utility may be attractive to certain elements and sentiments in the marketplace but, arguably, at least for the purist fly angler, it is in danger of bringing Milbro all too close to the values of coarse (angling) mongering (see Hummel, 1994; Mordue and Wilson, 2018). The less than premium brands also engaged a tendency to reduce the passion for game-angling to a passion-filled battle between hunter and hunted – as Daiwa, for example, exemplified in its slogans ‘just you and your prey’ and ‘it’s in your hands’ (Trout and Salmon, March 2001) intimating that the fish is a prize and agency is the preserve of the human hunter/handler. That said, such human centred technical promise, whatever the brand, always stopped short of promising angling predictability and certain success. As Daiwa rather subtly alludes to, in the same edition, to the vital tensions between natural uncertainty and the human quest for angling dominance, telling the reader ‘You’re in control’ but tempers this with an ironically askance submission: ‘somebody … should tell the fish’. Like all angling brands, Daiwa needs to keep alive the spirit of adventure, unpredictability and awakening alongside the desirability of further technical advance towards the ultimate goal of catching fish. Indeed, that goal made certain should never be part of angling lest the jeopardy in the sport would be lost and the whole emotional, sporting and business endeavour destroyed by the dystopia of ultimate technological efficiency.

Becoming angler, becoming animal

The issue of maintaining the fine balancing of affectivity and effectiveness in game-angling was frequently alluded to in the opinion pieces of Trout and Salmon, but were voiced with particular concern in the earlier editions we consulted. For example, discussing a ‘fish at all costs’ mindset that seemed to be ‘infecting’ certain areas of game-angling, the angling writer J.D. Birkett (Trout and Salmon, April 1969) mooted that this was a by-product threat of the emerging ‘materialistic age’ and the 1960s blind faith in the benefits of the ‘white heat of technology’. Intimating that newfangled innovations like carbon-fibre rods might indeed be lightning rods through which the cultures of consumption and accumulation could tear at the very fabric and integrity of what game-angling was/is all about. Not that Birkett was a luddite against all technological advance, but he was cautious about welcoming technology that promulgated the desires and aesthetics of ‘glitzy glamour’ and output over the ethics of ‘quiet quality’. In this, the act of catching and landing a fish is not a tug-of-war, rather, it is a dance, the performance of which is contingent on the ability to sense and respond to the movements of one’s adversarial partner. The game-angler’s passion and dominance, then, is, or should be, more about congress than instrumental achievement.

From a study of game anglers in Finnish Lapland, Bull (2009) found the contest of angler and fish is less one in which the human asserts inevitable supremacy, but is one in which the human is ‘animalised’ through the encounter. The good angler, then, rather than being a single-minded hunter, peels off the social pretentions and performances necessary in the everyday of human-to-human interaction for a more-than-human unfolding of a subdued animality. An animality that is not wild and viciously untrammelled but one in which the human is set free to become instinctually and affectively natural – a human animal. Which is illustrated rather cleverly and vividly in the challenger brand Sonik’s ad depicting the perfect angling being, a chimera with a man’s body and the head of a kingfisher wearing Sonik waterproofs (Trout and Salmon, July 2012).

Up until the 1960s, such chimeric qualities seemed unattainable without the predominant use of natural materials in vital equipment like split-cane fly-rods, but such equipment was in practice heavy, expensive, and more difficult to master compared to the new carbon-fibre rods. Carbon-fibre would promise to meet the demands of the modern angler who was short of the resources and leisure time to purchase and command the old means of doing things ‘naturally’. Likewise, access to the best game-angling waters had always been prohibitive, not only because of cost but because on many of these waters the ‘average’ angler did not have the social connections to pass through the barriers of elite riparian ownership (see Mordue, 2009). Nowadays, split cane fly-rods, like elite old reels and other angling equipment, have left the riverbanks altogether to become objects traded for their nostalgia and charismatic presence in antique markets and online bazaars (see, for example, theantiqueangler.com).

Again, always keen to sustain their cultural and technological heritage and superiority, Hardy and Orvis have built their very own angling museums, cementing their authenticity and serving up a ‘material expression of the brand and offer[ing] a place of seduction and desire’ (Crewe, 2016, p. 516). Such performative dynamic sit particularly well with Simonsen’s (2010) contention that ‘[e]motions are neither “actions” (something we do) nor “passions” (forces beyond our control that simply happen to us) – they are both at once’ (p. 227; also see Preston-Whyte, 2008). In Hardy’s case, this is continuously evoked in its signature design icon – a silhouette of Alnwick Castle, which is synonymous with historic Northumberland, home to some of the UK’s finest game-angling waters – and serving, as it does, as an ever-present reminder to the angling community of Hardy’s unique place in their world (cf. Nogue & Vela, 2018).

By constant finessing the differences between the merely good and the truly excellent, uniquely authentic and always memorable, elite angling brands like Orvis and Hardy encourage potential customers to enter their quest for excellence within the increasingly fine margins between angling success and failure. They do this in a manner which conjures game-angling excellence as a practice of continuous learning. That is, learning of the endless detail needed to master the limitless possibilities for improvement and mastering the avoidance of culpable failure that is the destiny of ordinary anglers because of their lack of knowledge and/or of their substandard equipment. Both Trout and Salmon and the brands in its pages are deeply invested in propagating and cultivating these tropes. For example, many brands set out to evoke the possibility of future missed opportunities and repeated lapses so they can produce potential cures. Typifying this strategy, the brand Leeda, a major producer of fly-fishing line, is clear in its admonishment to not ‘let the fish get away’ and attaching considerable importance to the avoidance of ‘fish losses’ through line breakages as a result a lack of awareness as to which brand of line is best (Trout and Salmon, July 1991). For Bull (2009), mastering detail is a distinguishing feature of the classic male angler, but he suggests that such tropes obscure other subtle traits of masculinity that are far removed from the one-dimensional task of catching fish. They are about being wholly present and connected with fish in the right place at the right time. Premium brands stress the vitality of this angling immanence, and in that make their equipment essential to it. For example, Orvis advises: ‘When the sun is about to set on a full day’s fly-fishing and suddenly the fish start to rise, it’s then it pays to have a rod of exceptional quality’ (Trout and Salmon, April 1991).

Fly-fishing is a very personal form of angling, with the ideal situation placing the individual angler, usually a white male, standing midstream, alone, in full communion with his quarry and his surroundings. In J.D. Birkett’s feature article in the April 1969 edition of Trout and Salmon, where he foreshadows with concern the expansion of fly-fishing into the mass market, he extols the virtues of the individuated game-angler, pontificating that ‘people don’t want to be equal. They want to be unique’. While this world view might seem elitist and anachronistic, it has not left game-angling’s core principles over the intervening years, which is evoked in a one-page advert by Orvis in the April 2011 edition of Trout and Salmon, that depicts a lone man standing in an idyllic river setting sporting an array of Orvis equipment, and telling the reader: ‘This could easily be you’. Suggesting that simply purchasing Orvis gear places you in angling paradise, no matter the real circumstances of where you fish, and thereby mobilising ‘fleeting daydreams and fantasies, as more comprehensively worked out paradises, utopias, and worlds to come’, that provide passports into ‘extra yous’ (Thrift, 2007, p. 14).

While such tropes have lost nothing of their purchase over time in the pages of Trout and Salmon, there has been a notable tactical, even strategic, change in the way brands think anglers could, and should, perform. During the first two decades of our window of observation, the cultural benefits, features and attributes of particular high-end products were very much to the fore, precisely linked them to particular angling practices. Over the past three decades, however, high-end products have become assemblages in an ever more complete experiential angling proposition, mobilising anglers to become, say, an Orvis or a Hardy man [sic], and increasingly an Orvis or Hardy woman. In the 1960s, for example, game-angling tended to be portrayed as a discretely bounded activity, largely devoid of overt labelling and merchandising. By the 1990s it was increasingly framed as the centrepiece of a larger experiential environment created by the brands themselves. Hardy aficionados could team an ‘Ideal’ rod with a ‘Perfect’ reel and step out in a pair of ‘Invincible’ brogues – playing the landed gentleman, even though the vast majority of consumers would only own the shoes and not the ground they walked on. Thus, Hardy clothing as well as luggage and other branded paraphernalia became essential parts in the cultural enactment of being the well-practiced British gentleman game-angler. Orvis’s apparel, on the other hand, would speak to a more modern, outdoors, American frontiersman spirit, which would transport the angler to somewhere magically grand even when adorned by a British angler in the more bucolic setting of the British countryside. Thus, Hardy has always been more effectively tweed than Gore-Tex, scotch whisky than bourbon, and effortless elegance over rugged masculinity. Other brands tell their own cultural stories, with Abu, for example – founded in Sweden in 1921 and now Abu Garcia since its takeover by the US firm Garcia in 1984 - performing a distinctively Scandinavian aesthetic through the demeanour of many of its angling products. Nonetheless, Orvis and Hardy best articulate the history of modern fly-fishing as it travelled from the UK streams and rivers, where its rules and mores were founded, to the US in the late-1800s where fly-fishing dominated angling on the game rivers there and expanded new markets for its performative necessities and elevating niceties. From here, fly-fishing travelled to the rest of the world, adapting to new landscapes and new branding and product opportunities as it went (see Mordue, 2009).

A noticeable feature of how Trout and Salmon magazine has changed over the years in line with fly-fishing’s global expansion, is the growth of adverts in its pages selling game-angling holidays and vacations in an increasingly diverse range of international as well-domestic destinations (also see Mordue, 2013). Another prominent theme we identified was a growing reference to value for money. Nearly all brands saw fit to ally their claims to quality, alongside the tailoring of equipment to suit a range of environments and watery conditions, with allusions to value that suited all angling pockets. In the 1970s, for example, even some of the most aspirational brands pivoted their marketing strategies in response to plunging disposable incomes and mounting unemployment, as they also rushed to cater to the expansion of the new-middle-classes and their desires for aspirational leisure and travel consumption (Mowforth & Munt, 2015; Urry, 1991). Not only did more game-angling places and opportunities become available, lifetime warranties would be extended to more products, and price lists came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the adverts of even leading brands. Marketers craning to find creative ways of reconciling the imperative for value for money with the enduring demands for quest, angling perfection, and angling time and space is illustratively manifest in the American brand Gladding’s insistence that its Rimfly fly reel ‘not only saves you money, it saves you valuable fishing time’ (Trout and Salmon, June 1975).

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored the affective registers of game-angling, particularly fly-fishing, through which certain brands are activated, which in turn activates game-angling emotionally, culturally, and physically. We posit that brands do not simply represent certain angling proclivities and behaviours, but through their enactments of desire and technological progress they have agential power to mobilise and reproduce them. Our textual engagement with key game-angling brands and discourses tells of the ways in which brands create the world of game-angling through material work on the affective states that embody game-angling as a compelling, passion-riven, even addictive, practice. They do this by upholding and honing game-angling’s core values while continuously reworking and advancing game-angling technologies, and emplacing them in idealised spaces and perfected states of angling being that tantalise and spark the angling body into (e)motion.

More specifically, our research has uncovered the following thematic practices. First, the extent to which newfangled game-angling technologies mediate and refashion the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Rather than technological advances expanding the range and repertoire of the minimalist game-angling toolkit over the years – as has happened in coarse angling equipment – they have deepened the sensory qualities of products to improve immanence in the field and imperceptibility between angler and fish in the water, that in turn produce immense affective registering in the sport. At the same time, game-angling’s core principles, affectivities, and emotional charges have not changed, although the demand for affordable equipment and fishing opportunities has grown significantly. In this, brands have played a crucial double role: while they have spread those core principles, passions and affectivities they have strictly regulated them, protecting them from new-fangled corruptions and foreign incursions. Within this field of affective mobilisation and management, upmarket brands stand supreme, simultaneously guarding and expanding their distinctions by stressing the artistry, feel, and experiential nature of their products alongside their superior technical excellence. Further down the chain, brands emphasise functional and technical competences much more, are less aesthetically and emotionally refined in messaging and product finish, and tend towards depicting fish as prey rather than sporting partners. Technical solutions are also quite frequently offered by these brands that compensate for handler shortcomings which can jeopardise the ultimate prize, a fish in the net – though not so much that the sport becomes perilously predictable and stripped of mystery, emotion, and adventure.

Trout and Salmon magazine itself, like other game-angling texts, plays a vital role in expanding and policing game-angling’s core principles and affectivities in the turbulences of an expanding marketplace, not simply by giving space for angling brands to perform their wares but by swelling its pages with carefully crafted, often lyrical, desire-filled advice on how and where to find some approximation of game-angling perfection (see Mordue, 2013). The overall message is that as one grows through the levels of game-angling – as determined by knowledge and cultural accumulation, emotional probity and intelligence, the ability to apply the correct and best available equipment in the best available places at the various price points according to budget – the more one becomes expert and thereby unfolded into a more-than-human world of animalised being (c.f. Bull, 2011; Preston-Whyte, 2008). The journey to expertise is thus a chimeric one where game-fish and angler become something more-than. As Ingold (2011) puts it, after Deleuze and Guattari (1998), such more-than beings are relationally constituted, and become resolved to each other through practice, but without arriving at a predetermined point. In other words, they become imperceptible as they quietly and ghostly move through mysterious spaces of encounter, which is all the more a powerfully emotive journey because they are very different animals arriving from very different worlds. This is born out by the texts we have consulted who consistently tell that the game-angling quest is not simply to catch fish but to become more-than-human and reach a game-angling Valhalla to which only certain brands can ‘truly’ lead the way. Game-angling offers only one such place, and we are sure other Valhallas exist in other immersive leisure forms. Though angling is a particularly complex ‘multispecies leisure’ (Danby et al., 2019), and studies of it are taking their place in the pantheon of other research that is ‘“bringing animals in” to leisure studies’ (ibid.: 291), it is far from being alone in the way it melds the natural, the technological and cultural warps and wefts of modern leisure. We would therefore encourage other researchers to explore how everyday material, emotional and cultural dynamics combine to bring various natures into recreational being. Particularly those commodified promises of exquisite leisure that might transport us beyond the Tantalusian confines of being human into active states of becoming something more.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).