Touched by water: The body in scuba diving

Abstract Focusing on the leisure practice of scuba diving, I examine how ’touch’ works as a sense experienced through material engagement with the aquatic world for both physical and metaphorical effect. Technologically facilitated and environmentally positioned, scuba diving brings together the distal and the proximate to produce a particular experience of space and a particular mobilisation of emotion. The paper positions itself within the conceptual context of embodiment in order to consider corporeality in terms of its visceral and material capacities that effect and direct movement, as well as the experience of the sensuous via an engagement with the diving environment. In doing so, it draws upon work within the social sciences that has acknowledged the importance of an embodied engagement with environments that are seen as therapeutic or restorative for their ability to instil a sense of well-being and calm through a re-centering of the self. Drawing out the meditative capacities of scuba diving, the paper considers the aquatic world as, for some divers, a therapeutic landscape.