|
- Thomas R.
McGuire
- Bureau of
Applied Research in Anthropology
- University of
Arizona
- Tucson,
AZ
- U.S.A.
Cod Traps and Credible
Claims: Some Internal Critiques of Social Science:
An Issues Position Paper
Two of social science's skeletons
need to be brought out of the closet. The first concerns the
representations and realities of folk management. The second
involves technological change and our reluctance to
acknowledge its implications
1. Credible claims for folk
management systems
In Folk Management in the
World's Fisheries: Lessons for Modern Fisheries
Management (1994), Christopher L. Dyer and James R.
McGoodwin have usefully assembled a collection of
state-of-the-art thinking and representations of "folk
management" in fisheries. Each of the contributors professes
the value of folk management; most proceed to document
failures. Since the volume seeks a readership among
biologists and managers, and indeed the editors invite such
readers to take particular notice of the "lessons for modern
fisheries management" appended to each of the case studies,
it would behoove us to reflect on what a field-based social
science has to offer.
Folk management is a convenient
label for a set of related notions: indigenous, traditional,
bottom-up, organic... management. In their introduction,
Dyer and McGoodwin couple this set closely with
sustainability. Thus, "fishers' appreciation of the
sustainability of utilized natural resources creates a sense
of environmental awareness that manifests itself as folk
management" (p. 6). The ensuing essays treat this more as an
hypothesis than a fact, and in her summation, Evelyn
Pinkerton assesses the robustness of the claims put forward
on behalf of folk management.
Dyer and McGoodwin introduce
several of these claims on behalf of folk management and
defend them. First, against the contention that many
indigenous management efforts are directed to controlling
access to space, not levels of fishing effort, they note
that "we also see a proliferation of case studies showing
that it is sometimes much more" (p. 2). Second, against the
observation that contemporary folk management regimes are
frequently reactions to externally imposed management
schemes, not long-standing traditions, they argue that,
regardless, "these are still important signposts indicating
how local fishing peoples feel the fisheries they work in
should be managed" (p. 3). Third, against the argument that
the globalization of the world economy has obliterated true
'folk societies,' they urge readers to "consider as 'folk
managers' any fishers who are linked to a renewable
resource, regardless of their degree of cultural,
technological, or socioeconomic sophistication" (p. 4).
Finally, they speak to the argument that modernization has
instilled mentalities of competitiveness and individualism
which supersede societal-level concerns. Such assertions,
they suggest, "are clearly contradicted, however, in the
documentation of robust systems of folk management existing
among otherwise modern and contemporary fishing peoples.
Indeed, most of the case studies in this book concern fully
modern fishers, contemporary 'folk,' who live in today's
modern world" (p. 9).
The first case, by Caroline
Pomeroy, is a study of failed efforts to maintain clearly
defined and exclusive resource boundaries, ambivalent
support on the part of government resource agencies for
local organizational efforts, and a resultant
common-property tragedy for Mexico's Lake Chapala fisheries.
McGoodwin's own contribution suggests that the prevailing
mode of recent folk management in the coastal fisheries of
Pacific Mexico is violence, subsiding now with the
realization that localized management is "...hardly worth
the effort, given the pervasive pessimism about ever seeing
the more valuable marine resources return to their former
abundance (p. 50)." Dyer and Richard Leard compare several
oyster harvesting regimes along to U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and
find a stable and sustainable management system among
ethnically homogeneous immigrants from Yugoslavia who lease
oyster beds from the State of Louisiana.
William Ward and Pricilla Weeks
look at managers, not the managed, in the Texas oyster
industry. They make a powerful case that management by the
state's Coastal Fisheries Division would be enhanced by
incorporating fishers' understanding of the resource. But
they also acknowledge that an offer by the CDF to suspend
all state regulation of oyster harvesting -- an opening,
perhaps, for local management -- was viewed by the industry
as a covert attempt to destroy that industry:
Embedded in
this view is a perception of human nature that is
unvoiced but in basic agreement with the CFD
biologists who say that if humans are given a public
resource to use with no restrictions, they will "keep
taking until the last one is gone" (p. 108)
Few of the remaining case studies
in the volume fulfill the editors' optimism for folk
management in the world's fisheries. Problems abound, and
are well-documented in contributions from Eugene Anderson,
Duane Gill, Craig Palmer, Svein Jentoft and Knut Mikalsen.
Only Brent Stoffle and his colleagues report on an
apparently successful incidence of local control over access
to resources -- the reefs off Buen Hombre, Dominican
Republic. In this case, the management regime was preserved
by the relative isolation of the community and the Dominican
government's willingness to deputize local fishermen to
incarcerate intruders. Even here, though, there were ominous
signs:
The future of
the coral reef ecosystem around Buen Hombre, like that
of others worldwide, is in doubt. Fishers in Buen
Hombre nowadays report lower fish catches and smaller
fish sizes compared with those caught by the previous
generation... (p. 135).
Are we to throw the baby out with
the bathwater? Folk management is a seductive concept for
social scientists, but in practice it becomes subverted by
unresponsive resource bureaucracies, uncontrolled
technological change, overcapitalization, overpopulation,
and, indeed, by the "rise of the rapacious fisher," as
Anthony Davis documents for the small-boat fishery caught in
the capitalist market system of Atlantic Canada (Davis
1991). Pinkerton, in her summary, suggests that the
development of folk management regimes is not
inevitable:
...we should
assume that a long period of stable population size,
location, and resource use is required as an
opportunity for local populations to experiment,
learn, and adapt to local environments (p.
318).
There are, nevertheless, some
important lessons for modern fisheries management in this
collection, as the title promises. These are contained in
the two contributions least concerned with folk management.
Kenneth Ruddle and Lawrence Felt examine local knowledge,
and they share a conclusion that such knowledge, in Felt's
words, must be "deconstructed and then reconstructed" (p.
253) before it can be effectively consumed by resource
managers and incorporated into regulatory regimes. For
Ruddle, this project calls for scientific verification of
systematically-collected knowledge. For Felt and colleagues
at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Neis 1992; Neis et
al. 1995; Felt and Neis 1996; see below), it involves an
understanding of the context in which fishers make
assertions about resources. For his case, Newfoundland
salmon fishers, Felt suggests that
conclusions
derived from local knowledge will be highly colored by
such external factors as imposed management
restrictions, competition with other claimants for the
resource, and degree of participation in wider fisher
organizations battling other claimants to the resource
(p. 253).
Failure to understand -- to
deconstruct and reconstruct -- the processes underlying what
fishers say about a resource makes it easy for
biologists and managers to discount what fishers know
about that resource. In a collection largely documenting the
obstacles to folk management in the world's fisheries, this
is perhaps the most useful lesson to emerge. Fishers have a
great deal to contribute, in both knowledge and practice, to
the sustainable use of resources. But if their sociologists
and anthropologists persist in uncritically accepting these
contributions, hook, line and sinker, we may indeed have few
lessons for modern fisheries management.
2. Cod traps1
In the 1970s and 1980s, a very rich
scholarship in political economy developed in Atlantic
Canada, much of it an effort to interject and fine-tune a
class analysis of the fisheries. The intellectual
protagonist for this work was the economic historian Harold
A. Innis, whose monumental tomes, The Fur Trade in
Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History
(1930) and The Cod Fisheries: The History of an
International Economy (1940) defined the "staples
theory" of Canadian development. A famous passage from The
Fur Trade, later read by some scholars as an incipient
dependency theory, states:
The economic history of Canada has
been dominated by the discrepancy between the centre and the
margin of western civilization... agriculture, industry,
transportation, trade, finance and governmental activities
tend to become subordinate to the production of the staple
for a more highly specialized manufacturing community (Innis
1956:385).
The radical critique of Innis,
however, considered his driving concern for environment and
technology (including some rather cursory observations on
the life histories of beavers and codfish) as "commodity
fetishism," and thus Innis himself as little more than a
classical, not Marxist, political economist. David McNally
sets the alternative agenda:
For Marx...
capitalist production is fundamentally the production
and reproduction of the capitalist social relationship
-- the dialectical relation between wage-labour and
capital. Once production is viewed simply as a
technico-material process -- as in Smith, Ricardo,
Veblen, Innis, etc. -- then the dynamics of social
production are reduced to those of technological
change (1981:45).
In his minor classic on the
northwest Newfoundland fisheries, From Traps to
Draggers (1985), Peter Sinclair is concerned with
technological change, but his focus is on the nexus of
technology and class, not technology and fish. His resulting
analysis is an internal critique of structural Marxism.
Domestic commodity production -- fishers using small boats,
family labor, and trap and handline/dragger technology --
have survived and even expanded in numbers. In part this is
due to state intervention in the form of unemployment
insurance and the occasional availability of wage-labor jobs
in processing plants. But he also attributes it to the fact
that
...the
uncertain, seasonal and small-scale nature of inshore
fishing leaves domestic commodity producers free from
the direct competition of large-scale capitalists for
whom this type of investment is
unattractive...Furthermore, fish companies prefer the
quality and size of dragger-caught fish (Sinclair
1985:144).
State intervention also played a
role in first encouraging, then dampening, the expansion of
the longline/dragger fleets. By providing loans and
subsidies, federal and provincial governments enabled local
residents to acquire vessels and gear and generated, in
Sinclair's terms, an incipient class of petty capitalist
producers, with roots in traditional communities but with
increasing interest in capital accumulation -- and, in the
1980s, increasing debts. Sinclair notes the technological
efficiency of the dragger: "skippers can count on the
pinpoint accuracy of a Loran C navigation aid, radar, echo
sounder, VHF/CB radio and perhaps an automatic pilot"
(1985:84). The strength of his analysis, however, is of the
growing social tensions created by economic differentiation
and frequent militancy of fishers and plant workers, joined
in the Newfoundland Fishermen, Food and Allied Workers'
Union. In short, these are precisely the issues of class and
power which went undeveloped in Harold Innis' staples
approach to Canadian history. But, as Sinclair would
subsequently acknowledge in a footnote to a postmortem on
the collapse of the cod,
An example of
research that would have benefited from more attention
to ecology is P.R. Sinclair, From Traps to
Draggers... (Maguire, Neis, and Sinclair
1995:150).
A pair of Canadian political
economists to broach ecological issues in the 1980s was
Ralph Matthews and John Phyne (Matthews and Phyne 1988; cf.
Matthews 1993). Part of their effort went to fine-tuning
Sinclair's class analysis but the focus was a critique of
the Department of Fisheries and Ocean's acceptance of
limited entry as a solution to open access problems in the
fishery. Such policies, they contend, simply foster the
private accumulation of capital, not enhance resource
management (Matthews and Phyne 1988:162).
Consonant with the growing
literature on local management, Matthews and Phyne contend
that instead of limited entry licensing, what was needed was
government involvement to maintain the integrity of
"traditional cooperative measures for policing that common
property" (1988:167). Describing the traditional practice of
drawing for a limited number of cod trap berths, they
conclude that "traditional practices ensure that resource
depletion due to over-fishing does not occur" (1988:167).
The assertion, of course, raises the familiar problematic
that all but scuttled an earlier cultural ecology: it is not
demonstrated.
Much of the political economic
scholarship in Atlantic Canada provided a trenchant and
necessary critique of Canadian fisheries policy and
development. And, by examining issues of class and power, it
filled the lacunae in Harold Innis's staples theory. But I
would suggest that it did not capture the magnitude of the
stock crisis as it unfolded surreptitiously through the
1980s. Since there is now a developing body of retrospective
ecological understanding, we might ask whether lines of
analysis rooted in the nexus of environment and technology
might have fared better.
Coincident with the drastic stock
declines of the late 1980s, there was a resurgence of
interest among some of Atlantic Canada's social scientists
in fishers' local knowledge of resources. One noteworthy
effort is the ongoing research of Barbara Neis and Larry
Felt (Neis 1992; Felt 1994; Felt and Neis 1996) from
Memorial University to record this local knowledge and
endeavor to interject it into fisheries management. Using
archival and anthropological sources (notably from the 1960s
and 1970s) and field interviews with inshore fishers in the
1990s, they have underscored what many inshore fishers were
claiming in the 1980s: the stock was in trouble. And Alan
Christopher Finlayson analyzes why such local wisdom of
inshore fishermen indeed played little role in the stock
assessment process through the 1980s.
Finlayson's well-regarded book,
Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern
Cod Stock Assessments From 1977-1990 (1994), prepared as
a master's thesis at Memorial, is a dialogue with key actors
in the assessment process through the decade. One of those
actors, Jake Rice, head of the cod assessment program at
DFO, is given the opportunity to respond to Finlayson's
critique of DFO's "interpretative flexibility" regarding the
contradictory data coming from the research surveys and the
offshore commercial catches, as well as to DFO's
unwillingness or failure to account for equally
contradictory signals coming from the inshore sector. Rice
recounts the problem:
"The
fishermen's inshore catches were completely
incompatible with what we now view as the trajectory.
The stock built until around '84, stayed stable to '87
and then dropped probably 15-20 percent with the
really poor recruiting year-classes we've had coming
in. So it went up, went flat, and now it's down. The
inshore went up, dropped a lot, was down for two
years, went up and has been climbing slowly ever
since. This year [1990] the projections are
that it's probably going to be the best year in 20
years for the inshore. So the inshore catches are not
tracking what we calculate as the total stock
trajectory" (in Finlayson 1994:116).
Finlayson's primary critique is
that DFO chose to ignore signs from the inshore sector that
stocks were in trouble because of its institutional
commitment to hard science, and thus to the abundant and
readily available data sets coming in from the offshore
sector. Hence, to Finlayson, "the inshore fishery is not
seen by most scientists as a source of valid knowledge"
(1994:105). Rice's response is that Finlayson confounds
validity with tractability:
"I know of no
fisheries scientist who feels the inshore fishery is
not valid. The knowledge is not
tractable to our tools, however...and is
therefore prone to be underutilized..." (quoted in
Finlayson 1994:105).
Finlayson offers little resolution
to the problem of assimilating vastly different data
sources: those of the inshore, where the diverse
technologies of traps, gillnets, and handlines do indeed
make the standardization of a catch per unit effort
virtually intractable; and those from the offshore.
Neis and Felt, in their efforts to
understand local knowledge of fisheries and ecosystems,
argue that such calibration is not necessary. There are
abundant clues, in this fund of knowledge, that would have
or should have been read as danger signals in the 1980s.
Neis (1992:165) catalogs these: smaller fish being caught
with traps and handlines, intensified fishing effort,
shorter seasons, increased competition for space. Two of her
informants from Petty Harbour found themselves forced to
increase the number of traps they worked:
"...Started
off one, now we got four. Even though we were
increasing our gear the fish were getting much
smaller. Fish wasn't half the size the last few years
as they had been years before that. We had to catch
twice as much fish for the same amount of
weight.
"We even had to change the
twine size in our traps. One time we used to use 8
inch twine in the side of the trap and the drawing
twine would be 3 and 1/2, now we got to put 5 inch or
4 inch in the side to stop a lot of those smaller fish
from going out through the side of the trap. but,
since the early 1980s, I'd say, we noticed the fish
getting much smaller" (David Hearn, quoted in Neis
1992:163).
Neis observes as well that
declining catches and technological changes in processing
plants "have discouraged fishers from leaving any fish
because they can now sell smaller fish and because, much
more than in the past, they cannot be assured of future
catches (1992:161). And her research documented the
increasing use of "Japanese" traps, mentioned
previously:
Japanese traps
can be placed with less risk in berths with rougher
bottoms and where, owing to tides, it was difficult to
hold fish in the past. They have a smaller mesh, are
easier to haul, and have a roof; it is more difficult
for the fish to find their way out again. Japanese
traps opened up new areas to the trap fishery but by
the late 1980s, even these areas were filled
(1992:164).
While Neis provides a compelling
account of the technological response to declining
resources, she stopped short of an analysis of the
reciprocal influence of inshore technology on cod stocks:
the harvesting of young fish. Speaking of Icelandic stocks,
the biologist D. J. Garrod poses the problem:
...the average
age of first capture generally remains well below the
optimum. This reduces the yield per recruit but, more
seriously, it reduces the spawning stock, leading to
concern for the maintenance of recruitment
(1988:206).
The effects of traps on stocks have
remained largely unresearched. Barbara Neis' informants to
the contrary -- they recall historically catching large cod
in traps -- Jake Rice contends that
"The trap
fishery has always caught almost completely
immature fish -- too young and too small to spawn.
(Not just in the 1980s with the 'mismanaged' stocks,
but as long as samples have been aged.) This is the
most biologically dangerous harvesting approach
possible (yet one [DFO's] Science Branch has
never gone so far as to oppose") (quoted in Finlayson
1994:64).
For Rice and DFO, it was a
politically intractable research question. Finleyson, in
Fishing for Truth, took no issue with Rice on this point.
Neis relied on local recollection without probing the
ecological impacts of the new technology.
NOTES
1. version of the following
argument appeared in the electronic Journal of Political
Ecology, volume 4 (1997).
REFERENCES
Davis, Anthony (1991) Insidious
Rationalities: The Institutionalisation of Small Boat
Fishing and the Rise of the Rapacious Fisher. Maritime
Anthropological Studies 4(1):13-31.
Felt, Lawrence F., and Barbara Neis
(1996) A Bridge over Troubling Waters: Social Science and
Interdisciplinarity in Sustainable Fisheries Management.
Prepared for the Symposium, "Reinventing Fisheries
Management," University of British Columbia, February 20-24,
1996.
Finlayson, Alan Christopher (1994)
Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod
Stock Assessments from 1977-1990. Social and Economic Papers
No. 52, Institute of Social and Economic Research. St.
John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Garrod, D.J. (1988) North Atlantic
Cod: Fisheries and Management to 1986. In Fish Population
Dynamics, 2nd. ed. J.A. Gulland, editor. Chichester, UK:
John Wiley & Sons, pp. 185-218.
Innis, Harold A. (1930) The Fur
Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic
History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press [1956
edition].
Innis, Harold A. (1940) The Cod
Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press [1978 edition].
Maguire, Jean-Jacques, Barbara
Neis, and Peter R. Sinclair (1995) What are we Managing
Anyway? The Need for an Interdisciplinary Approach to
Managing Fisheries Ecosystems. Dalhousie Law Journal
18(1):141-153.
Matthews, Ralph, and John Phyne
(1988) Regulating the Newfoundland Inshore Fishery:
Traditional Values Versus State Control in the Regulation of
a Common Property Resource. Journal of Canadian Studies
23(1/2): 158-176.
Matthews, David Ralph (1993)
Controlling Common Property: Regulating Canada's East Coast
Fishery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McNally, David (1981) Staple Theory
as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political
Economy. Studies in Political Economy 6:35-63.
Neis, Barbara (1992) Fishers'
Ecological Knowledge and Stock Assessment in Newfoundland.
Newfoundland Studies 8(2):155-178.
Neis, Barbara, Jeffrey Hutchings,
Richard Haedrich, David Schneider, and Lawrence Felt (1995)
Combining Fishery Workers' Ecological Knowledge and
Fisheries Science: Lumpy Lumpfish, Sticky Nets and Adaptive
Management. Paper presented to the American Fisheries
Society Annual Meetings, Tampa, Florida.
Sinclair, Peter R. (1985) From
Traps to Draggers: Domestic Commodity Production in
Northwest Newfoundland, 1850-1982. Social and Economic
Papers No. 31, Institute of Social and Economic Research.
St. John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland.
|