https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5571-1809
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ABSTRACT
The Caiçara fishing communities of coastal Brazil, specifically on the island of Ilhabela, demonstrate traditional knowledge of the sea. This research project features collaborative engagements undertaken with them, with the aim of sharing their observations, wisdom and concerns. Caiçara live primarily by artisanal small-scale fishing, cultivation of modest crops, and recently, catering to tourists. Their ways of life have remained substantially unchanged hundreds of years, until recently. The pattern of their lives highlights changing ecological conditions, manifesting vulnerability of the ecosystem and traditional fishing practices. Linked intimately to the environment, their ways serve to magnify many of the world’s most pressing concerns about climate change, the need for conservation, the effects of governmental regulation and the devaluing of traditional knowledge. The representation – or misrepresentation – of a people to the wider world crucially shapes their fortunes and promotes or inhibits their ability to effect positive conditions in their environment. In recognition of a long debate in cultural geography about the methods, merits and pitfalls of representation, the necessity remains for some type of portrayal of a people, if for no other reason than to permit them to be politically recognised. This participatory fieldwork transcends disciplinary boundaries through active witnessing.
Acknowledgements
The author and her colleagues, Professor Christine Baeumler, who accompanied her on the first of three trips to Ilhabela (Nov.–Dec. 2018), Dr Heather Yeung, on the second trip (July 2019), and Samuel Gonçalves on the third trip (27 Dec ‘19 -13 Jan. ‘20), would gratefully like to acknowledge the generous assistance of: the University of Dundee, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design Research Committee; the University of Minnesota Twin Cities sabbatical support; the Global Challenge Research Fund UK (for the second and third trip); the Casa na Ilhabela Residence Programme; and the personal assistance of: Felipe Schmidt Fonseca, Renaldo Luis dos Santos, Alex Caiçara, Zacquiel Goyes, Daniel Carvalho Rodrigues, Manoel ‘Moneco’ Dos Santos, Zico Dos Santos, Aliade Rafaela Souza, Lauro Dos Santos, Maria Dos Santos, Vanildo, Onésio Barosso, Dona Zefa, Osmar Rodrigues, Bendito ‘Dito’ Dória, Júlia de Rezende Barreto, Vagner ‘Marsaum’ Barbato, Camille Georgeault, Vivian Gonçalves, Aline Gonçalves, Arlindo, Roberto ‘Beto’ Cacao, ‘Mac’ Bone, Flavio Galeno, Louis and Donna Ica, Eririvan Fernandes, Jinmi In, Marina Luisa Caamaño, Osvaldo Clemente, Professor Gustavo Hallwass, Professor Renato Silvano, Dr Redemar Alevinos and Dr Claudia Ehlen Kerber of the Garoupa Ao Mar Project: Professor Alpina Begossi; Professor Laurence Davies and Dr Victoria Walters for proofreading; excellent editorial suggestions from anonymous readers for JCG; and most of all, to Francisco Pereria Da Silva, Laelcio Pereria Da Silva, Helena Beutel, and Patricia Aparecida Da Souza, our guides and translators, without whom this work would not have been possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Professor Mary Modeen is Chair of Interdisciplinary Art Practices at the University of Dundee, Scotland. As an artist/academic, she lectures in Art and Humanities, and founded the MFA in Art & Humanities in Dundee. Her research has several threads: perception as a cognitive and interpretive process, and place-based research, which connects many of these concerns, with attention to cultural values, history and embodied experience. As such, this research is usually interdisciplinary. Part of this work appears as creative art, and part as writing and presentations. Cultural values and individual differences are inherent in these investigations. Modeen is also the Associate Dean for Internationalisation for DJCAD, and Coordinates PhD studies in the College of Art and Design.
Notes
1 According to Marçio Tenorio, former Mayor of Ilhabela (2018).
2 This is done in the spirit of ‘de-colonialising’ research, as advocated by Linda Tuhiwai Smith- as a researcher, I do not wish to over-inscribe the thoughts of the Caiçara, but to share their concerns, but with a wider audience than many of them have been able to address themselves.
3 I visited the following Caiçara communities with colleagues, and guides over 18 months and three separate rounds of fieldwork: Siriuba, Jabaquara, Praia da Fome, Serraria, Estáquio, Praia do Gato, Castelhanos, Vermelha, Figueira, Bonete, and Praia Grande. Excursions were made by boat into the mangroves of Ilhabela, and across the channel to São Sebastião, Caraguatatuba, and up into the mangroves there.
4 This included municipal government officials, a social worker, a teacher, an NGO organiser, scientists, a museum curator, a local historian, and volunteers.
5 18 video recorded interviews, 15 sound recorded interviews, and hundreds of photographs documented this work. It must be noted that women were often reluctant to be sound or video recorded, but freely shared conversation with notes taken. And a children’s project at Castelhanos was held (January 2020) with observational drawings, facilitating many discussions about what the Caiçara children noticed in their environment.
6 Laelcio Pereira Da Silva in video recorded interview, 2020.
7 The author does not speak Portuguese, and relied upon translators and research associates to translate the interviews. Subsequently, these responses by local Caiçara are expressed in English, underpinned by documentary video and sound recordings in Portuguese. Where the words of locals are conveyed, the author has placed these as translated into English, in quotation marks, with the understanding that they carry the intentions and meanings in their translations.
8 In one village the author visited, a Caiçara woman, Vivian Gonçalves, had relatives in another village that was only a two-hour walk away, but was a place that she said she had never visited in all her life. She recounted a recent Caiçara Canoa competition in Perequê (November 2018), which she cited as the very first time she had ever been to the opposite side of the island in all her life.
9 According to discussions with several individuals: Daniel Carvalho Rodrigues, Manoel ‘Moneco’ Dos Santos, Zico Dos Santos, and Osvaldo Clemente.
10 Rare.org, Available from: https://www.rare.org (Accessed 10 December 2018).
11 Ice is another problem for the Caiçara; they have only one place on the island to buy it, and it is expensive. Across the channel in São Sebastião, there is also one other place, but for these fishermen, the difficulty of obtaining the ice and its cost are additional factors that are burdensome. Although they have applied to the local government of Ilhabela to establish more ice distribution centres, there has been no successful result.
12 Out in the boats among the leaping dolphins, the author and Caiçara watched the squid fishermen at work in January 2020.
13 Dona Zefa interview, recorded January 2020.
14 Speaking about Canadian women whose families were in the fishing business at the time of the cod fishing moratorium, Probyn (Citation2016, 13) cites: ‘These women attest to the dwindling stock long before the closing of the fishery. They were not listened to. Perhaps even more galling is that in the aftermath of the crisis, their insights about how to better manage the fishery went unheard.’ Similarly, Caiçara women told the author stories about their childhood fishing experiences and compared the small catches these days with the memories of the vastly more plentiful hauls in their past. Red snapper, hake, bonito and tuna were all mentioned as favourite fish in rapidly declining catches.
15 As Le Sann notes (Citation1998, 7), the closer one gets to the equator, the greater the diversity in numbers of fish species, but the population of each is much smaller than in more temperate waters. The Alcatrazes has almost 1300 species of tuna, 100 species of birds, and 259 species of fish. (ICMBIO- Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação do Biodiversidade, Ministério Do Meio Ambiente, 2018).
16 Phenology centres and projects are emerging as Citizen Science grows in its spread of observation posts and accumulation of metadata.
17 Osvaldo Clemente, in a video recorded interview, Ilhabela, January 2020.
18 As for cutting bamboo in APP, a penalty is provided for: “Decree 6514/ 2008, Art.43: Destroy or damage forests or other forms of natural vegetation or use them with breach of protection rules in an area considered to be of permanent preservation, without authorisation (for the) competent body, when required, or in disagreement with that obtained: Fine from BR$5000.00 (five thousand reais) to BR$50,000.00 (fifty thousand reais), per hectare or fraction.”
19 Francisco Pereira Da Silva, video recorded interview, 2020.
20 Zacquiel Goyes, recorded interview, Bonete, 2020.
21 Food and Agriculture Assoc. of the United Nations. Available from: http://FOA.org/fishery/fact/BRA/en. (Accessed 6 January 2019).
22 Available from: http://www.phys.org, published 9 April 2013. (Accessed 6 January 2019).
23 Zanardi-Lamardo et al. (Citation2013). “The data showed that the aliphatic hydrocarbon analyses were powerful tools for the assessment of the fate of the oil spill and that the northern part of the São Sebastião Channel is more subject to the effects of oil spills.”
24 Ilhabela Municipal report, June 2018.
25 Vagner ‘Marsaum’ Barbato, video interview, January 2020.
26 Fifth National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity: BRAZIL, 2015. Ministry of The Environment, Secretariat of Biodiversity and Forests. Available from: https://www.cbd.int/doc/world/br/br-nr-05-en.pdf (Accessed 6 January 2019), and Fifth National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2017. Ministry of the Environment (Brazil). Available from: https://www.cbd.int/doc/world/br/br-nbsap-v3-en.pdf. (Accessed 6 January 2019).
27 Repeated in interviews with Renaldo Luis dos Santos, Osvaldo Clemente, Roberto ‘Beto’ Cacao, and Zacquiel Goyes.
28 Praia de Fome translates in English as ‘Hunger Beach’, and was named for the African slaves who arrived in states of starvation, and who were fed before shipping onwards or sold to local plantation owners.
29 The Secretariat of Aquaculture and Fisheries (SAP), part of the Agriculture Ministry since Bolsonaro became president, recently published infralegal acts including Normative Instruction 10/2020, “establishing norms for the sustainable use of native fish in continental waters, marine and estuarine, for ornamental and aquarium purposes … .Suely Araújo, senior public policy specialist at the Climate Observatory, a group of NGOs”, said: “That act is harmful because it makes environmental control much more difficult and interferes with control rules. Among other things, the transport certificate of fish for ornamental and aquarium purposes (GTPON) was eliminated.” Jenny Gonzales, 5 August 2020, Mongabay. https://news.mongabay.com/2020/08/brazil-end-runs-environmental-laws-via-huge-surge-in-executive-acts-study (Accessed 29 August 2020).
30 It is interesting to note that this is also similar to the Gurage (Ethiopic) word ‘aysarä’, meaning “the stick of bamboo used to stretch cloth and measure it during weaving.” W. Leslau, Etymological Dictionary of the Gurage (Ethiopic), Vol. 1 (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz: 1979). Bamboo in this case is the material common denominator in a name that has crossed continents.
31 The Tupi word Aracaju, derives from ara -(parrot) and caju,-(cashew). The richness of indigenous names means that the associations of this origin may signify as ‘parrot cashew’. But it can also refer to time, and the cashew season. Some indigenous people would keep the shells of cashews to count years. So in lived experience, there is an overlay of time, the past, and cashews. The same name now also applies to the capital of the state of Sergipe, on the coast. https://www.dicionariotupiguarani.com.br/dicionario/boicucanga. (Accessed 26 August 2020).
32 Laelcio Pereria Da Silva, video recorded interview, 2020.
33 ‘In the past, radio units were installed in some indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon and they did wonders. I think the more we invest in getting low cost tech resources like this to people living in forests, the more we will get in return to fight deforestation. There are 20 million people living in the Brazilian Amazon, we should support their role in protecting their forests. They are the best park rangers as their cultures and livelihoods depend on healthy forests. Yet support rarely reaches them … ’ Rachel Biderman, Director for World Resources Institute Brazil, World Resources Institute, Sao Paulo, Brazil. @rachel_biderman (15 December 2018). The same can be said for the Caiçara with their knowledge of fish.
34 ‘The Indigenous peoples defend the Earth’s biodiversity – but they’re in danger’ (National Geographic, 16 November 2018). Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity. (Accessed 15 December 2018). Also, ‘How to stop deforestation: ‘Indigenous people are the best park rangers’ The Guardian, (4 April 2017.) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/apr/04/how-to-stop-deforestation-indigenous-people-are-the-best-park-rangers. (Accessed 15 December 2018). ‘In some places, such as Brazil and Indonesia, the amount spent by their governments on subsidising agriculture is more than 100 times higher than the international funding provided to those countries for forest conservation.’
35 Francisco Pereria Da Silva, interview 2020.