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Abstract
Women’s work in fisheries in the Global South is valorized for its role in sustaining small-scale fishing in the face of complex challenges from corporate-backed industrial fishing. This paper examines how capitalist modernization of fisheries and its attendant changes have transformed the worlds of work of artisanal fisherwomen in a Latin Catholic fisher village in the South Indian state of Kerala. Using ethnographic research and qualitative methods, the paper explores women’s interfaces and antagonisms with new actors in the commission shops and seashore auctions where they procure fish as well as the public fish markets where they sell fish. The paper discusses women’s survival strategies in the face of growing competition in the vending business and examines their implications for women’s engagement in collective action for improved work conditions and the rights of artisanal fish workers.
Acknowledgments
The authors express deep gratitude to the fisherwomen, fishermen and all others involved in the fish trade in Anjuthengu village who generously shared their time and experiences with us. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
Notes
1 The KSMTF comprises different district-level trade unions of small-scale fishers belonging to all castes and religions.
2 The social norms that regulate and restrict women’s mobility vary considerably across regions in India and across caste and class groups within the same geographic region. Kerala’s Latin Catholic fisher women have always been vested with the responsibility of selling the fish landed by their men. When the marketing landscape changed, economic necessity compelled women to travel to more distant places to carry out the fish trade and keep their families afloat.
3 The fieldwork was undertaken as part of the doctoral research of one of the paper authors.
4 A village panchayat is the lowest unit of a three-tiered structure of elected local self-government in India.
5 When selecting women within each stratum, the technique of purposive sampling was used to include women with a diversity of vending experiences such as women night market vendors or wholesale vendors whose daily transactions were of a larger size than small-scale vendors.
6 These observations were corroborated by interviews with fisher union leaders and fisheries department officials and through direct visits to several markets in the district.
7 The LC agents earned a daily commission of 5% of total fish sales. Hence the name ‘commission agent’.
8 The commission shops were not unique to Anjuthengu village and had mushroomed in many other market towns and coastal villages.
9 Life-cycle differences of age and marital status were seen to have no impact on women’s decisions to buy (or not) fish from the ring seine boats.
10 When changes in the distribution landscape required women to travel longer distances to buy and sell fish, it was older women in Anjuthengu village who began distant vending. Subsequently, older women were accompanied and assisted by younger vendors. The lower degree of social control over older women enabled their mobility and their protective presence, in turn, enabled younger women to travel outside the village to vend fish.
11 The names of all respondents have been changed.
12 Differences of age and marital status had no bearing on women’s decision to sell iced or fresh fish.
13 Some markets in Thiruvananthapuram district have even begun to sell sand for this purpose.
14 A discussion of these dynamics is outside the purview of this paper.