‘Emergent Aliens’: On Salmon, Nature, and Their Enactment

Abstract

Atlantic salmon aquaculture has become one of the most profitable industries in Norway, a country which is also known for its large population of wild salmon. We explore some ways in which Atlantic salmon, an icon of wilderness, is enrolled in regimes of domestication. Inspired by material semiotics, we treat domestication as a set of practices whose character defines and enacts Atlantic salmon in different, though partly overlapping ways. Approaching salmon through its various enactments, we also address the foundational division of nature from culture in Euro-American thought. We suggest that the domesticated Atlantic salmon is indeed emergent, complex, and historically contingent. A central claim is that salmon and nature are performed together, through various acts of differentiation that constitute what they both are. This article is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in West Norway.

Keywords:

• Salmon
• Norway
• performativity
• domestication
• alien species

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymised Sjølaks AS for their kind agreement to let us locate our study within the firm, and for its additional generous practical support. We would like to thank all those who work for Sjølaks (they too are anonymised) for their warm welcome, their help, and their willingness to let us watch them and take part at work. In many cases their kindness has vastly exceeded any reasonable expectation or need. The project, Newcomers to the Farm, Atlantic salmon between the wild and the industrial, is funded by Forskningsradet, the Norwegian Research Council (project number 183352/S30), with additional research leave and financial support from Lancaster University, and we are grateful to both. We are also grateful to Simone Abram, Kristin Asdal, Annemarie Mol, Knut Nustad, Gro B. Ween and two anonymous referees for helpful comments to an earlier version.

Notes

http://www.imr.no/nyhetsarkiv/2007/mai/romt_oppdrettslaks_ikke_fremmedart/nb-no, accessed on 20 March 2010.

This image of branching family relations is one of the most powerful metaphors of modern biology. Verran (2002: 752) wrote: ‘This linear, branching, tree-like figure of “botanical family” is taken by science as an ideal, immanent in the biological world, a found structure or pattern of the biological world’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_salmon, accessed on 1 March 2010.

Intellectual historian Menand distinguished between the naturalists' approach to species as ideal types and Darwin's approach to species, which highlights relations rather than categories, transitions rather than boundaries. He cited Darwin, who stated in the Origin of the Species (1859) that ‘I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other’ (cited in Menand 2001:123).

Note that the term ‘natural’ serves to exclude some forms of interbreeding, such as those that occur in captivity.

http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.php?id=236, accessed on 1 March 2010.

In a case study of lower limb arteriosclerosis, Mol showed how this condition is done differently in the practices of different hospital departments. It is important to note, however, that these practices – and their enactments of the condition – overlap with one another. ‘The body multiple’, then, is not a ‘body plural’. It is not single, but neither is it many.

According to aquaculture statistics produced by the Directorate of Fisheries, Norway, 50,730,000 Atlantic salmon were registered in Hordaland in 2009. Source: http://www.fiskeridir.no/statistikk/akvakultur/statistikk-for-akvakultur/laks-regnbueoerret-og-oerret (accessed on 16 January 2011).

Vidarøy and Sjølaks are both fictitious names.

This snippet of ethnography is from the summer of 2009, and is drawn from the first couple of weeks of fieldwork. Fieldwork in the salmon farming industry was done jointly by the authors.

Sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis), also called salmon lice (‘lakselus’), are a common parasite that live on salmonids in salt water. While they were present long before the emergence of aquaculture, the high concentration of fish in salmon farming seems to contribute to increased density of sea lice in the marine environment, which in turn affects smolt going to sea, or up the rivers to spawn.

‘Done’ rather than ‘made’ or ‘constructed’, because the practices need to keep going if these salmon realities are to be sustained.

As with the Ibadan census, this is displaying rather than collecting, ‘in this doing of number, the territory is the map’ (Verran 2001:73).

Fairly soon, the prefix ‘vill’ (wild) also became an indicator of quality, to the extent that a majority of Norwegian consumers claimed that they could easily tell the difference in taste, in spite of numerous trials with blind tests, in which such differences turned out to be difficult to detect (Døving 1997).

Around 1850, the regulation, cultivation, and control of salmon resources had become a significant national issue in Norway, and by the end of the nineteenth century, new hatcheries produced as much as a million fry per year. (Treimo 2007)

According to the Directorate of Fisheries estimates, 170,000 Atlantic salmon escaped in Norway in 2009. (www.fiskeridir.no/statistikk/akvaklutlur/roemmingsstatistikk, accessed on 28 March 2010).

Growth is a key parameter in selective breeding. In addition, young salmon of similar age groups are sorted according to size, and in this process, salmon that are much smaller than the rest are systematically sorted away.

www.artsdatabanken.no, /ArticleList.aspx?m = 6&amid = 2718 (accessed on 28 August 2008).

It took about 20 years and several shipments of salmonids between England and Australia to ascertain that the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) that was released in the rivers in the 1860s had not been able to reproduce, and that the species they caught was actually Sea trout (Salmon trutta). (Lien 2005, see also Franklin, this volume). Distinguishing within the same species can be even more difficult. In the river systems of the Pacific coast of North America, where hatcheries play a key role in stocking rivers with Pacific salmon, the practice of clipping the adipose fins on hatchery-produced salmon facilitates the distinction between hatchery produced and wild. In the North Atlantic, clipping of fins is only done for research purposes.