Fishing in the Amazonian Forest: A Gendered Social Network Puzzle

ABSTRACT

We employ social network analysis (SNA) to describe the structure of subsistence fishing social networks and to explore the relation between fishers’ emic perceptions of fishing expertise and their position in networks. Participant observation and quantitative methods were employed among the Tsimane’ Amerindians of the Bolivian Amazon. A multiple-regression quadratic assignment procedure was used to explore the extent to which gender, kinship, and age homophilies influence the formation of fishing networks. Logistic regressions were performed to determine the association between fishers’ expertise, their sociodemographic identities, and network centrality. We found that fishing networks are gendered and that there is a positive association between fishers’ expertise and centrality in networks, an association that is more striking for women than for men. We propose that a social network perspective broadens understanding of the relations that shape the intracultural distribution of fishing expertise, as well as natural resource access and use.

KEYWORDS:

• Fishing expertise
• gender relations
• perceptions
• social network analysis
• social status
• Tsimane’ Amerindians

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the patience and kindness of all Tsimane’ families in the study villages. We thank them for their warm welcome and for sharing information about their lives and knowledge. Our special gratitude goes to the Gran Consejo Tsimane’ and to CBIDSI for providing logistical assistance and office facilities. This work would not have been possible without the invaluable field assistance provided by Marta Pache, Paulino Pache, Vicente Cuata, I. Virginia Sánchez, Sascha Huditz, and Elisa Oteros-Rozas. We also thank Vanesse Labeyrie and four anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

Drawing upon Pfeiffer and Butz (2005), we employ a binary view of the terms sex and gender, because a thorough treatment of the multidimensional gender continuum is beyond the scope of our research. We use the term sex to refer to biological differences between women and men, and the term gender to refer to constructed sociocultural relations and differences between the sexes within a particular culture. We acknowledge the existence of multiple non-dichotomous identities that much more accurately reflect the diversity of human genders.