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Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic and interview research conducted in Scotland, South Australia and New South Wales, Australia, I attempt to frame the cultural, social and geographical networks created by the people who follow fish (primarily commercial fishers). My account is constructed through a ‘self-conscious storying’ (Whatmore 2008) deployed by geographers working in a more-than-human perspective. Although I find much to inspire from this approach, throughout this article the question that nags at me is how to account for women within a materialist more-than-human framework, and how to articulate a feminist politics within this epistemological and methodological space. I try to avoid admonitions about what should be done and to advance or to model an embodied glimpse of what such a politics might be.
Mujeres siguiendo peces en un mundo más-que-humano
Basándome en investigación etnográfica y entrevistas llevadas a cabo en Escocia, el sur de Australia y el Nueva Gales del Sur, Australia, intento enmarcar las redes culturales, sociales y geográficas creadas por las personas que siguen a los peces (principalmente pescadores comerciales). Mi narración es construida a través de una “narración autoconsciente” (Whatmore 2008) desplegada por geógrafos trabajando en una perspectiva más-que-humana. Si bien encuentro mucho inspirador en este abordaje, a través de este artículo la pregunta que me persigue es ¿cómo dar cuenta de las vivencias de las mujeres dentro de un marco materialista más-que-humano, y cómo articular una política feminista dentro de este espacio epistemológico y metodológico? Intento evitar admoniciones sobre qué debería hacerse y avanzar o modelar un vistazo corporizado de cuál podría ser esa política.
在超人类的世界中追寻鱼群的女人
我运用在苏格兰、南澳大利亚以及澳大利亚的新南威尔斯中所进行的民族志与访谈研究，试图框架由追随鱼群的人（主要是商业渔民）所创造的文化、社会及地理网络。我的解释是透过运用 “超人类” 视角的地理学者所展开的 “自我意识说故事” （Whatmore 2008）方法建构之。虽然我认为此一方法相当具有啓发性，但全文中困扰我的问题则是如何在唯物论的 “超人类” 框架中解释女性，以及如何在此一认识论及方法论的空间中接合女性主义政治？我尝试避免有关该做什麽的劝告，而是提出或塑造此一政治或许会如何的具体初步展望。
Acknowledgements
I thank all those who generously took the time to tell me their stories. I would like to acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council and the University of South Australia.
Notes
1. Indigenous rights on ‘sea country’ are a vexed issue in many parts of the world. In Australia, the battle over claiming title on sea country has been even more difficult than over land. In 2005, the Federal Court responded to
the Bardi and Jawi claim [for] a land area of 1037 square kilometres and an area of sea to the three nautical mile limit. It also includes a culturally significant site that straddles the three nautical mile boundary in the north west of the claim area along with Julinaburr/Bruce Reef which is 12 nautical miles to the north of the Dampier Peninsula.
2. I interviewed Mario and Patsy in the Fishing Coop in Ulladulla in March 2011, and my thanks to them and especially to Mick who spent a week talking to me and finding me other contacts.
3. I interviewed Rick and Semi at the very swanky Port Lincoln Marina on 25 February 2010. I thank them and I am also indebted to Dinko Lukin for talking to me at great length during that field trip. He died in July 2010, and was one of the first to conceive of ‘farming’ tuna in Port Lincoln. The generosity of so many of the fishers over the several trips I made is a testament to their openness, and perhaps to their desire to tell their very interesting stories to someone who might document them.
4. Although research on fish tends to be somewhat understudied within the social sciences, there are notable exceptions from which I take inspiration. Bestor's (Citation2000, Citation2003, Citation2004) work on tuna in the context of Tsukiji and, more generally, Japanese culture is a wonderful look at how Bluefin Tuna came to be so valued, as well as the globalization of a taste for sushi. Mansfield (2001, 2004) and Barclay and Koh (Citation2008) investigate questions of governance in the tuna industry, respectively, in North America and Japan. St. Martin (2004, 2005) has investigated the communities of North American fisheries. Bear and Eden (Citation2008) have brought a more-than-human perspective to both angling and regional network of fisheries regulation. My interest in fish farming has been considerably furthered in conversations with Marianne Lien and John Law about their joint project on Norwegian Atlantic salmon farming – Norway is, of course, the largest producer and technical force behind fish farming. See Law (Citation2010) and Lien (Citation2005, Citation2007).
5. There is, of course, a long story to be told about the biocultural sustainability of fish and human communities, and this article is a very early entrée into that large project.
6. Katherine Gibson got me thinking about the anthropocene as did Head (Citation2010), and I thank both for presenting their work in the Hawke Research Institute series in 2010. J.-K. Gibson-Graham's take opens up questions of diverse economies ‘in the present’, and spatialises a reworked mapping of North-South global relations. Lesley Head's work draws from her first training as a paleo-geologist reworking the very history and geography of cultural ecology. In terms of new thinking about climate change, which extends ideas about the anthropocene, I have also learned much from Potter's (Citation2009) work.
7. As I said, the space of the more-than-human is buzzing with too many different accounts to adequately describe here. However, Whatmore's (Citation2008) work has certainly been influential in directing the gaze of many of us to more materially grounded questions. Since then, so many scholars have taken these ideas in fascinating directions, for instance Lorimer's (Citation2010) grappling with visual methodologies as a mode of studying the more-than-human. My title obviously echoes Cook, Crang, and Thorpe (Citation1998) work on ‘following food’. My period of work at the University of South Australia and as the Director of the Hake Research Institute was pivotal for me in getting to know rural and agricultural sociologists and geographers who have been wresting with many of the same questions for several years. In particular, I think of Bryant's (Citation2001) work on women and agriculture, Stewart Lockie's sustained engagement with both actor-network-theory and more-than-human geographical perspectives, as well as the rich field of rural and now perhaps more aptly sustainable agriculture.
8. The work of Guthman, and that of her colleagues at UCSC, Goodman and Dupuis (Citation2002), has been incredibly influential in helping me to think beyond the impasse of what elsewhere I've called ‘the feel good politics of food’. Across the Atlantic, Miele and Evans (Citation2010) at the University of Cardiff have for years deeply interrogated the production and consumption of food in enlightening ways. See, for instance, Miele's (Citation2011) recent work on the European Guidelines about animal welfare that probes how we might measure the happiness of chickens. In the same tenor, I would like to thank Marianne Lien for inviting me to the ‘Sentient Creatures’ conference at the University of Oslo where I first learned that Norway has now established that fish are sentient creatures too. Many scholars are opening up the colour blindness of alternative food politics, but see especially Rachel Slocum's work, and her co-edited collection with Arun Saldanha, Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets (Citation2013).
9. Haraway's remarks about touch also can be seen in the longer context of feminist thinking and research on embodiment and more recently on affect, which is again vast but the genealogies of which should not be forgotten. Although I have written in more detail about the ethics of embodied ethnographic research that my longer project uses (Probyn Citation2010, Citation2011a, Citation2012), I am always mindful of McRobbie's (Citation1982) early warning to not take for granted the access that women researchers have to other women in her ‘The Politics of Feminist Research.’ Since then, of course, we have forged a distinct field of investigation in cultural studies, which articulates geographers such as Longhurst (Citation2001) and Crew (Citation2001), sociologists such as Skeggs (Citation2004) and philosophers of science such as Mol (Citation2002).
10. ‘Taste & Place: The Transglobal Production and Consumption of Food and Drink.’ Australian Research Council Discovery Project 2009–2011.
11. One of the anonymous reviewers of my article very usefully queried the difference between Haraway's companions, and my interest in the animals and fish that we eat. Aligned with this question is the larger distinction between Haraway's multi-species analysis, animal studies and the more-than-human. Without being definitive, I take the latter to refer to an interest in assemblages that are formed and reform between and among human and non-humans, which encompasses technologies, economies and ways of thinking and feeling. Much of the literature blurs the difference between animal studies and multi-species and/or more-than-human, but in some versions of animal studies I find vestiges of a knowingness that is the hallmark of humanism. What I find appealing in work such as Gibson-Graham (Citation2011, 1) is the avowal and, in fact, the principle of an ‘unreadiness to write a paper that displaces the assumed primacy of humans…’. To be blunt, this epistemological and ontological hesitancy is at odds with perspectives that continue a line of moral reasoning about (for instance) who should eat what that does not fundamentally disturb the primacy of the human. Of course, this is a long and vexed political debate, which would be a lot more interesting if it did not proceed on normative grounds.
12. The quick and easy answer would be that I have always been interested in gender as a relation, not as a thing. In this, I follow a long line of feminists, such as Teresa De Lauretis and especially her book, Technologies of Gender (Citation1987). This does not mean the disavowal of women as many pretended; it is just that by foregrounding the relationships between women and other entities one sees another view that had previously been rendered ‘off-space’ and unseen.
13. When I returned to the University of Sydney in mid-2011, I was keen to continue to forge the interdisciplinary connections that I started in my fieldwork on fish and fishing. As I kicked one silo after another, I began to despair. The questions that interest me about the sustainability of fish and of their human communities who both hunt and care for them cannot be approached from the proprietary angle of one discipline. And yet humans being what we are, sometimes it is as hard to share interest as it is to share resources. A response from one email to a colleague working in marine science asking whether he would meet with me to talk about building a project across disciplines met with this: ‘I suppose you are interested in mermaids’. He had obviously seen my signature and taken it for granted that a Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies would want to talk to a marine scientist about mermaids. When we did meet it turned out that we had several interests in common.
14. In September 2010, I followed the long disappeared fish along the northern Scottish coastline interviewing many retired fishermen and women. My thanks to them for their immense generosity for telling me their tales. Sheila was especially kind and invited me to her home and sipping wine she reminisced about her life as both a daughter and the wife of a fisherman. As I left, she told me that she would now write her memories down, and I hope that she is now doing precisely that. In part, my interest was piqued because as a girl I spent many summers in the small fishing village of Findochty, and I remembered the seemingly vast amount of fish on the docks. My 88-year-old father who is an avid fisherman and a font of knowledge on all things fishy still yearns to return to the small harbours of the area but is sadly physically not up to it. So, I went in part for him and reported back the sad details of how the fish and the men he knew had long gone.
15. The Peruvian anchoveta is still the world's most populous fish stock, and Peru produces 30% of the world's fishmeal. It is quite a complicated process to boil down the tiny fish and reconstitute them as pellets used to feed poultry and pigs as well as other fish. In addition, the Western appetite for Omega 3 either in fish oil capsule or increasingly added to all manner of food staples threatens to deplete the ocean of forage fish. Basically, this would be catastrophic.
16. My thanks to Jennifer Biddle for suggesting that I look at the WWF slogan and to her encouragement to think through the feminist dimensions of the more-than-human.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Elspeth Probyn
Elspeth Probyn is a professor of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published several ground-breaking monographs, including Sexing the Self, Outside Belongings, Carnal Appetites and Blush: Faces of Shame. Her forthcoming book is Oceanic Entanglement (Duke University Press).