Migrating fish and mobile knowledge: situated fishers’ knowledge and social networks in the lower Mekong River Basin in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Various terms are used to characterize fishers’ knowledge. Here we use situated fishers’ knowledge to refer to knowledge about long-distance fish migrations held by ethnic Lao fishers living in the Mekong River Basin in northeastern Thailand, southern Laos, and northeastern Cambodia. We consider the mobility of knowledge, humans, and fish, and adopt a theoretical framework based on Actor Network Theory (ANT) and political ecology. Based on fisher interviews, we demonstrate why knowledge transfer related to fish migrations is important. Fishers have various ways of knowing when migratory fish pass certain locations, although those are changing due to borders and technological changes. The paper’s main contribution is to move beyond simply investigating human mobilities, and to instead consider the relationships between human, fish and knowledge mobilities, something that ANT is particularly well suited for, due to its focus on multispecies interactions, something that mobilities scholars would benefit from paying more attention to.

KEYWORDS:

• Local Knowledge
• fish migration
• Laos
• Thailand
• Cambodia

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all the fishers living near the Mun River in northeastern Thailand, the Mekong River in southern Laos, and the Mekong, Sekong and Sesan Rivers in northeastern Cambodia for sharing knowledge with us. Without them this study would not have been possible. The research that led to this paper was funded by the project “Tracking Change - The Role of Local and Traditional Knowledge in Watershed Governance”, which is administered by the University of Alberta, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Thanks to Brenda Parlee, Louis and Boriphat Lebel, Brian McIntosh and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC 895-2015-1024].