We are seeking one or two additional papers to join our double panel session
proposed for the AAA 2012.
If you are interested please contact me (charles.menzies@ubc.ca) with an
idea of what your paper would be on.
TITLE: ³The organization of work and politics in marine fisheries.²
ABSTERACT: Fisheries simultaneously embody anachronistic intimate workspaces
and the most advanced elements of globalization. Most fish is still
harvested by the direct application of human labour working on board vessels
with crews ranging from 1 to 20 people. Fishermen (most practitioners of
this trade are still men and the few women often insist on the androcentric
label fishermen) typically work under extreme conditions and in close
proximity to their crew mates for days, if not weeks, at a time. There is a
camaraderie in this world that is rarely in evidence in many other
contemporary workplaces. But fisheries also exist in a highly globalized
market place in which capital, products, and materials transit the globe as
freely as any other 21st century commodity. Fish are often processed in
large scale industrial factories. Very often these factories are located
thousands of miles from where the fish was originally off-loaded. Despite
the close proximity of the on-board working conditions many local fleets are
owned by large scale businesses that know no national borders. The ideas and
information regulating fisheries and the associated ecological debates are
also global in nature and, while these debates have local impacts, they are
more often than not guided by global concerns rooted far from the
communities that catch the fish. The papers in this session draw from a
selection of detailed case studies of the organization of work, the
structure of local and global antagonisms, and the manner by which the
particularisms of the local intersect and perhaps- transgress the global in
this venerable way of life.
Bye for now,
Charles
