"Vindö" is an
island off the west coast of Sweden, in the general area of Göteborg, Sweden's
second largest city.[1] There are many islands and mainland fishing
villages in this region, referred to collectively here as the "Göteborg
region." The residents of these
communities have, for centuries, spent much of their time and energy
fishing. Fishing has provided a means
of subsistence, economic opportunity, cultural heritage, and even a
communication link to the outside world.
Fishermen from this region have, through the years, had close contact
with Danes Norwegians, and Englishmen.
Many of the terms in the local dialects of the islands reflect this
contact. These dialects also reflect
each individual island's heritage, although this is now diluted by the mixing
of peoples engendered by modern transportation, social policies, economic and
political institutions, and television and other communicational media. The unique dialects spoken in the entire
region, however, continue to identify these people as native to the Göteborg
region.[2]
The island of
Vindö, while quite large, is only inhabited on its leeward third: the remainder
of the island consists of raised granite hills, hearty knee-high scrub bushes,
and long stretches of coastline where glacier-deposited boulders meet crashing
seas. The winter months are blusterous,
with winds of 10-15 m/sec out of the north and west an almost daily
occurrence. A low set of hills running
the length of the island provides adequate shelter for houses but, as with most
of the neighboring soil-impoverished islands, any kind of substantial
agricultural activity has not been viable in modern times. There was a time when residents grew
potatoes and families often had a cow to supplement their (largely fish) diet,
but now there are few plots of land which are available for crops or animals,
and even fewer residents who are interested in growing or raising them.[3]
Vindö has about
400 year-round residents, a number that is inflated by anywhere from three to
five times during the warm, long, days of summer. The influx of sommar gäster
("summer guests"), as they are called all along the west coast, is evaluated by
year-round residents in both positive and negative terms—and these terms appear
to have changed through the years.
Currently, the summer visitors provide a vital infusion of cash into the
local economy which is readily appreciated by everyone. Most residents also seem to enjoy the change
in tempo brought on by the busy activities of a summertime harbor full of
(mostly) young families out to enjoy the nature on their island. But they seem
to also enjoy a sense of "difference" which this particular form of contact
with outsiders brings: a form which accents who is in control and who one is as
an island resident. That is, influx
from the outside acts to affirm the value of one's status as a local resident,
so long as this influx does not bring conflicts along with it regarding access
to resources and promotion of the locally valued lifestyle.
Winter months
bring a return to a much more regular, institutionalized and introverted routine
in the community. The sun (on a cloud
free day) only presents itself for a few hours, and then only at a miserably
ineffective angle for providing any warmth or bright light. While summer months afforded the opportunity
to be outside, sun bathing, island exploring, or socializing in small groups at
the harbor or beach, activities during the winter are much more focused around
the home, work, and socializing through institutional programs such as school
and church. The harbor empties with the
(religiously) enforced Sunday midnight sailing of the fishing boats; not to
fill again until Friday night, perhaps earlier if bad weather forces the
smaller boats into port. As if to
compensate for the interruptions to strictly local social relations during the
chaotic summer months, a string of institutionally organized social events fill
the calender of winter. Many of these
events take the form of fund raisers for local organizations—a kind of
voluntary taxation to support activities of the library, church, and school—but
they are also occasions for rare winter face-to-face encounters over coffee and
sweet breads. These events are spaced
throughout the winter months and are an important vehicle for establishing
community solidarity as well as for providing a means for those who are not
socially well-connected to establish themselves as a part of the community.[4]
There are
actually two different kinds of "summer guests," as members of the seasonal
part of the population are called: people who rent parts of houses or adjoining
cabins from the residents, and people who actually own their own houses on the
island. There is a third group of even
more temporary summertime dwellers, namely boaters who come and anchor in the
harbor for the week or weekend.
The native
population (that is, the group of year-round residents) breaks down
approximately as follows:[5]
A few notes are
in order here. First of all, the
population, despite the large number of retirees, is relatively very young as
island communities go. Few of the
villages on the entire coast have such a young population. Secondly, although it might look like
fishing accounts for the activities of only 10% of the people, when all of the
economic dependents of that 10% are counted (i.e., the wives and children) and
the number of retired fishermen figured in, then a clear 80% of the population
is or was directly related to the institutional practices of fishing. When one adds to this the amount of economic
activity on the island that is supported through the business transactions of
the fishermen (for example, the fishermen fuel and supply their boats from the
local store), then the magnitude of fishing, in terms of how it shapes the
economic and cultural landscape here, is seen to be quite large.
The history of
the islands in the Göteborg region has been greatly influenced by a series of
massive herring populations known as sill
perioder ("herring periods"). These
periods are believed to have occurred with a frequency of 100-120 years and a
duration of 30-50 years since at least as far back as 600 A.D. It is not really known if these large
variations in the population of herring along this coast are due to
infrequently large populations of the normal herring stock which migrate to the
west coast, or are a product of an unusual pattern in the normal migration of
herring in the North Sea which leads them into the relatively smaller bodies of
water between Denmark, Norway, and Sweden known as the Skagerrak and Kattegatt
straits. Whatever the cause, the
effect, in times before a very intensive open-sea fishing were possible, was to
bring a normally unobtainable resource right into the arms of people struggling
to make an existence on these wind blown mounds of granite off the west coast
of Sweden.
The herring
period at the turn of the 19th century, for example, resulted in a population
increase of 600% among the islands of Öckerö, one of the larger townships
within the Göteborg region (Olsson, 1984:30).
This increase in population was largely the result of the industry which
grew up around utilization of the herring, primarily in the form of salting
houses and trankokerier ("fish-oil
factories"). The oil produced by
boiling herring down to its nonsoluble residues was an important international
product used as a source of energy in many parts of the world. In the 1790's, salted herring and herring
oil accounted for 17% of the value of Sweden's export products (Nilsson, 1963,
cited from Utbult, 1990:8).
The primary
fishing technique employed during the most intense parts of the herring periods
of the 18th and 19th centuries (and undoubtedly prior to this as well) was
land-based net capture. Teams of 10 to
20 men would drive the nets out around a shoal of herring in the shallow waters
just off shore and haul the encircled fish up on to land or cage them in among
the shallows for retrieval when their sale to buyers was more secure (Hasslöf,
1949). In the first decade of the
twentieth century, as herring ceased crowding in among the islands following
the last herring period, the adaptation of new technologies (e.g., motor driven
boats and winches, new net materials, and new boat designs with sheltering
decks) made possible the pursuit of herring further out to sea.
Herring is a
migratory, schooling fish. It's
migratory range is hundreds of miles, and while far from random, has proven to
be quite variable (see Figure 31). From
the fishermen's point of view, herring are known to enter certain areas of
water at certain times of the year which, together with the prevailing fish prices
and repair schedules for boat and equipment, determine the yearly cycle of
activity for each boat. The other major
varieties of fish, besides herring, which are caught are: cod (usually caught
in the Baltic Sea south and east of Sweden), Norwegian Lobster (a small
salt-water crayfish which brings high prices in the fall, and has led to a
seasonal fishery that entails smaller bottom-fishing trawlers), and various
kinds of bottom-living flat fishes.
These fisheries
make up the majority of what I will call "big fishing."[6] All of these fisheries require substantial capital investment and
fishing teams that range from 3 to 15 men.
Boats engaged in "big fishing" are out to sea for one to two weeks at a
time, occasionally shuttling crew members across the country, or to Denmark or
Norway, to meet the ship and thereby avoid the expense of sailing all the way
to home port. There is also a large
number of boats which fish closer to the coast and employ various kinds of
traps and floating and bottom nets to catch herring, mackerel, eel, crab,
lobster, and bottom fish. This kind of
fishing is referred to variously as kustfiske
("coast fishing") in its professional form, and småfiske ("small fishing") in its recreational, retiree, and youth
forms.
Ever since the
introduction of seaworthy fishing vessels, and most noticeably following the
introduction of trawling (a technique whereby 1 or 2 boats drag a semi-enclosed
net through the water), the Göteborg region has accounted for an overwhelming
majority of Sweden's fisheries in terms of: catches made, capital investment
(see Figures 13 and 14), and the percentage of professional fishermen. In short, it is a clear fact that the
fishermen of the Göteborg region have (at least since the turn of the century)
been the most numerous, had the biggest and most expensive boats and equipment,
focused their attention on the biggest possible catches and primarily on
herring.[7]
Among the
activities which are here labelled "big fishing," can be identified three
primary practices, based upon the fishing techniques employed in each. These practices, arranged in order from
larger-scale operations to smaller-scale operations, are vadfiske ("net fishing," more formally, purse seining), flyttrålfiske ("mid-water
pair-trawling"), and trålfiske
("trawling," more formally, bottom-trawling).
Purse seining and pair-trawling are employed exclusively for herring,
bottom-trawling is employed for bottom-dwelling, sedentary species.[8] As such, the former two practices entail
travel to more remote fishing grounds (entailing larger ships, greater expense,
and more elaborate social organization) while the latter practice is generally
restricted to nearby waters (entailing smaller investment, shorter trips away
from home, and more extensive knowledge of specific fishing areas).
Figures 2
through 12 shows the boats and crew members of teams from Vindö which engage in
"big fishing." This constitutes 12
ships (and all but 1 of the island's boats which are longer than 12 meters )
and 35 fishermen (about 85% of the island's active fishermen). As shown, there is only one purse seining
team in residence, although this "team" consists of two different ships which
will work together during the coastal sprat season.[9] Typically, during the early-winter sprat
season, the smaller boat of the pair (and often another boat from the local
fleet) will rig up as a "light boat" whose job (in addition to helping search
for fish) is to attract the fish into a concentrated shoal which the larger
ship can encircle, trap, and draw on board.
There is also only one pair-trawling team from Vindö. This team is also made up of two ships,
although they operate quite independently.
In large part, this independence stems from the fact that the ownership
of the boats is divided, creating independent economic units run by members
with different kinship affiliations.
The remaining 8 teams and boats shown in Figures 2 through 12 engage in
bottom-trawling.
Figures 2
through 12 also show that 23 (66%) of the fishermen from the island who engage
in "big fishing" are part owners of their respective boats and equipment. Furthermore, it is clear that this ownership
is concentrated among those who are related—usually, but not exclusively,
agnatically—to each other. Of the 12
non-owning fishermen, 4 are over 30 years old and only 1 of these 4 is not
married. Three of these 4 explicitly told me they had no interest in becoming a
boat owner and I have no information on this question as regards the remaining
member of the group. Of the remaining 8
non-owning fishermen (all under 30 years old), only one is married, and newly
wed at that. Of these 8, half expressed an interested in
becoming boat owners (the other half I have no good information on), although
the future of such a career appeared dim to all of them. Two of these 4 individuals who plan to
become owners some day were clearly well-established in the community: one by
way of active church and community involvement, the other through quite intense
commitment to his crew and kin on the island.
There are no
hard and fast rules for accounting for why one becomes a fisherman or a boat
owner. Most fishermen told me "there
was never any doubt" in the matter of becoming a fisherman—they had gone
through their compulsory seven or nine years of school but most of that time
they had fishing on their minds and in their hearts, they told me. A few of the fishermen moved away from the
island in order to continue their education, or to pursue a factory job, but
maintained close contact with the island and subsequently returned to live on
the island and be a fisherman. The most
common reasons cited for returning was: it's a better place to raise your
family; I missed home and family while in the big city; the work is "freer,"
more interesting, one gets to do many different things. With only one exception that I know of, none
of these fishermen who once left the island and later returned to the community
and the practice were sons of boat owners.
Sons of boat owners told me that it was never a question for them: they
intended to become fishermen, spent quite a lot of their youth engaged in small fishing activities, and ultimately
expected to become a partner in the ownership of their father's boat.
Clearly, the
social structure of boat crews suggests the importance of agnatic kin relations
in the process of becoming a boat owner.
Informants, well aware of this regularity, were keen to point out to me,
however, that one does not become a fisherman and owner just because one's
father is a fisherman. On the other hand,
it is explicitly acknowledged that fiske
går i arv ("fishing is inherited").
Löfgren (1978) makes the case—for the community of Bua which is south of
the Göteborg region on the west coast of Sweden—that the agnatic structure of
boat ownership is a result of the
intensification of capital required of modern fishing. Thus recruitment mechanisms, he says, have
come under more and more economic pressures to select for kin who are
agnatically related—a strategy which makes possible the modern means of production. While the economic substratum of the
practice may explain part of the ownership pattern, this alone fails to address
many of the phenomena which structure the practice and make it salient,
apparently instilling the desire to become a fisherman in members of the
community.[10] In the remainder of this chapter it will be
argued that it is the relations between island institutions and fishing
activities—that is, the material, social, and cognitive organization of fishing
practice based in this community—which render life experiences meaningful for
individuals who live on the island and therefore make the lifestyle of the
prototypical fisherman (a boat-owner) worth pursuing.
The terms
"person," "identity," "self," "role," and "status" have been taken to mean
different and often conflicting things by different scholars. I want to define the term I use below,
"identity," as a description of an
individual's organization of experience.
The very simple notion here is that individuals come to have a sense of
who they are which is constructed through embodied experiences in real
situations. These situations are
themselves structured by the practices in which the individuals
participate. Identity, in this sense,
is about reflection upon—and action taken in accordance with—learned and
perceived order in the world and one's place (both perceived and desired) in
it. It entails construing past
experiences and organizing ongoing behavior in order to evaluate—and demonstrate—who
one is and where, in the world, one fits.
One way to try
and examine the nature of identity would be to try and "probe" the internal
structures of individuals—the residua of embodied experiences—directly, via
some form of psychological testing.
Besides the obvious problem of how to say something general from a
series of such individual protocols, the theory of distributed cognition
suggests a more productive approach would be to probe the larger loop of
cognitive activity—the pathways through which diverse structures are brought
into interaction in the cultural process—which is at once both responsible for
and a product of the internal organization of many individuals. The general question under investigation,
then, is "in which ways does social life appear to yield one kind of
organization of experience, one kind of identity, rather than another."[11] More empirically put; "what technology,
activities, institutions, ways of talking, reasoning, remembering, and behaving
are responsible for the shape of the organization of experience of fishermen
from Vindö?"
The gambling
nature of herring fishing has often been noted by ethnographers and
anthropologists (cf. Anderssen, 1972; Barth, 1966; Wadel, 1972). As mentioned above, herring migration is not
very predictable. Furthermore, water
turbulence, temperature, clarity, and sky luminance, are all known to affect
herring schooling behavior, but the effects of these variables are only
impressionistically known. Longer term
ecological variables of migration patterns (e.g., water salinity, predation,
disease, bridge and other marine construction, and the effects of pollution)
are also only partially understood.
From the standpoint of the fishermen, catches can fluctuate from very
poor to very great with only small changes in weather, location, and time of
day. The use of sophisticated satellite
navigation aids and sonar fish finding tools have drastically changed the nature
of the practice, but it remains true that the herring schools travel in a body
of water much larger than the range of a boat's (or a fleet of boats')
searching devices. Furthermore,
experience on board suggests that these devices still cannot resolve the
quality of a potential catch. Many times
what looks like a big catch on the sonar devices, turns out to be a large
school of small fish which either slip through the meshing or are not suitable
for sale as anything other than scrap fish.
The uncertainty
of the enterprise of herring fishing makes for both economic insecurity and an
ethos of gamesmanship and excitement.
Life on board, for the average non-captain crew member of a purse seiner
or pair-trawling ship, is marked by long periods of waiting, eating, and
watching TV and videos, punctuated by intense periods of work activity and the
promise of large financial rewards for the week. It is not unusual for earnings to vary by a factor of 10 from one
week to the next. A good week's catch
will earn a crew member 10,000 SK (before taxes, approximately $1,500 to $2,000
in US dollars depending on the exchange rate).
This level of income, although generally not sustainable throughout the
year, provides fuel for the imaginations of crew members in both good times and
bad.[12]
The evaluation
of fishing experiences, however, is not limited to the catches' economic
compensation in terms of monetary reward.
One of the most impressive sights of this process, following a cast of
the net from a seiner or a draw of the trawl from a pair of trawlers, is the
massive quantity of squirming, glittering, "sea silver" which is said to have
"gone dry" in the nets because the volume of fish is greater than the volume of
water. Now the fishermen's spirits,
following a hard hours work of winching in and restacking the net, are high and
the tensions of being confined together indoors for long periods of fruitless
searching have been released. A good
catch means the possibility of a shorter work week, not something discussed as an
objective but nonetheless taken to be a benefit when it happens—that is, one
does not pursue this kind of fishing in
order to have short weeks. In fact
"big fishing" is romanticized by its practitioners, at least in their rhetoric,
for the commitment to being out on the water all week.
Every day that
the winds blow so hard that fish disperse and the fishing operation becomes
inefficient (and miserable for the crew), the decision to stay in port until
the winds die down is an available option.
Being out to sea for the entire week, however, is seen as a sign of true
commitment—and therefore a sign that the team is doing things right and will
ultimately succeed—and even more so if the team often toughs it out through bad
weather. Part of the reasoning here is
based on experience, those who do not driver
hårt ("drive hard") their fishing
enterprise are not successful and their businesses go under. Thus one hears, for example, team members
from boat X recount with pride tales of overhearing (on the ship's radio
scanner) other crews talking about boat X being out in bad weather and fishing
effectively while they themselves are having difficulty.
This issue of
commitment is also evidenced in the ways fishermen compare their activities
with those of smaller boats, many from areas further north, which pursue coast fishing. The latter practitioners are characterized by the former in
somewhat derogatory terms as those who return
home to their families often. Of
course, everyone realizes that boat size is an issue in the feasibility of
staying out in bad weather, and that those with smaller boats must spend more
time in port when the weather turns stormy.
Even those who fish with large ships have, with few exceptions, fished
with smaller boats before. It's just
that the rhetoric of fishermen from bigger boats entails a kind of moral
imperative which encodes the means for justifying their own aspirations,
attitudes, and daily routines. For
their part, fishermen from further north on the coast engage in another kind of
rhetoric—talk which indicts the fishermen of the Göteborg region for their
overzealous fishing, depleting fish stocks and ruining the industry for all.[13]
When the boats
bring their fish to land (usually somewhere along the coast), they bring them
either to auction (where a second kind of "gamble" awaits them for determining
the price they get for their fish), or they have collectively organized trucks
waiting to take the herring to distributors and canners for a fixed (and
generally lower) price. While the size
of the catch (and the variation in this) is one variable which can make the
event exceptional, the price one gets at auction is another aspect which makes
the catch memorable and lends excitement to the activity. Although a primary objective of the
fishermen's organization has been to remove
the speculative nature of fish markets through planning, communication, and
collective effort, fish landed in foreign ports is still subject to more
volatile buying practices. These
auctions, however, remain a source of extreme interest for fishermen.
Back home on
Vindö on the weekend, catches of the week are recounted most often in terms of
their size and the price fetched for them.
These variables generate narrative not because of their effect on bank
account balances, but because of their effect in being used to define
practitioners as successful at what they are spending their efforts doing. This success comes not only in terms of the
capital one amasses but also in terms of the way one can cash in experiences on
the water through making them meaningful in discourse with other island
residents. Excerpts of an experience by
one Göteborg region fisherman—an owner of a large seining ship—provides an
example (Bertil Quirin's Fiskare,
1991:181-182, my translation). For
understanding the story, it is important to know that the Dutch buyers
mentioned pay high prices for a special kind of fat herring which is generally
only available in early spring. This is
the catch referred to in the story. But
to complicate matters these fat herring are hard to transport as the fish, if
not caught at precisely the right time in their feeding cycle or if badly
handled, simply disintegrate into mush and are unsuitable for sale at all.
We came into Hirtshals [Denmark] late in the afternoon, but couldn't unload before the auction began at 7:00 the next morning. The Dutchmen had already arrived. They come out early in order to prepare their buying strategy. It is a really big operation, this buying organization, and you couldn't help but notice the tension in the atmosphere. The Dutchmen were everywhere. They were down in the boat and scrutinized the herring. They took samples and wondered if they could buy the whole load immediately. Four crowns [Swedish Kronor] a kilo they were willing to pay, and that was very good. But I didn't think it was right to sell in this way. Everyone must have the chance, and so I told them all they would have to wait until the next day. The morning came and we set to work unloading. Then we noticed how difficult it really was. The herring didn't hold together. They were so full of [stomach contents?] that the abdomen would burst open and after 1600-1700 lådor [20 or 40 kilo boxes], we were forced to quit and set the rest aside for scrap. Then the auction began. Now it was exciting. The herring was bad, the Dutchmen ran back and forth, and we didn't know if we would get anything sold. But despite the fact that the herring was in bad condition, we got 6-7 SK [Swedish Kronor] per kilo. It [the herring] was fat. That's what mattered. We were, of course, more than satisfied. In spite of that, we couldn't help thinking it was a shame that so much money disappeared to scrap. Over 1200 lådor to no use. One thing we knew, however: where we could go to fetch more. It was incredible. The ocean was as smooth as glass the rest of the week and we did unbelievable fishing. Just drove in and out. That was the best fishing I have ever been in on, and you can imagine how fun it was to come home after such a fine trip.
The pair-trawling
fleet, on the other hand, will generally arrange—through their organization SVC (Svenska
Västkustfiskare Centralförbund, "Swedish West Coast Fishermen's
Organization")—for trucks to meet them at the nearest port on the Swedish
coast. The fleet will have been out on
the water all night (all in the same general region), communicating with each
other (and with certain amounts of culturally permitted obfuscation) about
their successes. When the fish are actually
unloaded there is a second round of questioning about the night's catch. Part of this discussion is a result of
non-captains never having obtained the information in the first place, as they
are seldom or only intermittently on the bridge. Another reason for the new accounting is that the figures on land
often do not match the reports given on the water, so there remains an intense
curiosity about exactly who caught what, and where—not only to obtain the facts
about fish, but also the social facts about the nature of communication and cooperation. Finally, there is just plain an interest in
meeting up with others who are like yourself (a fisherman, engaged in a nearly
identical practice) but also different (from another team, another community,
each with it's own particular reputation).
While the boats wait their turns for docking space, in order to unload,
they tie up to boats which are in the process of unloading. Crew members wander over to the decks of the
unloading boats and peer down into the storage areas and around on the dock to estimate
for themselves how much was caught and what the other boats have on board for
gear or work-saving devices—while making small talk with the crew that is
unloading.
Crew members of
the larger herring fishing ships generally return home to Vindö on Friday or
Saturday. When the ship is nearby it
too will return to home port for the weekend.
Vindö harbor becomes the primary arena for social activity on weekends
as fishermen work on their boats, recount the week's events and discuss future
plans. The week's catches are the major topic of conversation (among the
men) around the harbor over the weekend.
The older fishermen, although retired from the week's activities of "big
fishing," are active participants in the game of fish talk. Most of this talk is about the size of the
catch in lådor. Lådor
are the boxes used to loose-ice pack the herring, and which have been the
yardstick for measuring catches since at least as far back as the turn of the
century. This practice persists despite
the fact that compensation is made to fishermen for kilos of fish, and the fish
are now being packed in much larger (and more convenient and produce-friendly)
containers.
My own guess is
that lådor will remain the currency
of harbor talk as it provides an important link between the generations and
across the practices—lådor remain the
salient units of fish caught and sold.
"Big fishing," as it is now pursued, doesn't look much like the practice
most of these retired fishermen once pursued.
Furthermore, the small fishing
most of the old timers pursue, while acknowledged for its significance in the
lives of the old and young, is somewhat antithetical to the ideals of "big
fishing." It is pursued close to home,
in safe weather and waters, without committed practitioners who are concerned
with expanding their fishing enterprise.
I am not suggesting that the younger fishermen expect the retirees to be
trying their hand at "big fishing," only that the difference between the
activities is loaded with cultural values which clearly marks a difference
between the generations. One major
point of contact between the generations, however, remains the dialog and
associated significance of the size of the catch. Lådor, as the
meaningful units of the catch, will continue to structure this dialog even
though the practice is beginning to move away from the use of lådor in the actual activities of the
fishermen doing the catching.
Again, it is
important to emphasize that the catch's significance is only partially related
to economic success. The catch takes
much of its significance here in terms of its proof of "success," a kind of
"winning the game," or "beating the odds" and in this way it aligns nicely with
what the older fishermen were also trying to do in their time. Even if the scale of this achievement has
changed, the nature of it hasn't. One
eighty-year old fisherman (who still pursues small fishing daily) recounted—to me and two locals one day—the
following episode which took place while purse seining the old fashioned way,
some 60 years ago, in the North Sea.
We were out north of Hirtshals [Denmark], sitting there brewing coffee—oh, it was marvelous. The captain came down and said, ‘Well, Sälö [another boat from the island] is just over there, and it looks like they might be on to some herring. Should we go there or continue on?' And we continued on. And sure enough, we came upon a big shoal and cast, and hauled in 700 lådor of beautiful herring. And the others came over, but there was nothing [no fish] to see [remaining to catch]!
One of the more
exciting purse seining episodes of the year (that is, reported during my
residence on Vindö) entailed a "cast" of the seine right up against the pilings
of a deep-water oil tanker dock, yielding a handsome catch for the team. Some spectators even came over to the edge
of the dock to watch the hauling process from ringside seats—they were
literally on top of the seine. The
narrative effect of this story marks the team—and particularly the captains—as
successful by demonstrating skill, mastery, and competence which renders the
risk-filled event routine. The seine
could well have become wrapped around the dock, entailing the loss of tens of
thousands of dollars. Furthermore the
cast, set as it was in the shipping lanes of big freighters, describes an
unconventional (and therefore clever) accomplishment, a bit of a coup.
Finally, at
least part of the significance of any catch has its roots, I believe, in the
herring periods as reflected in the aura of "poor people make good" which is prevalent
in the writings of both resident and non-resident historians of the area. Resource abundance and industry productivity
of these earlier periods (where herring oils of this coast are said to have lit the streets of Paris) are sharply
contrasted in these texts with the otherwise stark existence of a mostly
island-bound, resource-poor population.
The images of land net fishing—where low capital and labor investment
and highly egalitarian social mores were the norm—are ripe with messages of
collective effort spawning successes of huge proportion, which resonates well
with modern stories about the catch.
These historical events and their modern depiction in narrative—whether
written in text books and historical documents, or spoken and heard at the harbor—create
the means by which participants in the practice organize and make meaningful
their experiences.
A large catch
also makes possible, in economic
terms, the pursuit of "big fishing." As
shown in Figures 13 and 14, the fishermen of the Göteborg region have prevailed
above all others in terms of the degree to which they satsa ("invest") in their
fishing. This investment is seen (as
evidenced in their polysemous use of the word satsa) both in terms of capital and hard work or drive—and the
quality and size of the fishermen's boats are monuments to their success. There exists in this community, and in other
communities of this region, a fairly harsh work ethic and fierce independence
that finds expression in, what for Swedes, is a rather rare capitalistic
drive. This work ethic is, I believe, a
product of a complex combination of factors, including the following four:
Fishing boats
are objects of responsibility and personal freedom, but a "freedom" to engage
in activities which are culturally endorsed.
Children are given their first boat (small, outboard motor skiffs) under
the understanding, perhaps already clear to them from outings with their
father, that its care is their responsibility.
The attention to repair and maintenance of a boat, and its use as a
vehicle for small fishing, nature
exploring, or just putting around, are all activities which are culturally
endorsed and promoters of self-motivation, mechanical skills, and knowledge of
the environmental conditions of fishing.
For fishermen,
of course, fishing vessels are the location of much social and work
participation. Fishermen spend at least
the equivalent of three 24-hour days a week, year-round, on board these vessels
which range from 12 to 35 meters in length.
Their physical work and living environment is, simply put, a very small
place and the location of many shared experiences. The move to a new region of water, the inauguration of a new
piece of equipment, and the event of a rare catch[16]
are all memorable experiences that are ordered by being a crew member on a
particular boat at a particular point in team and personal history.
Fishing
vessels, as the material and cultural objects which constrain and shape life
experiences, are thus also objects of personal identification. As a non-owning crew member, one's fishing
career is segmented into the boats one has been with and the experiences
entailed on board each ship. As an
owning crew member, ships define an individual in even more explicit
terms. Ships are owned by (on average)
2-3 individuals who are usually captains and share in the major
responsibilities of driving the ship, running the fishing operation, and
maintaining the ship when it is in port.
Over 90% of the ships on Vindö have owners which include two persons
related to each other as father and son.
The remaining boats' owners are related through their wives, are
brothers, or are just good buddies (see Figures 2 through 12).
Owners are
closely identified (by themselves and by others) with their ships. On the water, a ship and it's captain
(sometimes even the collective of owning captains) are polysemously referenced
by the third person singular masculine pronoun he.[17] On land, owners use their boat names in
various ways to identify themselves.
Conversations on the telephone with people of a certain distance, and initiated by an owner, are often begun with
an identification that includes the ship name (sometimes even it's publicly
visible registration number).[18] Baseball-style caps, tee shirts, soccer
uniforms, work shirts, winter jackets, address labels—all embossed with pictures
and name of the ship—are common-place possessions of owners, and are worn or
used in a wide range of local contexts where others will find meaningful the
association between person and ship which is expressed.
Ships also have
histories. In good times, the million
dollar (now, multi-million dollar) ships of the Göteborg region have been
replaced with new ships every 5 years.
The "used" ships have been sold to fishermen north and south along the
coast in what has been an economically mutually beneficial arrangement. Nearly 50% of the Vindö fleet is less than 7
years old, and 30% of the ships were built less than 4 years ago. Ships are built in certain places, with the
technology and materials of the time, often with the design coming from the
owners' own experiences and planning.
These facts are not inconsequential; they mean that certain events and
situations—certain kinds of fishing, certain crew sizes, certain territories of
water, certain decisions about the design of the boat—as opposed to others, have
taken place and left their marks in the memories of those involved.
Furthermore,
although the boats may change every 5 years, the name generally does not—Valö
becomes Valö II, then Valö III, and so on.[19] Since ownership follows (predominantly) the
family's patrilineage, the ship name provides a link to past boats and male
ancestors. While past male ancestors
are not obviously salient for these fishermen, it is accurate to say that the
degree one is "rooted" to the island—and thus has many kinds of social
resources to draw upon to define oneself as a native and a fisherman—is
importantly influenced by the size of one's family tree and one's historical
connection to fishing here. A long
lineage of ships, all designated by the same name, is often captured in
personally owned and publicly displayed wood carvings and series of photographs
representing this historical connection.
Fishermen who
once worked together but who now only rarely meet face-to-face due to their
different work schedules, will use their common experiences on board as points
of reference for conversations and topics of social exchange. Furthermore, the boats retired fishermen
have been with or owned provide an important linkage (for them) to the modern
discourse about fishing. Their talk
with younger fishermen is made salient by the physical presence (in the harbor)
of older boats and technologies in a way that stories of the activity alone
could not accomplish. A career in
fishing, I am arguing, is reckoned and recognized—both publicly and
subjectively—via the lineage of boats one has owned and with which one has been
a crew member.
Technology on
board the modern ships of Vindö has made it possible for one individual,
generally a boat-owning captain, to be in total control of the operation of the
ship at any one time. Much of this
technology entails information management.
It provides answers to questions such as: Where is the ship? Has it been here before? What do the fish look like in the
vicinity? Where are other ships? Where has fish been reported to have been
seen? This technology mediates the
cognitive and social activity of the practice.
In addition to shaping crew social organization—for instance, making it
possible for the driving captain to run the operation largely single-handedly
for a majority of the time spent on the water—technology plays a role in the
way learning and knowing about one's profession takes place.
For instance,
variability in fishing grounds during mid-water pair-trawling (due to the
migratory nature of herring and the mobility of modern trawling) means that
propositional knowledge of local waters and conditions is underdeveloped. This is not true of other types of fishing,
notably bottom-trawling and small fishing
where the collection and protection of information about the locations of
sedentary fish and bottom conditions is at a premium. The complement, one would expect, to the fact that captains of
pair-trawling teams do not employ a lot of privatized knowledge would be that
between-team cooperation is highly developed, and this is clearly true of the
mobile pair-trawling fleet. In this
practice, if one has the skills required to maneuver the ship, navigate, keep
all of the gear in operational order, keep the crew happy, get the fish sold,
respond in appropriate ways to requests for information from other pairs in the
fleet, and manage information about where everyone else is fishing, success
will be forthcoming (or else, failure for all is the alternate outcome). Chapters 3 and 4 entail an in-depth
investigation of pair-trawling, and will elaborate further upon relationships
between the cognitive activities, social organization, and cultural history of
this practice.
The ideology of
fishermen from Vindö and elsewhere in the Göteborg region explicitly devalues
verbal tuition as a means of learning and knowing—fishermen learn by doing, I was told, and my own observations
corroborated this fact. First-year
fishermen are given the same jobs and responsibilities as many-year
(non-captain) veterans rather than placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of
specialized job skills or positions to be mastered. This social organization is influenced by a general principle in
the local culture, namely the down-playing of individual differences. This principle is evidenced on board in the
observation that only boat-owner-captains are clearly exceptional in crew
social hierarchy. In part, this is
played out through an egalitarian distribution of work routines and financial
rewards which dictate that everyone gets an equal share in the catch as
compensation for one's labor as a crew member, regardless of what one accomplishes as an individual. The point is that work routines are fairly
fluid, rarely require specialized skills, and collective work is
institutionalized; all of which contribute to expertise and learning through
participation rather than through explicitly building and distributing
propositional knowledge. These latter
activities would, it seems reasonable to speculate, tend to engender boundaries
that emphasize attributes of individuals—something that is antithetical to the
on board, local, and even national cultures of these people.
Although local
and on board attitudes encourage all individuals
to be fishermen, it shouldn't be concluded that there are no boundaries
which define fishermen as individuals. Some of these boundaries are evidenced in
the tensions brought about by the negotiation of where lines dividing on board
responsibilities between owners and non-owners in fact lie. For example, it was not unusual to sense
non-owning crew members' discomfort with having to stick around and work on
board once the ship had landed home for the weekend—an activity which is not
really in the "job description" of non-owning crewmen. But because these descriptions are only
implicitly formulated (to make them explicit would make the non-owning status
of individuals much more visible), the grey area surrounding an early landing
at home port is a source of tension between crew members.[20]
It was also not
unusual to hear non-captain crew members bemoan a decision made to stay out
fishing an additional day at the end of the week. Non-owners have generally organized their lives around a bounded investment (namely, fixed
amounts of labor) in the operation; they often have plans for the weekend which
do not include anything to do with fishing.
However, publicly flaunting this attitude flies in the face of general
sentiments about what it is to be a riktig
fiskare ("real fisherman"). At
least descriptively, it can be said that attitudes which define who one is (or
ought to be) as a "real fisherman" can be marshaled to keep other quite
legitimate notions about who one is as a "non-owner" at bay. The argument, implicit in this reasoning, is
that a "non-owner" should be working
toward becoming an "owner," the prototypical "real fisherman."[21]
Of course, no
one in the island community believes that all fishermen must, can, or will become
boat owners. But owners—due to their
dominant place in the community socially, politically, and economically—have
the resources for defining what it means to live on Vindö and be a resident and
a fisherman. Non-owners therefore fill
a residual or non-prototypical (yet legitimate) social category of
fisherman. For instance, there are
several unmarried men, ages 18 to 25, who are not entirely committed to living
out their lives on Vindö. The
equal-shares system of crew compensation is quite lucrative for a young man
with only high school education, and many teenagers (especially from the
job-scarce island communities of this region) are lured to the profession by
the prospect of a large income before they have committed themselves to the
life of a fisherman.[22] These individuals have not yet invested,
financially or socially, in this lifestyle.
That is, they are not married, they do not (generally) own property on
the island, they (often) have more years of education and ties to the city than
most of the older fishermen they spend their weeks with, and they rarely spend
their free time engaged in fishing-related activities.
On the other
hand, if individuals have created
social ties on the island which make very salient for them the notion of being
a long term resident, they come (via energetic participation in the practice of
fishing) to value their daily routines, and are likely to adopt the model of
the prototypical "real fisherman" and proceed to invest some of their earnings
in a boat when the possibility to do so arises. If they happen to be in the position of being the son of an
owner, both the antecedents and consequents of this logic—that is, being
socially well-connected on the island and being afforded the opportunity to
invest in a boat, respectively—are nearly automatic.
The analysis of
this chapter has described aspects of the lived-in world in order to articulate
the structured environments in which fishermen act, resulting in—the theory of
distributed cognition holds—internal structures. These arrangements of internal and external structures, through
the processes which employ them for action in the practice of fishing and as a
resident on Vindö, participate in the properties of "identity"—the means by
which fishermen reckon and demonstrate who they are. Although the nature of internal structures are quite reasonably
surmised in this indirect fashion, it would be nice to be able to examine their
properties directly as well. For
instance, if the organization of subjective experience were somehow shown to
directly reflect the properties of structured environments which have been
argued (above) to be influential in fishermen identity, then one would be more
confident that the essential elements
of identity have been explained.
First assume a
theoretical perspective which takes remembering to be a constructive process—a
process which employs the episodes of experience which are well organized for subjects for reconstructing former events
which are not immediately salient or
known. Then the episodes actually employed for reasoning about the past should—the
argument goes—be the ones which are well
organized for individuals. These
episodes—and the mechanisms which bring them about—should therefore be credited
with a large role in the phenomenon we have been calling identity. Two anecdotal observations of fishermen's
verbal remembering protocols offer reason to believe that the structured
environments discussed above are indeed influential in organizing subjective
experience, and thus identity, for fishermen.
One day I was
among a group of island residents who were trying to remember what year the
local store had burned down. The
carpenter who had rebuilt it couldn't remember (although his wife could because,
she said, someone in or near the family had been seriously ill during that
time). The store, as was mentioned
above, is the major fueling and supply center for the island's fishing fleet. The remembering process for one fisherman
was voiced as follows: "Well, let's see.
That was when we had Valö III, so it must have been around 1977." One way to interpret this fisherman's verbal
protocol is as follows. The store is
strongly associated with the recall of his ship, since so much real work
activity involves the two together.
Furthermore, the particular ship he owned and worked on at the time of
the store's burning is strongly associated with the change in work routine, and
entailed difficulties, caused by the store's incapacity to function as it
normally does. Finally, the ship itself
is well lodged in the fisherman's conceptual framework of personal history,
from which an approximate date of the store's calamity can be formulated.
This example is
not a unique case. Another fisherman,
reasoning about the date of an event which occurred while fishing with a former
boat of his, proceeded as follows.
"Well, we got our new boat in ‘85, Palme was shot in ‘86, we were
fishing sprat,[23] so
it must have been in the fall of ‘87."
Here the fisherman reasons his way through a series of specific
experiences (the purchase of a new boat and the murder of a prime minister) and
general routines (they fish sprat every fall) which are well organized for him
and which make the recollection salient.
Given the constraints posed by episodes which are well organized—and
coordinated in places with calender dates—the "salience" here may simply fall
out as the result of a constraint satisfaction process.
In this view of
memory, the re-collection of events is just that—a process of reasoning through
specific experiences by a subject for the purpose of making sensible some
former event. To the extent these
experiences are coherently organized along axes which provide information
regarding the target event, remembering is a probable outcome. Each of us undoubtedly has a domain of
experience in which this phenomenon is often employed to reason about events in
one's past.[24] For these fishermen, the boats they have
been with and owned is a rich source of activating the residua of experience
which have resulted from a history of embodied activity in the practice of
fishing.
Fishermen from
Vindö, like people everywhere, evaluate their current activities, their past
histories, and their future plans, through subjectively construing and publicly
articulating representations of their experiences, at the same time they are
creating new ones. That is, they are
engaged in a process of employing the residua of situated action for the
organization of ongoing behavior in structured environments. This process is, for these fishermen,
grounded in activity which is constrained by such diverse structures as: the
location of one's work area, the amount of time spent there, the technology of
trawling, the behavior of herring and world markets, the practice of telling
stories at the harbor, and the processes of learning and memory. Boats are the location of shared experiences
and learned work routines. Work routines
entail tasks which are mediated by artifactual
structure (e.g., instrument displays, machinery, and the actions of other
crew members and other crews), natural
structure (e.g., the patterns of fish migration and weather, and the
physics of trawling) and internal
structure (e.g., learned expectations about sequences of environmental
states and how to bring them about).
Artifactual and internal structures are products (and, together with
natural structure, are generators) of an ongoing cultural process—they result
from performance in the practice, institutionalization of the practice, and the
evaluation (and re-evaluation) of private and shared experiences.
[1]"Vindö" is a pseudonym for the island were research took place. In fact, there is an island off the west coast of Sweden which bears the name Vindö, but it is not the island referred to in this study.
[2]The local residents claimed that they can still identify a person's place of residence (that is, which island that person lives on) by dialect.
[3]Aside from house pets, there is only one family on the island which has animals. This family has horses and sheep which are raised largely for their entertainment value. There is very little serious gardening conducted on the island. Most agricultural activity is restricted to maintaining flower beds for the purpose of esthetic enhancement of house and yard. One island resident, who engages in a kind of explicit "homesteading" that is somewhat foreign to the local culture, plows and plants a very small plot, has fruit trees, and maintains bee hives.
[4]Examples of local residents who are not "well-connected" include: those who do not have young children which afford between-family contact, those who do not have any of the few island jobs which bring them into daily contact with the public, and those who have only weak kinship links on the island. The value of these institutionalized meetings for establishing oneself in the community was not lost for the ethnographer, who was the most marginal member of society!
[5]In the remainder of this dissertation, I am referring to this population of year-round residents when I use the terms "local population," "local resident(s)," or just "resident(s)."
[6]The term is mine, and is used throughout as a convenience for designating those who engage in fishing but not "small fishing." The latter term is used by the fishermen as described below.
[7]The 1980's have seen a dramatic expansion of Sweden's cod fishery. This was largely a result of the division of traditional fishing grounds to the west into areas controlled by the political and economic interests of nations bordering the North Sea in the 1970's. This left Sweden with reduced access to western waters, but with a majority of the economic rights to the Baltic Sea, fertile cod territory. At the same time, falling prices of herring and the rising price of cod have made cod fishing more attractive than ever before. However, since 1990 the cod fishery has had serious problems including: falling prices world-wide, drastically diminished local stocks due to dropping salinity of the Baltic and over fishing, and difficult negotiations with Baltic countries over control of this relatively limited resource. Herring fishing, as a result, is once again regaining stature, even if in diminished value, as the primary fishery.
[8]There are exceptions here. Larger purse seining boats pursue mackerel in the North Sea (using one of the granted licenses) and can also be converted to do pair-trawling. Pair-trawlers can be rigged up to trawl (as a pair) along the bottom of the sea, and will seasonally change over to bottom-trawling for cod as individual ships. Smaller boats which usually spend their time bottom-trawling can also have their gear converted to capture mid-water herring by trawl, and can even employ a small-scale seine during the coastal sprat season.
[9]Sprat is a type of herring.
[10]My own data also suggest that fishing teams have always been built around agnatic membership. It's just that the large teams of old are now small teams. Therefore, what were once teams made up of multiple kin groups are now built around a single kin group.
[11]The fact that we are left with a description of an "abstract identity" rather than any one individual's identity is not seen to be as large a problem as trying to derive a general statement from individual protocols. The model presented here clearly accommodates the existence of individual differences, and the choice to ignore these differences is a convenience of method. One justification of this choice is given by an epistemological position which expects the greatest explanatory power to come from a level of description which favors accounting for scope over accounting for variability in the phenomenon of "identity."
[12]The average reported cash receipts from fishing by fishermen of the Göteborg region, for the year of 1990, was 177,500 SK (SCB, 1990). Assuming 50 work weeks in the year, this means an approximate weekly income of 3,550 SK.
[13]It should be mentioned that larger boats are not only compelled to stay out in bad weather due to financial constraints which dictate they not be idle, but these teams also face certain amounts of social pressure (from others with boats of similar size) to be out demonstrating their status as competent fishermen.
[14]The congregation's membership includes only about 15% of the local residents, of which only half can be said to be "religious" or active members. Nonetheless, the congregation is quite influential in the lives of teenagers, fishermen's wives, and the elderly, as it provides for many of the organized activities of youth, and young families. Furthermore, three of the four largest fishing ships had at least one owner (and in one case, all of the owners) who were very active in the church.
[15]Informants tell of a much more explicitly ritualistic separation of these spheres in former times in which it was supposedly believed that to see a woman on the way to port for departure to sea was bad luck regarding fishing success and safety of the crew. As with many such retrospective accounts regarding supposedly "irrational beliefs," one cannot help wondering if these beliefs do not tell us more about the negotiation of a socio-cultural order than they tell us about the rationality of minds involved.
[16]These days such catches are not only remarkable for their size, but also for their contents: old mustard gas bombs from WW II (often intact and undetonated) and unwanted parts of second hand cars that have been dumped overboard by black market traders with and from the former Soviet Union.
[17] In response to the question, "where is Valö" issued over the radio (where Valö is the name of a boat in the vicinity), the response would inevitably be of the form, "oh, he is over north of....". The point is, ships are known as she, so it's definitely not just the ship that is being referred to. On the other hand, many objects are referred to (unconventionally, from the standpoint of standard Swedish) with the animate third person he rather than the inanimate third person it. Furthermore, a range of contexts reveal that the he of these sentences is usually responsible for animate activities like directing the boat, deciding to do things, etc. Given that the label of the object in the original question was the boat name, yet the subject in the response was an animate being, I am lead to interpret this regular occurrence as evidence for the captain(s) of the boat being identified with his/their ship.
[18] People on the island are known mostly by just their first names. When this has led to conflicts due to multiple individuals having the same first name, the solutions of choice (rather than using a last name) have been to use a common derivative, hyphenate the name with a middle name, or (perhaps more common in the past, but still used to identify young kids) append the name with a reference to one of the parents (e.g., Kalle's Anders). The sphere in which an owner would identify his ship would be a call off of the island but within the fishing industry's influence (e.g., fishing or non-fishing related businesses on neighboring islands) or further away if the call is about a business transaction where the business in question may require explicit labelling of the ship.
[19]There seem to be three kinds of ship names that are popular: female relatives' names, the names of (often small, not particularly well-known) islands along the coast, and the names of Greek mythic figures.
[20]One strategy which overcomes this problem is to have all cleanup work completed before landing home. This strategy is eagerly adopted by all involved, meaning the weeks-end cleanup is performed on route home. Although I have only anecdotal evidence, it also seemed as though the captains would actively avoid returning to home port—choosing to dock or remain docked somewhere else—if extensive work such as trawl repair (which cannot be done on route) is required.
[21]It should be mentioned that fishermen are quite emphatic about the status of non-owners as full members of the collective which is the "team" and by implication the business. Thus, it is often claimed that fishermen are not "employed" by anyone—but are all self-employed. Again, the principle of down-playing status differences can be invoked to explain this bit of ideology which can only be held to be literally true on tenuous grounds.
[22]It is not unusual for a youngster with no experience to be paid only a half share in his very first year fishing, thereafter to earn a full share. This aspect of the compensation system, which makes regard for one's experience as a "fisherman" but not one's individual talents, seems in line with the general ideology just mentioned.
[23]A kind of herring which comes in to the west coast during late fall every year.
[24]In the ethnographer's case, over twenty years of attending schools in more than seven different towns and cities spread across thousands of miles and two countries has yielded a convenient yardstick for associating and reasoning about life experiences.