LIST OF FIGURES.. vi

Figure 1. Culture as process

Figures 2-12. The crews of local boats boats

Figure 13. Boats of the Göteborg region by number and value

Figure 14. Boats of the Göteborg region by horsepower

Figure 15. Flyttrålfiske, mid-water pair-trawling

Figure 16. Electronic navigator display

Figure 17. A side trawler used in pair-trawling

Figure 18. Trawl winch levers

Figure 19. Schematic of trawl construction

Figure 20. Names and parts of the trawl

Figure 21. Net sounder display

Figure 22. A modern stern trawler used in pair-trawling

Figure 23. Trawl force diagram

Figure 24. Avstånd radar display

Figure 25. Schematic of cable marking system

Figure 26. Warp angle measuring device

Figure 27. The sensing and display properties of Asdic

Figure 28. An example DECCA coordinate fix

Figure 29. DECCA sending and receiving logic

Figure 30. Sea chart with DECCA coordinates

Figure 31. North Sea herring migration patterns

Figure 32. A week of pair-trawling on the west coast

Figure 33. Herring prices

Figure 34. Landing fish

Figure 35. Hauling herring

Figure 36. First draw at Stor Middelgrund

Figure 37. Fleet activity at Stor Middelgrund

Figure 38. The electronic navigator

Figure 39. A reconstruction of the situation of Segment One

Figure 40. Point fix One

Figure 41. Point fix Two

Figure 42. Point fix Three

Figure 43. Point fix Four

Figure 44. Point fix Five

Figure 45. The True Motion (TM) radar of Nordö

Figure 46. A close-up of the TM radar

Figure 47. A reconstruction of the situation of Segment Three

Figure 48. A reconstruction of Sydö's RM radar display during Segment Three

Figure 49. A reconstruction of Nordö's TM radar display during Segment Three

Figure 50. The situation reasoned about in Segment Ten

Figure 51. Spartan and Milton set

Figure 52. A adjusts radar scale

Figure 53. A turns to meet up with B

Figure 54. A reorients himself to a new radar display

Figure 55. A pinpoints B's location on electronic navigator

Figure 56. The situation discussed in Segment Nine

Figure 57. The reporting of fish along the edge

Figure 58. Distributed Cognition

Figure 59. A sonar display

Figure 60. A sample of descriptions

Figure 61. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 1 and 2

Figure 62. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 3 and 4

Figure 63. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 5 and 6

Figure 64. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 7 and 8

Figure 65. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 9 and 10

Figure 66. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 11 and 12

Figure 67. Speaker-Listener agreement in the Match Task for subjects 13 and 15

Figure 68. Inter-listener agreement in the Match Task by match item

Figure 69. Cluster analysis of inter-listener agreement

Figure 70. Results of the two-dimensional Multiple Dimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis

Figure 71. Results of the three-dimensional Multiple Dimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis

Figure 72. Projections of the 3-dimensional MDS solution of inter-listener agreement onto each of the 2-dimensional planes of the coordinate system

Figure 73. Multiple regression of the dichotomous variable Purse (1 = Purse seinerman, 0 = Other) over the coordinates fore each subject's position in the agreement space constructed by the 3-D MDS solution

Figure 74. Multiple regression of the dichotomous variable Pair (1 = Pair trawlerman, 0 = Other) over the coordinates fore each subject's position in the agreement space constructed by the 3-D MDS solution

Figure 75. Multiple regression of the dichotomous variable Bottom (1 = Bottom trawlerman, 0 = Other) over the coordinates fore each subject's position in the agreement space constructed by the 3-D MDS solution

Figure 76. Correlation between inter-subject agreement across the Pile and Match tasks

Figure 77. Scattergram plot of Language Similarity (L) versus Pile Similarity (P) for all pairs of cards and all descriptions of part one of the Match Task

Figure 78. Scattergram plot of Language Similarity (L) versus Pile Similarity (P) for all pairs of cards from the 12 cards and 120 descriptions of part two of the Match Task

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Subjects who participated in part or all of the sonar experiment

Table 2. Subjects' pile sizes

Table 3. Agreement between all pairs of listeners

Table 4. The feature grammar

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My accomplishment with this research, however modest, is due to the help of a large number of people and institutions. Funding for the project was graciously provided by the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, by the National Science Foundation through a Dissertation Improvement Award (BNS 9115646), and by the American-Scandinavian Foundation through a Fellowship granted for my year-long residence in Sweden.

To the residents of the island I have herein called "Vindö," I owe much thanks. These people accepted me into their community, activities, and lives, for which I am very grateful. In the process, I learned a lot about them, and much about myself. In return, I had only my sincere efforts at being a "good community member," in their terms, to offer them, which included satisfying their intense curiosity about me and where I come from. I have chosen to leave the island anonymous in this work in order to militate against the possibility of unwanted publicity. It was a difficult decision to make, because the people are quite proud of their heritage and their circumstance, and I know many would have welcomed the exposure. For these individuals, my decision will come as something of a disappointment. The decision, however, is based upon my conviction that part of my professional obligation entails minimizing the unanticipated consequences of my field work. Of course, this is impossible to do completely but I felt that keeping the island anonymous was an important step to take.

Roger Säljö, at the University of Linköping, was of great assistance in selecting a field site, helping with arrangements while I was in Sweden, and in being an enthusiastic supporter of my efforts. My doctoral committee—Roy D'Andrade, Ed Hutchins, Fitz Poole, F.G. Bailey, and Aaron Cicourel—provided valuable feedback on the planning, execution, and writing-up of the project. Special thanks go out to Ed Hutchins for his unwavering support during my entire graduate student career. Ed's confidence in me—even at times when my own was faltering—has led not only to the successful completion of this project but also, more importantly, to understanding about myself and the institutions in which our research and social activities are located. Most importantly, Ed's own approach to the study of human behavior, in which rich cognitive and social phenomena are everywhere—phenomena to be seen or uncovered and made explicit, encountered and modelled or analytically cast—has been both inspirational and instrumental in my own work. A more valuable education is hard to imagine. Finally, to Hilary, who has been a team player from week one (struggling with Durkheim) to the final week (struggling to prepare my own dissertation defense), "thank you" seems both inadequate and unnecessary. Perhaps that's what makes a partner in life so special.

VITA

November 28, 1960 Born, Berkeley, California

1974 - 1981 Alpine ski racing in regional, national, and international competition

1987 B.A., University of Washington, Seattle

1988 - 1989 Teaching Assistant, Departments of Anthropology and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego

1989 M.A., University of California, San Diego

1989 - 1990 Research Assistant, Laboratory of Distributed Cognition, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego

1990 - 1991 Field Researcher, West coast of Sweden

1992 - 1993 Research Assistant, Laboratory of Distributed Cognition, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego

1994 Ph.D., University of California, San Diego

PUBLICATIONS

Hazlehurst, B. (1989). Evolutionary Process and the Ecology of Culture. M.A. Thesis, University of California, San Diego.

Hutchins, E. & Hazlehurst, B. (1991). Learning in the Cultural Process. In C. Langton, C. Taylor, D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen (Eds.), Artificial Life II. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Hutchins, E. & Hazlehurst, B. (1995). How to invent a lexicon: The development of shared symbols in interaction. In N. Gilbert & R. Conte (Eds.), Artificial Societies: The computer simulation of social life. London: UCL Press.

Hutchins, E. & Hazlehurst, B. (1995). The development of shared form-meaning pairings in interaction. In E. Goody (Ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Fields: Anthropology and Cognitive Science

Studies in Connectionist Modelling of Language and Cognition

Professors Edwin Hutchins, Gary Cottrell, Mark St. John

Studies in Cultural Anthropology

Professors Roy D'Andrade, John F.P. Poole, Theodore Schwartz

Studies in Cognitive Anthropology

Professors Edwin Hutchins, Roy D'Andrade, Aaron Cicourel

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Fishing For Cognition: An ethnography of fishing practice in a community on the west coast of Sweden

Brian Leighton Hazlehurst

Doctor of Philosophy in Cognitive Science and Anthropology

University of California, San Diego, 1994

People who live on the islands off the west coast of Sweden have, for hundreds of years, engaged in various forms of fishing as their primary means of existence. In addition to describing the modern way of life in one such community, this dissertation outlines a theory of culture and cognition by formulating principles about how behavior is organized, and about the consequences of this organization for social and cognitive life. The organization of an individual's behavior is profitably viewed as some function of current and past behaviors, as well as the nature of media and processes (e.g., internal representations, social organization, and material artifacts) which structure the flow of information to (and within) the individual while performing in a social and material world. While the sciences of cognition generally derive their theory of mind from the logical necessity of "systematic" mental processes, it is argued here that "systematic" human cognition results from the use of the material products of histories of social action—resources available in the environment for achieving individual and collective goals with which actors come into coordination—rather than from symbol-manipulating mechanisms of the brain plus structured knowledge. In the theory of distributed cognition employed here, cognitive actions are mediated by internal structures which result from embodied experience with (and, simultaneously, result in) the structure and processes of social practices and cultural histories of which the actions are part. The theory entails an information processing account of the material, social, and historical means for organizing behavior. The methodology utilizes techniques for making explicit the functional properties of cognitive resources (structures and processes both internal and external to actors) employed by actors in socio-historically situated activity. Data are analyzed which address the nature of: fisherman identity (the means by which fishermen organize subjective experience in an objective, socially constructed, world), decision-making and problem solving (the collaborative enterprise of information collection and management entailed in deciding where to set the trawl by captains of a team of pair-trawlers), and language consensus (the bases for constructing and sharing descriptions used to communicate about sonar representations of fish).