From Wullie’s Peak to the Burma Naming places at sea

The chapter focuses on human-environment relations. It begins with a description of how place names are used during a fishing trip, and how they are marked in digital GPS chartplotters and discussed amongst fishermen. Most of the names discussed are of places at sea not marked by anything visible from the sea’s surface. An account of the working day of a trawler fisherman shows how the intensive sociability of fishing skippers transcends their isolation on different boats. Discussions among skippers are focussed on the material results and affordances of fishing in places and names are generated in these discussions, reflecting Marnie’ Holborow’s Marxist analysis of language. The chapter builds on Tim Ingold’s analysis of place by demonstrating that place names reflect subjective the experience of working in them, as well as searing events of social history and changing fishing practices. An examination of places that are remembered but no longer in use shows that the same location can become a different place. The chapter concludes by emphasising how places are generated through conversations amongst people involved in developing their affordances, and how names for places incorporate many aspects of life experience and resonate through collective social experience.

‘Working the ground’

Chapter One focuses on human-environment relations and opens with a description of what it means to ‘work the ground’ when fishing off the coast of Scotland. Through detailed ethnography and James Gibson’s and Tim Ingold’s conception of ‘affordances’, it shows how productive grounds are created through the labour of fishers. The chapter explores people’s personal relations to grounds, sensory techniques for ‘feeling’ the grounds, and the historical development of new tools to explore grounds. The chapter describes how fishermen saw themselves as contributing to the productivity of grounds - in contrast to the conventional view of fishermen as destroying the ocean environment. Drawing on Marx, ‘labour’ is explored as both a material metabolism with nature and as a subjective activity. Understandings and experiences of labour are shown to be contradictory – at times relational, productive, alienated, and destructive – reflecting people’s real and conflicted relations too their environment and their own labour. The need for ethnographic investigations of the subjective experience of labour in ‘the West’ is emphasised. A labour-centered approach to human-environment relations can ensure analysis is both materially grounded and sensitive to people’s subjective relations to environments, machines, and markets.

Introduction

Key aspects of the history, social relations and economy of the west of Scotland, particularly the area around the Isle of Skye and Lochalsh. The market pressures that lead to deaths at sea are outlined, and the book’s labour-centred approach to analysis is introduced. The book’s content is situated in both phenomenological and political economy approaches to anthropological analysis. It is also situated historically in the development of capitalism, waged labour and fisheries on the west coast of Scotland and anthropological studies of Scotland and the sea. Finally, the introduction outlines the details of sea-centered approach to ethnographic fieldwork that the book is based on, and the opportunities and limitations this afforded.

From ‘where am I?’ to ‘where is that?’ Rethinking navigation

Chapter Four continues the discussion of techniques and technologies with a focus on orientation and navigation. The chapter draws on Tim Ingold’s and James Gibson’s descriptions of orientation as a process of movement through the landscape to find affordances. The chapter describes the techniques used locally for finding position from the 1960s onwards: dead-reckoning, and the use of radar, depth sounders, Decca, and GPS. Challenging anthropological accounts of ‘Western’ navigation that assume Westerners always rely on charts and instruments and that these alienate people from direct relations with their environment, the GPS chartplotter shows the perpetual importance of the subjective and experiential aspects of orientation in a digital age. The chapter argues that alienation is instead produced by relations of ownership and exploitation, and that the chartplotter facilitates the centralisation of fishing knowledge with the skipper and the employment of low-waged migrant workers as crew. While authors such as Edwin Hutchins describe navigation as answering the absolute question ‘where am I?’, the chapter proposes that the aim of navigation is usually to answer the relational question ‘where is that?’

Conclusion

The conclusion focusses on the importance of considering labour, production and capitalism in anthropological analysis. In contrast, a focus on consumption can result in the ‘enchantment of things’ – a reification that obscures processes, history and how things are brought into being and transformed. The role of labour and capitalism can be harder to see at sea due to the overwhelming environment, but they are no less important than on land. Neil Smith has described how capitalist relations currently produce nature as a totality, and this includes the marine environment – what Jason Moore describes as the Capitalocence. An analysis of the political economy of capitalism can make an important contribution to understanding the sea, human-environment relations, human-machine relations, and human societies more generally. There is much to explore in the connections between human and environmental exploitation, violence and capitalism at sea, and contradictions and class in Western society. People’s labour plays a critical role within the enormous metabolism of capitalism, which ties people and their environments together on a huge scale.

‘You just can’t get a price’ The difference political economy makes

Chapter Five focuses on the structuring effect of political economy on commercial fishers in Scotland (and elsewhere). It outlines how sea creatures like crabs and lobsters were made into tradeable commodities, and how commodity relations affected ownership of boats and gear, and the distribution of fishing surplus among owners and crew. Commodity relations extended to the commodification of people’s own labour, and permeated and structured social relations between fishermen, generating new forms of class relations. Following Henry Bernstein’s key questions of political economy, the chapter investigates ‘who owns what’ and ‘who gets what’ and how these relations have changed historically. Over time, ownership of boats has been centralised and the fishing share system has been modified so that owners appropriated a greater portion of the fishing surplus. The position of crew has moved in the opposite direction, as they have shifted from being part owners of boats and gear, to a pool of casual waged labourers, to migrant workers (mainly Filipino) on very low wages. In ecological terms, commodity relations encouraged a strategy of catching tiny prawns in bulk, a fishing strategy which is facilitated the employment of low-waged fishers.

Techniques to extend the body and its senses

Chapter Three begins by examining the importance of boats as technologies for living and working at sea - in contrast to a great deal of literature about the sea and fishing that focusses on human-environment relations only. The chapter draws on Marcel Mauss’ analysis of techniques to ethnographically and phenomenologically examine the way in which boats and other tools are used to extend people’s bodies and sensory perception deep into the sea. As a result of these extensions, the sea is treated as a familiar workspace and caring relationships of maintenance develop between people and their tools and boats. The chapter investigates how human subjectivities and bodily safety are affected by the struggle to remain in control of the extended practices often used to work at sea. This control also depends on the ownership of boats and their gear. The chapter engages with the history of the Scottish herring fishery, the anthropology of the senses, and Lucy Suchman’s and Michael Jackson’s anthropology of human-machine relations. It also draws on anthropologies of labour-action, enskilment and task-orientation by Michael Jackson, Gísli Pálsson, and Tim Ingold.

Structural Violence in ecological systems

The final substantive chapter explores the structural violence in the fishing industry. The circumstances of the wreck of the fishing boat Kathryn Jane and the death of her crew are examined in detail, along with the effect of the wreck and deaths on other fishers. The logic of seamanship meant taking the time and care to stay safe at sea, yet the logic of the market pressurised fishers to catch as quickly as possible and created incentives to fish in dangerous conditions. Fishers experience structural violence, with a fatality rate 115 times higher than the average workforce – but this was not recognised by fishers or government agencies. Instead, an ideology of nature naturalised deaths on a dangerous sea, and an ideology of accidents blamed fishermen for their own deaths. Fishers themselves coped with the deaths of their friends and workmates by isolating each event and ‘not keeping score’. Fishers and other seafarers were sometimes traumatised by these experiences. Ecological systems produced by capitalism include structural violence.