By showing that small‐scale fishermen practice a number of forms of self‐regulation, among them some that many have referred to as “property” at sea, anthropologists have challenged the assumptions of the “tragedy of the commons” model—that unregulated harvesting of a common‐property resource is the cause of depletion of sea resources. Some have been inspired by ecological models of territoriality developed to explain the behavior of human foragers. We argue that rules of access to sea resources can only be understood in the context of the total socioeconomic system of which they form a part, including its land‐based component. We also suggest that while the concept of ownership does apply to some forms of sea tenure, the extension of the concept to include informal rules of access is obfuscatory. [fishing, ownership, sea tenure, ecology, states]
The Schaefer-Gordon model of fisheries management does not adequately predict the state of stocks or the behavior of fishermen. In any scientific discourse, this should call the basic assumptions into question. I review the challenges to the model's biological assumptions and argue that its economic assumptions are also flawed. I review the approach developed by A.V. Chayanov for studying peasant economies in conjunction with comparative data on other fisheries and data from Mississippi Shrimpers to show that Chayanov's model characterizes the shrimpers of Mississippi. From the comparative and ethnographic data, I conclude that fishermen do not operate as firms. This further calls into question the adequacy of the current fisheries management model and raises the question of how and why such an inadequate model is perpetuated.
We have argued that differences in success in Icelandicfihing are statistically explained more by technical and ecological factors than by personal qualities of skippers, the "skipper effect. " Research by other scholars has reopened the discussion of the skipper effect. We assess some of the statistical arguments, pointing out that while there may be a strong skipper effect in some societies, in other societies it is weak or negligible. W e suggest that it is important to distinguish between the statistical reality of the skipper effect and its sociology and that the concept of skipper effect is of limited utility in comparative studies, since different researchers using it have not always been talking about the same phenomena andfihing success is conceived dafferently in different societies. The discussion of the skipper effect echoes debates on resource management and the authenticity of folk models, as well as larger debates in social theory on the relationship between the symbolic and the real and the role of history and agency. Folk theories ofproduction, we argue, are best regarded as cultural accounts constructed in social discourse, in the context of production systems.
Anthropological research has produced a number of robust findings about organized labor. National and state policies are the chief determinates of unions' power to organize workers for concerted action to redress the imbalance between those who provide labor and those who control its use through ownership or management of capital. Unions are effective when workers do not accept management paradigms of shared interest; the organization of production promotes worker self-organization; discussion among workers is possible; unions show members how to address problems with space, ideology, and management manipulations of emotions; and unions draw on community contacts and social relations beyond the workplace. Unions are ineffective when they are corrupt, racist, and inattentive to change. Servicing and organizing functions of unions are contradictory. These and other findings leave many topics that anthropologists have not ethnographically explored and define an agenda for future research.
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