Fish stories between past and future: competing and complementary heritage imaginaries in the Northeast Adriatic

Abstract

The article addresses the topic of coastal transformations through the lens of the critical heritage approach. It focuses on fish as a vehicle to assess how heritage as a particular type of imaginary and discourse conveys the social, cultural, political and economic transformations of the area. The two fish chosen to represent the heritage imaginaries in the Northeast Adriatic Bay of Piran are the wild mullet and farmed seabass. Both species are seen as local but each in its particular way. Mullet has acquired a local status by appearing annually in the Bay of Piran where local traditions developed around its catch. Farmed seabass became local through the process of domestication after it traversed large distances across the land to arrive in the Bay’s meshed cages. Through detailed ethnographies and textual and visual discourse analysis, the authors find an array of competing and complementary heritage imaginaries surrounding both fish. These imaginaries highlight frictions as a central part of the present-day life on the coast as well as unease about the future, and can be discerned in the tense relation between fishing and mariculture, the competing ideologies of the local, national and the global and the disappearance of previous ways of life in the face of rapid coastal transformation.