This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. -- .
By:
Penny McCall Howard
Series edited by:
Alexander Smith
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 14mm
Weight: 517g
ISBN: 9781784994143
ISBN 10: 1784994146
Series: New Ethnographies
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 12 April 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction Part I: A metabolism of labour and environment 1 'Working the ground' 2 From Wullie's Peak to the Burma: naming places at sea Part II: Techniques and technologies 3 Techniques to extend the body and its senses 4 From 'where am I?' to 'where is that?' Rethinking navigation Part III: Capitalism and class 5 'You just can't get a price': the difference political economy makes 6 Structural violence in ecological systems Conclusion: labour, class, environments and anthropology Index -- .
Penny McCall Howard is National Research Officer for the Maritime Union of Australia and is an Honorary Associate in the Anthropology Department of the University of Sydney
Reviews for Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea: 'Working the Ground' in Scotland
'As Howard makes clear capital and its drive to profit must be challenged-this book is a weapon in that fight.' Sarah Ensor, International Socialism, A quarterly review of socialist theory How do the fishers relate to each other, their boats, their technologies, the sea, their catches? In this deeply researched book, written with an intimate feel for fishing and the sea, Penny McCall Howard answers these questions. Based on the Scottish industry, this important book shows how class relations continue to shape labour, working relationships, environments and at times life and death. Few researchers hold both a 100-ton captain's licence from the US Merchant Marine and a doctoral degree; few are as at home on a fishing boat's deck as they are in a library. Penny McCall Howard brings a unique blend of abilities to this compelling account of work and has produced an argument for rethinking how we understand the nature of labour in any industry and in all places. Professor Bradon Ellem, University of Sydney Business School -- .
- Winner of Winner of the American Anthropological Association's Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize for 2018 2018 (UK)
