Collapsing fish stocks, gendered economies, and anxieties of entrapment in coastal Sierra Leone

Abstract

This article explores the economic negotiations between Sierra Leonean fishermen and the women who compete to buy their fish, tracing how relationships of gendered intimacy and interdependence are being reconfigured in a context of deepening economic precarity. Fish stocks in Sierra Leone are in crisis. Fisherfolk look back with nostalgia to a past in which bountiful harvests had made it possible for transactions of fish to be simple and impersonal. Today, by contrast, it is almost impossible for women to access fish without working to develop strong personal relationships with fishermen: deploying gifts of food, loans of money, and even secret 'medicines' to secure the loyalty of potential customers. I analyse how men and women reflect on their growing impoverishment through discourses that emphasize their moral ambivalence at being drawn back into webs of interpersonal dependency, and argue that these anxieties need to be understood in the context of Sierra Leone's history of domestic slavery.

Fishing, thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

“…These ties are multifaceted and often include an element of friendship, romance, and everyday gift exchange. But women also routinely lend fishermen money in return for the promise that they will sell them, and no one else, their catch (Diggins 2019). In an economy as tight as Tissana's, women's livelihoods are very often hanging in the balance as they gaze out to sea: depending on their customers both catching fish and honouring their promises to bring those fish home.…”

“…Of late, however, this mood of suspense has slid into something closer to dread. Sierra Leone's coastal ecosystem has been radically depleted in recent decades (Diggins 2019; Okeke‐Ogbuafor, Gray & Stead 2020). In Tissana, catches are becoming ever smaller and less predictable, and everyone – in boats and on the wharf – has grown wearily accustomed to having their hopes thwarted.…”

Is community-based management of small-scale fisheries in Sierra Leone the answer to their problems?

“…As a result of industrial over-fishing and destructive artisanal fishing, some of Sierra Leone's fish stocks are in decline. For example, the African bony fish (Heterotis niloticus) and the Madeiran Sardine (Sardinella maderensis) are both overfished (Diggins, 2019;Ighobor, 2017;EJF, nd), and "The high exploitation rate of the Grunts (Haemulidae) and Croakers (Scianidea) suggest that these stocks are nearing a point where they could be exploited unsustainably", while the Bonga (Ethlamosa fimbriata), Snappers (Lutjanidae), Groupers (Epinephelinae), Shrimp (Carideawithin) and Herring (Clupea harengus) are fully exploited and need to be managed with care (Baio and Sei, 2017, p. 33). This is a worrying situation because fish is the main source of animal protein in coastal communities in Sierra Leone [add ref].…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…As well as peonising graduate and postdoctoral research staff, this turn drives an output‐oriented, project‐based model of research that can sometimes call into question the integrity of the discipline itself by bringing back the division between ethnography (as a practice of gathering data) and anthropology (as a generalising science). A significant number of articles published in 2019, within the rubric of anthropology, inhabit that borderland that anthropology shares with neighbouring social sciences: with human geography (Saxer and Andersson 2019; Brachet and Scheele 2019; Gardini 2019; Saxer 2019; Gohain 2019; Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019; Luo et al 2019; Fradejas‐Garcia 2019; Andersson 2019); area studies (Goh 2019); urban studies (Civelek 2019; Kobi 2019); development studies (Green 2019); human economics (Diggins 2019; Pied 2019; Henig 2019); and sociology (Miller 2019). Geoffrey Hughes, in his 2018 survey of European anthropology in this journal (Hughes 2018), referred to the rise of what he called ‘meta‐anthropology’, breaking down traditional boundaries between academic knowledge production and knowledge practices, both in the field and in wider political economies, a development he cautiously welcomed as prefiguring a more secure future for the discipline in the age of audit and concrete accountability for so‐called ‘deliverables’.…”