Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda

Abstract

This article examines contemporary ontological conflicts between people who make their living on an island with fish that are considered by fisheries managers to be “commercially extinct” and people who make their living managing “commercially important” fisheries for this region as a whole. It is an experiment in worlding, the work of wading between content and contexts to configure webs of relevant relations through which the politics of eating and existence play out along Uganda's southern littoral. By attending ethnographically to observable actions and concrete practices, I suggest that fishworkers and fisheries managers enact multiple, relatively distinct versions of food, fish, bodies of water, and fisheries. Attending to this multiplicity is crucial for rendering plausible already existing alternatives to an overdetermined future of death, depravity, and collapse that features within scholarly, popular, and policy-oriented accounts of Lake Victoria's fisheries.

Counter-apocalyptic beginnings: cosmoecology for the End of The World

“…First, because it enables us to attend to the non-innocent character of the Anthropocenic refrain: the manner in which, by appealing to the fate of a universal Anthropos and a transcendental Earth, its organization of terrestrial and cosmic forces can become the source of its own forms of ecological and cosmological devastationauthorizing interventions and operations that determine in general what is vital to life, and therefore bring divergent modes of living, other values and valuations, other ways of composing the Earth, to an end of their own. Indeed, with the help of an ethnographic story of the introduction of a ban on fishing in the name of "food security" and the survival of humans and stocks of Nile Perch facing imminent extinction in Uganda's Victoria Lake (Johnson 2017), in what follows I argue that, far from a primary condition for the cultivation of any life worth living, the imperative of survival that pulsates through the Anthropocenic refrain is inescapably tethered to the world whose end this refrain seeks to avert and from which its transcendental notions of Humanity and Earth emanate. In Victoria Lake, the imperative of "survival" itself becomes the source of an erosion of other modes of living and of inhabiting the Earth, thereby prolonging the long imperial apocalypse of ecological homogenization (Crosby 1986).…”

“…Nowhere are such operations more visible than in those situations in which modern states or transnational development and conservation programmes brush against other modes of inhabiting the earth, ways of living and dying otherwise whose modes of habitation do not neatly conform to the demands that the rhythm of imminence makes manifest. One such case is the banning of fishing and the paramilitary operations of its enforcement that Smart-Fish, a multinational governmental and nongovernmental collaboration funded by the European Union and implemented by the Indian Ocean Commission with the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, has imposed on Uganda's Lake Victoria (Johnson 2017). The introduction of the ban was a direct response to the dwindling stocks of Nile Perch, a species of commercially significant fish that came to inhabit its waters and now is considered to be at imminent risk of extinction brought about by ecological and economic transformations.…”