Navigating Seas, Markets, and Sovereignties: Fishers and Occupational Slippage in the South China Sea

Abstract

Oceans have always been arenas of crime, drugs and human trafficking, and poaching. When such violations occur on fishing boats, they fall under the rubric of "fisheries crime." Political scientists and economists have tended to assume that these criminal fishers simply abandon their legal occupation and take up illegal practices, labelled "transnational organized fisheries crime" by the United Nations. On the other hand, some scholars have also argued that subsidized and militarized fishers in the South China Sea are simply acting as instruments of their states' geopolitical agendas, responding to regulations, non-enforcement of regulations, and incentives. Such present-centric approaches both obscure the modalities of fishers' embodied skills and knowledge and their motivations, and downplay the inter-ethnic networks that connected different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in past and present. Charting the spike in maritime trespass in (and out of) the South China Sea, this article combines ethnography and historiography to show how fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader, smuggler, and militia. I propose the concept of occupational slippage as a way of going beyond the fiction of fishing as mono-occupational and theorizing the realities of fishers as mobile maritime actors who enact and

Blue boats in deep waters: how aspects of IUU policy impact Vietnamese fish workers

“…Blue boats traveling outside of Vietnamese waters to fish is nothing new: this is a practice that has been ongoing for decades (Rozko 2021 ). What has changed, however, is a significant crackdown on blue boats entering regional waters from Vietnamese authorities and other countries in the region.…”

“…The growth of blue boats reflects a series of trends in Vietnam’s fisheries: resource depletion in nearshore waters (Pomeroy et al 2009 ; Teh et al 2014 ), a market for trash or small forage fish used as feed for fish farming (Marschke and Betcherman 2016 ), and a labor force of workers with limited options that can support blue boat activities (EJF 2019 ). Reasons for fishing beyond territorial waters are also linked to the mobile nature of seafaring life that spans territories and boundaries (Roszko 2021 ).…”

Construing and constructing the South China Sea beyond state‐led environmentalism: Vernacularizing geographical, geopolitical and sociotechnical imaginaries of territory

“…However, the state's designation of grounds for fishing put fishers in a situation where they had to operate in contested areas. This proved to be a double‐edged sword for the fishers, who had been sent to fish‐depleted waters in spaces where rival states claimed their activities to be illegal (Roszko, 2021 ). Tanmen fishers addressed the first conundrum by extracting fossilized giant clamshells from disputed archipelagos, thereby turning the massive exploitation into a de facto territorial claim.…”

Anthropology of Transformation

“…For the floating labour-seafarers, fishers, poachers, smugglers, militia and pirates-the sea is not just a wide surface, but an ever-changing seascape made up of sea features, sites and histories; memories of fortunes, disasters and daily survival; the transgression of bodily, physical and geographical limits; and state regulations and borders. The comparative analysis of life histories, oral traditions, enduring customs, logbooks, maps, graphic representations of territory, and technological changes in maritime and marine practices can help us uncover the ways in which these various labourers interact with ocean spaces, illuminating larger processes that would otherwise remain obscure (see Feldman 2011; see also Hofmeyer 2012 ;Roszko 2021b;Vink 2007;Steinberg 2014). However, without engaging in deep history and archaeology and without contextualising our ethnographic data, this thalassography methodology still only amounts to historically "shallow temporalities", to use Hann's term (2017: 226).…”

“…Transoceania: Connecting the World beyond Eurasia development of fisheries, making the islands on which the wells were located part of an important network of freshwater sources not only for Cham, but also for Malay, Arab, Persian and other sailors throughout the first two millennia CE. The maritime and marine knowledge of the seascape and the skills accumulated by fishers-cum-seafarers during their past ventures have not vanished; they have been passed down through generations and applied to new ventures, whether it is the smuggling of goods or people, poaching or piracy (Roszko 2021b). With the rise of nation-states, the maritime routes expanded and changed and the fluid ethnic identities hardened, but the deeper structures of "local cosmopolitanism" (Ho 2006) underlying "sea work" remain stubbornly persistent down through the generations, if not centuries.…”