‘Thinking like a fish’: adaptive strategies for coping with vulnerability and variability emerging from a relational engagement with kob

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst a group of commercial handline fishers in the town of Stilbaai in South Africa's southern Cape region, this paper presents a range of flexible, adaptive and evolving strategies through which fishers negotiate constantly shifting variability in weather patterns, fish stocks, fisheries policies, and economic conditions. These variabilities constitute a diverse set of vulnerabilities to which fishers must respond in order to sustain their livelihoods. In this context, the act of 'thinking like a fish' on the part of the fishers provides them with an effective means of adapting to variability and uncertainty. Findings of ethnographic research in 2010-11 suggest that a number of the fishers who participated in the research actively work towards achieving a balance between profit and sustainability. 'Thinking like a fish' is an embodied, interactive way of knowing that emerges from interactions between fishers and fish, offering an ethical and ecological outlook which is a valuable resource for fisheries and conservation management in the region. We suggest that the deeply embodied interactional component of 'thinking like a fish' results from a desire to understand the life world of fish and to think from their perspective in order to more effectively target them while sustaining the species and ecosystem.

A systematic scoping review of the impacts of community food production initiatives in Kenya, Cameroon, and South Africa

“…CFPIs assessing agrobiodiversity were often programmes and initiatives working with communities to think and act longer term and more sustainably, such as interventions at a household level to support sustainable self-provisioning of crops, livestock or fishing as a source of affordable nutrients. 44,49,121 Studies reporting assessments of practices already in place as opposed to new initiatives demonstrated the negative impact on agrobiodiversity, such as loss of crops and livestock, 45 changes in fish populations because of overfishing 65 and changes of land use or cover. 86,88 South Africa had the highest proportion of studies that evaluated urban agriculture initiatives (n=4 of 5 (80%)).…”

New Materialist Approaches to Fisheries

“…Normative applications seek to use new materialism to widen the aperture of marine social science and management to consider the aff ective relations that emerge through fi sheries (Nightingale 2013;Rossiter et al 2015). Others question the binaries of fi sh/fi sher, theorizing the ways in which this ordering is produced through relational encounters (Bear and Eden 2008;Duggan et al 2014;Probyn 2016) For those focused on the ontological politics of human-fi sh orderings, their work engages with the ruptures that occur when the materiality of ontologically plural beings resists the ordering imposed by structures such as colonialism and capitalism. Zoe Todd (2014), working in with the Paulatuuq in Northern Canada, argues that human-fi sh relations are "active sites of engagement": fi sh are integral to all aspects of community and social life.…”

Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS

“…Relations of care for the kelp forests and rock pools, which have a deep history along the coast, are expunged. Might a different approach to the logic of conservation-not as dollarized ecosystem services-enable fishers to reclaim a different set of relations with the ocean that are based on care and on "thinking like a fish" (Duggan, Green & Jarre, 2014)?…”