Research Overview
Traversing national boundaries and international networks of commerce, control, and expertise, Nyanja (Lake Victoria) has long been a crucible for transformative social dynamics characterized by what I call the littoral – literally, the shoreline. It is a place of heightened prospects for actual and economic mobility, alternative moralities of sexual and economic exchange, and competing valuation of space and resources for leisure, protein, and politically strategic purposes. Nyanja’s littoral comprises a liminal frontier of possibility where a uniquely littoral cosmopolitanism continues to emerge around the vernacular practices of fishing. In a region where politics are so often assumed to be aligned along immutable tribal, ethnic, or racial lines, at the littoral, identity and belonging are actively renegotiated, and further, are closely linked to the vernacular practices and politics of working with fish.
Vernacular fisheries practices refer to fisheries-related activities that are conducted in relation to the cosmopolitan cultural ecology of the littoral, rather than in accordance with relatively static managerial understandings of what a fishery is and should be, though the vernacular can also be found in the creation and application of managerial conceptions of fisheries here (as elsewhere). Vernacular practices are difficult to calculate, control, and predict, because like the littoral, they are always on the move. In Nyanja, these include buying fresh fish to process at night by the handful, rather than by the kilogram in the light of day, selling fish to neighbors rather than to wholesalers at formal markets, and upholding practical operational categories of “reasonably-sized” fish that may be formally illegal, but nonetheless usually permissible. They also include the maintenance of profitable business and conjugal ties between a husband and wife who own boats individually, but share ownership of a transport vessel supplying intercontinental markets, paying tribute to ancestral spirits at family shrines, and the forging of friendships with key individuals involved in the formally illegal fisheries trade who provide access to fish, processing techniques, buyers, and information about impending enforcement efforts.
My research provides fresh perspectives on Lake Victoria, where so much previous work has been guided by assumed fisheries-related crises, and limited by the preferences of many researchers and professionals who work there for quantitative data and statistically-driven analyses, as well as their aversion to long-term residence in littoral fishing sites (Crul et al. 1995; Geheb 1999). Focusing on the movements, material forms, and meanings generated within Nyanja’s diverse fisheries-related economies, this historical ethnography:
My research is guided by the overarching proposition that women are vital to sustaining local, regional, and intercontinental fisheries-based economies through their vernacular fisheries-related work. They do this through species and form-specific activities that are also suffused with kinship and sexual connections. Further, their work mitigates possibilities for the kind of spectacular triumph or failure featured in dominant popular narratives and the more narrowly defined criteria for managerial success in Lake Victoria, and instead sustain a socially and ecologically cosmopolitan Nyanja. I argue that attention to the work littoral women do, how they interpret and represent their work, and how their work is interpreted and represented reveals how important women are to what MacGaffey (1991) would call ‘the real economy of fishing’ in Nyanja, not just as wives, mothers and lovers, but as economic and political entrepreneurs actually working to make Nyanja well.
METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW
I have spent over twenty months conducting fieldwork primarily in Uganda, but also in Tanzania and Kenya, following people, fish, and ideas about fish and people, while carefully detailing the movements, meanings, and material forms they generate. I collected this data by participating in and observing contemporary everyday and eventful moments at key mainland and island littoral sites and in formal managerial settings, and by conducting in-depth interviews with a purposeful sample of littoral residents and resident managers (n=70) to be placed in dialogue with the ‘received wisdoms’ recounted in scholarly, professional and media sources collected in previous phases of research. I also tracked similar and divergent phenomena and events across time and location through oral history interviews with littoral residents (n=40), archival research, and vernacular mapping. Archival research focused most closely on eight previously unavailable collections of once confidential documents dating from the mid-1890's to the mid-1970's that I helped to catalogue in 2011 and 2012 with a team of Ugandan archivists and academicians and University of Michigan graduate students.
RELEVANCE AND ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS
My work combines classic anthropological interest in migratory subsistence production (Evans-Pritchard 1969), ritual practice (Rappaport 1984), cultural ecology (Steward 1972) and exchange (Mauss 1925), with pressing questions about the gendered practice and politics of commerce and control within globally integrated commodity supply chains, and the governance structures that sustain them both. This project promises that focus on the vernacular will advance literature challenging received wisdoms about environmental degradation (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Tropp 2006), political participation (Hanson 2003; Ferguson 1994; Gray 2002), regional economies (Guyer 2004; Scott 2009), disease ecologies (Giblin 1992; Thornton 2008) and healing (Kodesh 2010; Schoenbrun 2010) by studying a shifting set of vernacular fisheries practices as they now articulate with the application of an assumed universally appropriate participatory managerial approach (Brosius, Tsing, and Zerner 1998).
Nyanja challenges me to advance theoretical and methodological approaches that range beyond question of management (Ostrom 2009), but nevertheless have vital implications for the ecological and political future of Lake Victoria’s fisheries. Findings from this study will advance understanding of social-ecological interactions in historically and contemporarily dynamic resource-interdependent societies. My focus on how fisheries-related economies produce particular kinds of products and values while creating gendered relationships of interdependence and social difference will contribute to environmental anthropology and the growing field of multispecies ethnography. By developing concepts of vernacular practice and littoral politics, my research also makes important theoretical and methodological contributions to contemporary debates in technical resource governance and sustainability, development and African studies more broadly. And, will provide concrete policy recommendations to promote the sustainability of Nyanja and the increasingly lucrative local and regional eastern African fish trades on their own terms.
REFERENCES
Berkes. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Hemisphere Pub.
Brosius, J. Peter, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 1998. “Representing Communities: Histories and Politics of Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal 11 (2): 157–168.
Crul, R.C.M., G.T. Silvestre, D.J. Postma, M.J.P. Van Oijen, T.O. Acere, and G. Bongers. 1995. A Bibliography of Lake Victoria, East Africa. Technical Documents in Hydrology IHP- IV Project M-5.1. Paris: UNESCO.
Diouf, Mamadou. 2000. “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12 (3) (October 1): 679–702.
Evans-Pritchard, E. 1969. The Nuer: a Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-savanna Mosaic. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Geheb, Kim. 1999. Overview and Bibliography of the Literature of Socio-economic Relevance to the Fisheries of Lake Victoria - Aquatic Commons. Socio-Economics Data Working Group (SEDAWOG) of the Lake Victoria Fisheries Research Project. In: Lake Victoria Fisheries Research Project. Jinja, Uganda. http://aquacomm.fcla.edu/3641/.
Giblin, James. 1992. The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840- 1940. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gray, Christopher. 2002. Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa Southern Gabon, C. 1850-1940. Rochester N.Y.: University of Rochester Press.
Guyer, Jane I. 2004. “Niches, Margins and Profits: Persisting with Heterogeneity.” African Economic History (32) (January 1): 173–191.
Hanson, Holly. 2003. Landed Obligation: the Practice of Power in Buganda. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Hardin, Rebecca. 2011. “Concessionary Politics: Property, Patronage, and Political Rivalry in Central African Forest Management: With CA Comment by Serge Bahuchet.” Current Anthropology 52 (S3): S113–S125.
Huntington, Henry P. 2000. “Using Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Science Methods and Applications.” Ecological Applications 10 (5): 1270–1274.
Kodesh, Neil. 2010. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
MacGaffey, Janet. 1991. The Real Economy of Zaire: the Contribution of Smuggling & Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.
Ostrom, E. 2009. “A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems.” Science 325 (5939) (July): 419–422.
Rappaport, Roy. 1984. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights Ill.: Waveland Press.
Schoenbrun, David L. 2010. “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing Between the Great Lakes of East Africa.” The American Historical Review 111 (5): 1403–1439.
Scott, James. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Steward, Julian. 1972. Theory of Culture Change: the Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Illini Books ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Thornton, Robert J. 2008. Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks, and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa. California Series in Public Anthropology 20. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tropp, Jacob. 2006. Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Vernacular fisheries practices refer to fisheries-related activities that are conducted in relation to the cosmopolitan cultural ecology of the littoral, rather than in accordance with relatively static managerial understandings of what a fishery is and should be, though the vernacular can also be found in the creation and application of managerial conceptions of fisheries here (as elsewhere). Vernacular practices are difficult to calculate, control, and predict, because like the littoral, they are always on the move. In Nyanja, these include buying fresh fish to process at night by the handful, rather than by the kilogram in the light of day, selling fish to neighbors rather than to wholesalers at formal markets, and upholding practical operational categories of “reasonably-sized” fish that may be formally illegal, but nonetheless usually permissible. They also include the maintenance of profitable business and conjugal ties between a husband and wife who own boats individually, but share ownership of a transport vessel supplying intercontinental markets, paying tribute to ancestral spirits at family shrines, and the forging of friendships with key individuals involved in the formally illegal fisheries trade who provide access to fish, processing techniques, buyers, and information about impending enforcement efforts.
My research provides fresh perspectives on Lake Victoria, where so much previous work has been guided by assumed fisheries-related crises, and limited by the preferences of many researchers and professionals who work there for quantitative data and statistically-driven analyses, as well as their aversion to long-term residence in littoral fishing sites (Crul et al. 1995; Geheb 1999). Focusing on the movements, material forms, and meanings generated within Nyanja’s diverse fisheries-related economies, this historical ethnography:
- Re-theorizes fishing sites in Ennyanja not as classically rural and marginal, but as places where a uniquely littoral cosmopolitanism continues to emerge around the vernacular practices of fishing;
- Views women less as victims or collateral damage with respect to assumed fishery decline, but rather as actors enmeshed within a complex and dynamic littoral where their vernacular work is vital to sustaining local, regional, and intercontinental fisheries-based economies;
- Elaborates emerging possibilities for more locally and regionally-based fishing economies, even amongst unprecedented efforts to eradicate fishing practices that directly compete with the intercontinental fisheries trade.
My research is guided by the overarching proposition that women are vital to sustaining local, regional, and intercontinental fisheries-based economies through their vernacular fisheries-related work. They do this through species and form-specific activities that are also suffused with kinship and sexual connections. Further, their work mitigates possibilities for the kind of spectacular triumph or failure featured in dominant popular narratives and the more narrowly defined criteria for managerial success in Lake Victoria, and instead sustain a socially and ecologically cosmopolitan Nyanja. I argue that attention to the work littoral women do, how they interpret and represent their work, and how their work is interpreted and represented reveals how important women are to what MacGaffey (1991) would call ‘the real economy of fishing’ in Nyanja, not just as wives, mothers and lovers, but as economic and political entrepreneurs actually working to make Nyanja well.
METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW
I have spent over twenty months conducting fieldwork primarily in Uganda, but also in Tanzania and Kenya, following people, fish, and ideas about fish and people, while carefully detailing the movements, meanings, and material forms they generate. I collected this data by participating in and observing contemporary everyday and eventful moments at key mainland and island littoral sites and in formal managerial settings, and by conducting in-depth interviews with a purposeful sample of littoral residents and resident managers (n=70) to be placed in dialogue with the ‘received wisdoms’ recounted in scholarly, professional and media sources collected in previous phases of research. I also tracked similar and divergent phenomena and events across time and location through oral history interviews with littoral residents (n=40), archival research, and vernacular mapping. Archival research focused most closely on eight previously unavailable collections of once confidential documents dating from the mid-1890's to the mid-1970's that I helped to catalogue in 2011 and 2012 with a team of Ugandan archivists and academicians and University of Michigan graduate students.
RELEVANCE AND ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS
My work combines classic anthropological interest in migratory subsistence production (Evans-Pritchard 1969), ritual practice (Rappaport 1984), cultural ecology (Steward 1972) and exchange (Mauss 1925), with pressing questions about the gendered practice and politics of commerce and control within globally integrated commodity supply chains, and the governance structures that sustain them both. This project promises that focus on the vernacular will advance literature challenging received wisdoms about environmental degradation (Fairhead and Leach 1996; Tropp 2006), political participation (Hanson 2003; Ferguson 1994; Gray 2002), regional economies (Guyer 2004; Scott 2009), disease ecologies (Giblin 1992; Thornton 2008) and healing (Kodesh 2010; Schoenbrun 2010) by studying a shifting set of vernacular fisheries practices as they now articulate with the application of an assumed universally appropriate participatory managerial approach (Brosius, Tsing, and Zerner 1998).
Nyanja challenges me to advance theoretical and methodological approaches that range beyond question of management (Ostrom 2009), but nevertheless have vital implications for the ecological and political future of Lake Victoria’s fisheries. Findings from this study will advance understanding of social-ecological interactions in historically and contemporarily dynamic resource-interdependent societies. My focus on how fisheries-related economies produce particular kinds of products and values while creating gendered relationships of interdependence and social difference will contribute to environmental anthropology and the growing field of multispecies ethnography. By developing concepts of vernacular practice and littoral politics, my research also makes important theoretical and methodological contributions to contemporary debates in technical resource governance and sustainability, development and African studies more broadly. And, will provide concrete policy recommendations to promote the sustainability of Nyanja and the increasingly lucrative local and regional eastern African fish trades on their own terms.
REFERENCES
Berkes. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Hemisphere Pub.
Brosius, J. Peter, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Charles Zerner. 1998. “Representing Communities: Histories and Politics of Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal 11 (2): 157–168.
Crul, R.C.M., G.T. Silvestre, D.J. Postma, M.J.P. Van Oijen, T.O. Acere, and G. Bongers. 1995. A Bibliography of Lake Victoria, East Africa. Technical Documents in Hydrology IHP- IV Project M-5.1. Paris: UNESCO.
Diouf, Mamadou. 2000. “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12 (3) (October 1): 679–702.
Evans-Pritchard, E. 1969. The Nuer: a Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-savanna Mosaic. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Geheb, Kim. 1999. Overview and Bibliography of the Literature of Socio-economic Relevance to the Fisheries of Lake Victoria - Aquatic Commons. Socio-Economics Data Working Group (SEDAWOG) of the Lake Victoria Fisheries Research Project. In: Lake Victoria Fisheries Research Project. Jinja, Uganda. http://aquacomm.fcla.edu/3641/.
Giblin, James. 1992. The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840- 1940. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gray, Christopher. 2002. Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa Southern Gabon, C. 1850-1940. Rochester N.Y.: University of Rochester Press.
Guyer, Jane I. 2004. “Niches, Margins and Profits: Persisting with Heterogeneity.” African Economic History (32) (January 1): 173–191.
Hanson, Holly. 2003. Landed Obligation: the Practice of Power in Buganda. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Hardin, Rebecca. 2011. “Concessionary Politics: Property, Patronage, and Political Rivalry in Central African Forest Management: With CA Comment by Serge Bahuchet.” Current Anthropology 52 (S3): S113–S125.
Huntington, Henry P. 2000. “Using Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Science Methods and Applications.” Ecological Applications 10 (5): 1270–1274.
Kodesh, Neil. 2010. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
MacGaffey, Janet. 1991. The Real Economy of Zaire: the Contribution of Smuggling & Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.
Ostrom, E. 2009. “A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems.” Science 325 (5939) (July): 419–422.
Rappaport, Roy. 1984. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights Ill.: Waveland Press.
Schoenbrun, David L. 2010. “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing Between the Great Lakes of East Africa.” The American Historical Review 111 (5): 1403–1439.
Scott, James. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Steward, Julian. 1972. Theory of Culture Change: the Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Illini Books ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Thornton, Robert J. 2008. Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks, and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa. California Series in Public Anthropology 20. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tropp, Jacob. 2006. Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei. Athens: Ohio University Press.