Editor's Foreword: The Puertoricanization of North American Fisheries Research

Human Organization, Fall 2006 by Griffith, David

Fishers must constantly make inferences about the location, abundance, quality, and distribution of the resource. These inferences are derived from indirect observation and sampling. Every time a fisher sets out a net, hook, or trap, he/she is sampling the water for the resource, which can then be related to proxies such as water conditions, underwater environments and topography, weather, and catch characteristics.

Carlos García Quijano (2006) Resisting Extinction: The Value of Local Ecological Knowledge for Small-scale Fishers in Southeastern Puerto Rico. PhD Dissertation, Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.

The day before I began writing this, with my good friends Manuel Valdés Pizzini and Carlos Garcia Quijano, I visited a Villa Pesquera-a fishing association-on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico, in the municipality of Aguadilla. It was El Dia de St. Juan Bautista (the day of St. John the Baptist) and the fishing families congregating at the Villa were taking advantage of the bustling tourist traffic to market fresh tuna, dolphinfish, and yellowtail and mutton snapper. Like many of the fishing communities profiled in this issue, Aguadilla's have had to deal with several natural, social, economic, and political forces in recent years, many of which seem far beyond their control. Imports of low-cost seafood, the destruction of mangroves, coral reefs, and other habitats, coastal industrial and real estate development, gentrification, and declining fish stocks are only a few of the external problems distressing fishing communities at the same time increasing fuel and other expenses and new and old fishery regulations dart in and out of fishers' strategies, nibbling at the substrates of their livelihoods.

The authors that NOAA anthropologist Lisa Colburn has assembled together for this special issue of Human Organization recognize that fishing in North America and much of the world today reaches far beyond the technologies and strategies of humans pursuing fish and shellfish; that NOAA acknowledges this by expanding its social scientific base from an exclusive reliance on economists to one more open to anthropological and sociological analyses reflects this improved understanding. Just as some early social scientists often embraced, uncritically, suspect models of economists and fishery biologists, migrating toward the mistakes of modernization theory, today some NOAA economists and even a few marine biologists are looking to anthropology and sociology for clues about how to profile and represent fishing communities accurately, understanding that ecosystems include human dimensions and that concepts like Maximum Sustainable Yield lose their power when applied to fishing strategies that include shifting among many species and combining shore-based jobs with fishing over the course of fishers' lives. Economists I know and economists I have read have begun to understand that the cultural significance of fishing communities often outweighs their economic significance, and that to value fishing communities with reference only to their contributions to the gross national product is as silly as valuing the quality of employment across the United States with reference to employment at Wal-Mart.

The practice of moving among several species, gear types, and jobs has been central to Puerto Rican fishing for over a century. This was not always so. Under Spanish Rule, only select members of the mariners' guilds were allowed access to Puerto Rico's fisheries, and a few families were able to obtain good livings exclusively from fishing. Yet shortly after the United States incorporated Puerto Rico into its expanding influence in the world, the opening up of its fishery resources resulted in the growth of a small-scale, artisanal, multi-species fishery that has managed to remain more or less stable over the past 108 years.

The fisheries profiled here are not all small-scale or multispecies, yet the practices of shifting among different species through the year and moving between fishing and other occupations that characterize Puerto Rico's fishing families does arise from place to place across North America's fisheries; as marine resources become more stressed from contamination and the destruction of habitat, such practices are liable to become ever more common. In my home state of North Carolina, they have already become the norm: so much so that regulations designed to "box" fishermen into specific fisheries, licensing them only for shrimp or only for blue crab, are hotly contested. I can't say for sure that this trend will occur throughout North America's fisheries, yet in so far as it has in some regions it has made profiling fishing communities a far more complex exercise, one which often eludes conventional economic and biological analysis and demands that we engage in the multidisciplinary, cooperative research that has been a hallmark of the Society for Applied Anthropology since its inception. It demands that we expand our analyses from single methods or single perspectives, moving away from an exclusive reliance on positivism and engaging multiple paths toward knowing. It demands we reach into theoretical and practical areas that may seem irrelevant or poorly adapted to understanding people chasing after a usually mobile, open access resource; it demands that we mine, for example, peasant studies, transnationalism, class analysis, and the literature on ethnic and gender identity for what they can bring to our work on fisheries. Above all it demands that we work closely with fishing families themselves, understanding the depth of their knowledge about fishery resources and tapping their ideas regarding management measures, engaging them to help frame our research questions and hypotheses and to reflect on and revise our conclusions and recommendations.