Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv, 112 pp. (Tables, figures, coloured photos, maps.) US$69.99, cloth; free ebook. ISBN 9783030795900.
The degradation of the global oceans has become a matter of public knowledge in recent years in a manner that few concerns, short of climate change itself, achieve. Children of readers probably know of the dangers of plastic to ocean-going turtles, and the North Pacific Gyre is now synonymous with what is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. As much as the scale of destruction wrought upon the waters has become so huge it has almost become an abstraction, the solutions and at least mitigations of many of the environmental issues at and around seas reside in the decidedly unabstracted practices and lives of communities that rely on fish, aquaculture, and the extraction of other maritime resources. In the Asia-Pacific, academic studies of such communities and the social, economic, and extractive traditions have been historically rare; Edward Norbeck’s work on Takeshima and the fishers of Japan’s Inland Sea, Han Sang-bok’s fascinating account of Gageodo and other South Korean islands at moments of change in the 1960s and 1970s, John Butcher’s historicization of Southeast Asian fishing development and Micah Muscolino’s writing on the fishing and state development in the Zhoushan Archipelago are exceptions (Norbeck, Takashima: A Japanese Fishing Community, University of Utah Press, 1954; Han Sangbok, Korean Fishermen: Ecological Adaptation in Three Communities, Seoul National University Press, 1977; Butcher, The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia, c. 1850–2000, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004; Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, Harvard University Press, 2009). Michael Fabinyi and Kate Barclay’s Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods therefore is a valuable cross-Pacific and cross-subject/disciplinary contribution to a field of study that is due a moment of importance in our world of global environmental crisis. Through an interesting conceptual triumvirate of livelihood, social process, and governance practices and forms, Fabinyi and Barclay examine a number of interesting case studies across the southern and western Pacific, at the same time staking a claim for the qualitative and the social amidst the voluminous body of quantitative and statistically driven fisheries science and analysis.
Following a theoretical and conceptual chapter, Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods journeys to the fishing communities of Palawan and Visayan in the western Philippines and the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea in a second chapter that considers these spaces and the traditions and their enmeshing in and struggles with global change. The third chapter addresses issues of class and gender in the social structures and stratifications of fishing communities and their impacts on practice and place in regions such as again the western Philippines and in a fascinating section, the Solomon Islands, which explores the place of women in the manufacture of customary shell currency around Langalanga Lagoon (55). In the final case-study-driven chapter Fabinyi and Barclay explore the role of governance and governance structures in the organization and reconfiguration of fishing territory and practice. The case study focusing on sea fishing communities in Australia challenged by the introduction of neo-liberal forms of bureaucratic organization such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs) and ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) (69) brought to mind experiences of and writing on Iceland’s introduction of the Kvoti system and the dramatic rationalization of fishing communities there in the 1980s (Margaret Wilson’s brilliant 2019 work Seawomen of Iceland: Survival on the Edge, University of Washington Press, is an accessible guide to the subject). The consolidation of bluefin tuna fishing out of Port Lincoln, South Australia at the expense of many other communities and enterprises echoes the disruptive influence of such models elsewhere, and is in contrast to the following case study used of Indonesia, a story in which such new models are not put into practice and bureaucracies are forced to compromise, navigate, and negotiate more traditional relationships with fishers, rather than abstract, disempower, and consolidate them.
Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods’ final chapter is less successful for this reader, deploying the term wellbeing as a conceptual frame perhaps to be used in future analysis of fishing communities and their encounters with those who seek to reconfigure them through bureaucratic means, engage them in the work of managing damaged and degraded ecologies, or challenge their social or class structures and practices. Wellbeing, a product of a neo-liberal self-help industry focused on adding/developing resilience for those mired in unwanted, unhealthy, or alientating social and economic relations, surely cannot help articulate the future aspirations of communities and social groups involved in practices, lifestyles, and livelihoods that are essentially highly material. Wellbeing will not contribute to solving the climate crisis, sea temperature rise, ecological collapse below the waves, or the struggles of Pacific fishing communities to compete with global fishing industries. By using the term in this frame the authors are in danger of abstracting very real, physical challenges encountered by these communities and their ecosystems, and distancing readers from the fact that what fishers as far apart as Port Lincoln and Palawan or Visayan really need is systemic change in both the structures of their industries and in global strategies to engage with and mitigate climate and ecological change. Fishing people and their communities, do not need to adjust through wellbeing strategies to ecological collapse, they need industrial and governmental structures to minimize the impacts that require adjustment, and academic analysis that supports that goal.
That said, Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods is a real and helpful contribution to those who seek to engage with the watery spaces of the Pacific, but though it is grounded in much vital work in the field, it tends conceptually towards the abstract. The book would be helped by a deeper contextual focus on the history of both fisheries science and statistics and the politics of fishing and maritime demarcation, both of which are products of the post-1945 status quo in the Pacific and the Cold War. Tim Smith’s vital work on the politics and ideology of fisheries science and statistics (Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855–1955, Cambridge University Press, 1994), and that of Carmel Finley on the enmeshing of fishing and Cold War politics and the creation of new empires of fishing in the Pacific (All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management, Chicago University Press, 2011)) would be good companions alongside Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods. In spite of my concerns, I recommend this intriguing book: the enormous variety and complexity of the sea cucumber fishery, and in particular the description of the mechanics of extracting a deep sea fish from the reef waters of Palawan using a hypodermic needle to reduce the pressure in its swim bladder so that it can be ready for the Hong Kong live fish market (32) will live long in this reviewer’s memory.
Robert Winstanley-Chesters
University of Leeds, Leeds
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh