Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse (Themes in Social Anthropology)

This work addresses theoretical questions regarding economic production, particularly in relation to fisheries, emphasizing the ways in which human-environmental interactions are represented in social discourse, among both indigenous producers and anthropologists. The first chapter explores some of the parallels between two kinds of theoretical discourses, one on production and the other on language, each of which may be characterized as a "language of nature". These discourses suggest a rigid dichotomy between the individual and the superorganic (society or culture), placing production and the act of speaking outside society. The producer and the speaker are presented as autonomous individuals posited by nature; they become intermediaries rather than agents, incapable of consciously modelling their own activities. An alternative, social approach emphasizes that human action, whether it be the appropriation of nature or verbal communication, is consciously motivated and necessarily embedded in human relations. The next three chapters deal with the analysis of different kinds of cultural models in the history of a particular discourse. Chapter 4 discusses the phase of peasant production in Iceland. In peasant society, there was a "natural" ceiling on production. Accordingly, in the folk model the human producer was seen to be a passive recipient of value. A series of anomalous and imaginary water-beings mediated between the domains of land and sea, between human society and nature. Chapter 5 discusses the changes in the economic rationality of Icelanders that took place when the domestic economy gave way to both petty entrepreneurial fishing and large-scale capitalist production for an expanding market at the end of the 19th century. As labour became a commodity and the previous ceiling on production was removed, a new model was developed which redifined both the domain of the natural and earlier notions of work and productivity - a model with conceptions of nature, production and human agency very different from those of the previous one. The new model underlined the economic role and the abilities of the fishing skipper, emphasizing human agency and the role of the individual in the production process. Competition for prestige, capital and labour fostered the idea that the skippers' abilities to locate and catch fish determined the size of their catch. At the same time, production discourse became gender-specific. Chapter 6 deals with the third phase of Icelandic fishing, the period for "scientific" management. With increased concentration of capital in recent years, the declining importance of labour and the integration of the industry with the state, a new cognitive succession has taken place.