Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference Uppsala, Sweden Arranged in cooperation with Kungliga Gustav Adolfs Akademien with financial contribution from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and Vetenskapsrådet (original) (raw)
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2018
The aim of this article is to problematize tourism enterprising fishermen s understanding of nature. From a discourse-theoretic outlook, I explore how fishermen “know” nature. Here, “knowing nature” is a positioning practice which means that views of nature are uttered and negotiated by people in relation to another person or a group of people. The empirical material that is analyzed was created for a coming dissertation exploring how a traditional industry like fisheries is formed and negotiated in the service-oriented economy. The ethnographic material consists of interviews, observations and textmaterial and was collected in tourism enterprising fisheries along the west coast of Sweden, between 2011-2016.First, the tourism enterprising fishermen s knowledge of nature is formed with reference to fisheries authorities. The management of fisheries is decentralized as the idea of governance is spreading in EU. Governance creates challenges while the actors have to negotiate different...
Food Ethics
The term ‘sustainability’ is vague and open to interpretation. In this paper we analyze how firms use the term in an effort to make the concept their own, and how it becomes a premise for further decisions, by applying a bottom-up approach focusing on the interpretation of ‘sustainability’ in the Norwegian salmon-farming industry. The study is based on a strategic selection of informants from the industry and the study design rests on: 1) identification of the main drivers of sustainability, and 2) the application of five different discursive strategies to analyze how the firms maneuver to legitimize ‘sustainability’ in their conduct. We employ the Critical Discourse Analysis framework, which emphasizes how discourses provide different concepts of meaning. The sustainability concept is assessed based on how sustainability is brought into action by social actors in a legitimate way, and how this action results in sustainable practices. The empirical case of the study is the verbal ju...
The Fishers of the Archipelago Sea - resilience, sustainability, knowledge and agency
2019
This doctoral dissertation combines ethnology and environmental science in order to recognise changes in the operational environment of the livelihoods and lifestyles of coastal small-scale fishers in the Archipelago Sea and the constraints that mostly influence the abundance and resilience of fisheries in the Archipelago Sea-from the fishers' perspective. This study focuses on recognising the mechanisms that are decreasing resilience as well as examining the relationships between policy-making, scientific research and knowledge by applying the framework of political ecology. Finally, the aim is to find solutions for promoting transformations that will foster cultural resilience and sustainability as well as other dimensions of both. The research material for the doctoral dissertation was gathered by conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including 23 in-depth interviews and participant observation. Media and scientific articles and reports also formed a portion of the material analysed for this study. The research material was analysed abductively, and as a practical tool, qualitative analysis software Nvivo was applied as well. The timeframe of the analysis is from 1880 to the present, starting from the commercialisation of winter-seining in the Archipelago Sea and concluding with a discussion of the present-day challenges facing fisheries. There is, however, an embedded future-oriented thinking present throughout this study, as many of the concepts applied, such as resilience and adaptation, contain an implicit future-thinking aspect. It was found that according to fishers, the most important constraint influencing the resilience of small-scale fisheries is the ever-increasing number of environmental policies and an unwillingness to acknowledge the local ecological knowledge possessed by the fishers. The ensuing environmental conflict is to some extent a consequence of not including the dimension of cultural sustainability in policy-making processes, or in research involving environmental management and conservation, and not recognising the potential offered by local ecological knowledge both for promoting overall sustainability and also as a tool for enhancing the social acceptance of environmental policies.
Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2017
Nature-based tourism frequently results in controversies over access rights, but also over how resources should be managed and utilized. In this article, we explore disagreements on management strategies and angling practices, which followed in the wake of the gradual introduction of increasingly strict harvest regulations in salmon angling in the Orkla River of Norway. Different views on what represent the most severe threats to the salmon stock appeared in this case to originate in rather complex patterns with respect to the ways stakeholders related to and engaged with salmon, rivers and nature in general. The identification of incompatible goals and motives of various categories of stakeholders has for long been a dominant approach in research on these types of conflicts. In this contribution, we broaden the scope by exploring how such controversies involve competition for hegemony with respect to how management and angling practices should be discursively framed.
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Abstract This paper examines the ways in which national and international policies regulating trade, labor, and the environment have influenced the lives of fishers and their families in Kihnu Island, Estonia. As populations of many fish species in the Baltic Sea have declined, international policies regulating the use of the environment and marine resources have restricted access to natural resources in such a way that fishing communities have needed to supplement fishing incomes with tourism and seasonal migration. In this context, Kihnu women have demonstrated astute political and organisational skill in obtaining designation for Kihnu cultural space as part of UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, seeking to enhance the tourism potential of the region. Furthermore, men, who traditionally made up the majority of fishers, have skilfully turned EU legislation to their advantage and used their knowledge of fishing Baltic herring in Finnish waters to continue to practice their livelihoods. Despite the fluidity of their social and economic system, the Kihnu community has managed to maintain its particular identity and traditional involvement in fishing. The paper has three aims. Firstly, it demonstrates how community histories are interwoven with global and regional histories. Secondly, it explains international and local policies and their effects on the lives of the Kihnu community. Finally, it shows how different regulations have influenced the development of small-scale fisheries in Baltic Sea region.
Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2022
That fishers’ ecological knowledge (FEK) can contribute to the sustainability and legitimacy of environmental planning and management is widely accepted. Nevertheless, despite this broad consensus about its importance, there is uncertainty about the ways in which FEK can be captured methodologically. Here, we present the results of a methodological inquiry aimed to connect FEK to the diversity of work practices within fisheries. Using a sample from a qualitative study of Swedish small-scale fishers, we test to what extent a new combination of concept and method – Fishing Style analysis and the Structure-Dynamic-Function framework – can produce insights into the partiality and diversity of FEK, as well as its embodied and tacit aspects. Results demonstrate how different work practices generate a variety of FEKs. We use this finding to discuss the implications of our work for future study of FEK, and how attention to FEK can inform environmental planning and management.
Sustainability
The cultural sustainability of coastal landscapes relies heavily on the community’s self-organisation in fish foodways. The theoretical framework concentrates on cultural sustainability, foodways, land–sea interactions, and community of practice. The data presented in this article were part of the SustainBaltic Integrated Coastal Zone Management plan, consisting mainly of semi-structured and focus group interviews with stakeholders, supported by background information from various available sources. The results are outlined by descriptions of self-organisation, community matters, and food forming cultural sustainability of coastal landscapes. The self-organisation in community of practice among coastal fishers is slowly progressing by negotiating common resources and voicing concerns about ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Foodways, which comprise the indispensable ingredient for sustaining a way of life that has produced traditional coastal landscapes, are always evo...
Sustainability Comes to Life. Nature-Based Adventure Tourism in Norway
Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2021
This paper investigates how tourists and guides perform sustainability during adventure tourism trips in natural environments. The paper draws on empirical data from an ethnographic study of five different multi-day trips in Norway, each of which used skiing, hiking, or biking as the mode of travel. In our analysis, we focus on how the different actors understood, operationalized and practiced elements of sustainability in their everyday lives while on the trips. The paper applies a micro-sociological perspective to the nature-based adventure tourism scene where the interplay between tourists, guides, adventure activities and nature is understood as multiple dialectic performances co-produced by the different actors. Goffman's dramaturgical metaphors, and concepts of frames, appearance, and manner saturate recent research on tourism and nature guiding. This paper builds on the “performance turn” as a theoretical point of departure for understanding sustainability in nature-based...
The Ethnography of Local Tourism Connections between Fishery and Tourism in Izola 1
The paper is about the fishermen community in Izola, a coastal town in the Northeast of the Upper Adriatic. Attention is given to the wider socio-natural context within which fishermen from Izola find themselves situated after the break-up of Yugoslavia. The principal change that fishermen find most influential to their situation is the new state border that caused losses of previous fishing territory along what is now Croatian coast. Special attention is given to one of the several adaptive strategies devised by the fishermen from Izola, which was increasingly demonstrated after 1991: combining fishery with tourism. Two points are central to the research: what is the fishermen's attitude towards tourism activities in comparison with fishery and what is it that people from the tourist industry are marketing for the tourists that involves fishery? The last of the two questions partly brings to the fore the tourism discourse of the newly established Slovene state about its coastal area, and the analysis of the fishermen's perspective on the new situation and their adaptation to tourism.