Crafted Natures: A Beach as Seen by Its Fishermen (original) (raw)

The Fishermen's Beach: Cultural Heritage and Contested Identity in a Touristic Place

ijhssnet.com

This paper analyzes the relationship between maritime heritage and identity in a coastal town of Catalonia (Spain) which was a fishermen's town until tourism gradually became the main economic activity . In summer 2007 there were actions to recover the maritime heritage of the beach and, simultaneously, there was a popular movement against the construction of a seafront promenade. Both actions affect the main beach of the town known as The Fishermen's Beach transformed by locals into cultural heritage. Analysis of ethnographical fieldwork data leads to the conclusion that the process of converting the beach into heritage emerges in a context of negotiation of identities by local actors, with the tourism industry as backdrop, and with a clear political dimension.

Old landmarks and new functions. Coastal architectures redesign the geography of the coastal belts

Firenze University Press eBooks, 2022

The geographical space should be conceived as a progressive and conscious construction, resulting from the interaction between individual and collective actions. If from the second postwar period and for the following twenty years the coastal space has maintained even a minimal break with the anthropized spaces, starting from the 1970s the rapid industrial development has increasingly occupied the coasts. These changes along the costal space can be understood referring to the 'maritime-coastal region', which are places between the land and the sea, profoundly different by the integration of resources. During the following years, the growing awareness of the economic importance of the sea and its immediate hinterland has generated further changes in the evaluation of the role of maritime spaces in the processes of territorial organization. The chapter focuses its attention on one of the most symbolic maritime cultural assets: lighthouses. They are distributed along the European coastlines, responding to the same historical function, and evoking a common past. A very interesting case is Galicia, a finisterre Spanish region. Its coast is rich in lighthouses and other architectural structures, which for a long time have been at the service of the navy, redefined with new economic and social functions. As a result, lighthouses and other cultural resources are considered as an expression of that system of signs that binds the territorial components. From a methodological point of view, the proposal uses a qualitative approach, with the aim to point out how lighthouses have become scenarios of new functions thus satisfying the needs of tourists with a high attractive potential. In reconstructing this evolutionary process, the proposal will go through the analysis of the new socio-cultural and economic dynamics which, always guided by an inner Mediterranean identity, are transforming the coasts and landscapes. * While the paper is the result of a joint work, sections 1 is attributed to Donatella Privitera, sections 2 to Antonietta Ivona, sections 3 to Lucrezia Lopez. Conclusions are commons.

Sustainability and Cultural Heritage in the Catalan Coast

aijssnet.com

This paper proposes to consider two questions that are being increasingly involved nowadays: sustainability and cultural heritage. That is, the relationship between the concern for a sustainable development of marine resources management, and the concern for the preservation of maritime cultural heritage seriously damaged due to the coastal tourism development. On one hand we observe the emergence of cultural discourses about nature (e.g. the case of marine protected areas) where the limits of natural and cultural heritage are blurred. On the other hand, we observe how the attempt for the preservation of certain tangible and intangible cultural heritage (e.g. traditional methods of catching fish, fishermen's ecological knowledge) is done on behalf of environmental sustainability. In this paper I propose a reflection and debate on this issue from some ethnographic examples of my current research on the central Catalan coast in Western Mediterranean Europe.

Moving Seascapes: The Architecture and Biology of Fishing and Canning on the Portuguese Coast

BAc Boletín Académico. Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea, 2021

When they fish, humans play an active part in the dynamics of marine ecosys-tems, and architecture is subsequently involved in the processing of their catch. Our goal is to develop the idea of Fishing Architecture as a useful concept for understanding the interconnected relationship between architecture and fish-ing. By analysing the architectural and ecological outcomes of fisheries and can-ning industry, we will try to assess the complex relationship between human ac-tivities and environmental transformations. How can we represent the intricate relationship between the sea and the coast? This text seeks to state this hypothe-sis and incorporate ecological information into the analysis of the development of the sardine canning industry in Matosinhos. Based on the knowledge of ma-rine ecology, we hope to find an original perspective from which to visualize and evaluate urban developments and their environmental impacts.

Salinas: Interstices of the Urban, Cultural and Political Processes in Mediterranean Ecologies

The Plan Journal

Salinas, or Mediterranean coastal salt marshes, are priceless ecological wetlands, resilient spaces along the coast that have survived over time and hold incalculable cultural, historical, and ethnographic values associated with them. Today, artisanal sea salt production is no longer a profitable business, and in many cases, these spaces become a no-man's-land in-between nature and city, falling victims to pressures of changing land uses and the unsustainable urban growth of the Mediterranean coastal tourism. However, the process of change and abandonment of these former production landscapes presents an opportunity to promote new formulas for spatial tactics, public use and new sustainable futures. A liminal condition full of spatial and formal assets that opens the rising potential of the local economy and the right of the salina's active exploitation, interaction and identification.

Cultural Seascapes in the ‘Sea of Calms’ and La Restinga Coast

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2022

El Hierro has been characterized by the balance between human development and environmental sustainability. The island was historically far from the mass tourism developments dominant on the other Canary Islands. Tourism accommodations in El Hierro are few compared to more developed coastal areas in the Archipelago, and recreational activities are mainly linked to cultural and natural sites and resources. This chapter focuses on La Restinga fishing village and its coasts, where the 'Sea of Calms' and one multiple-use Marine Reserve (MR) are located, both of which became popular over the last decade. The tourist development experience has promoted a new way of looking at the sea and conceptualizing its habitats and populations. In 2014, after the submarine volcano eruption occurred in 2011, we estimated that at least 25,391 dives had been carried out in the diving spots established by the MR and other diving sites close to La Restinga. Despite the difficulties experienced after the volcano eruption, a unique imaginaire has been consolidated, thanks to the image of the island's exclusive nature and iconic elements. In addition, the rapid recovery of the destination is an excellent example of how the tourism system can adapt and incorporate unexpected events such as volcanic eruptions.

CFP: Narrating and Constructing the Beach, Munich (abstracts due 14 Jan, 2018)

International Conference at Amerikahaus Munich, 14-16 June, 2018 Keynote: Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University The beach has recently become the site of important transformations: understood in the context of mass tourism for many years, nowadays we perceive the beach as bearing witness to the arrival of refugees, to pollution and climate change (e.g. tsunamis, rising sea levels), and to a growing number of sociocultural conflicts (e.g. over dress codes as in the case of burkini / nudist debates). As an area of unregulated movement as well as an institutional / institutionalized border, the beach receives growing media interest, but still remains at the periphery of maritime studies in academia. To do justice to the complex spatial concepts, dynamics, practices, and aesthetics of the beach, the international conference ›Narrating and Constructing the Beach‹ views it as a (border) phenomenon in its own right and sets out to analyze it systematically and historically. The (European) »invention of the beach«, which Alain Corbin situates approximately in the 18th century, is connected to a myriad of discourses and practices which crystallize at, and are projected onto, the beach. In this respect, the conference will trace the manifold, changing, and at times competing representations and experiences of the beach in artwork, culture, and society as well as the many cultural imaginaries of the beach in their global and historical diversity. One focal point will concern the techniques employed to narrate, construct, and reshape ›the beach‹: it is our cultural, artistic, and perceptual practices that produce the beach as an ever changing aesthetic, sociocultural, political, historical, and also geographic space. As such, the beach is at once liminal and multiple, determined by the juxtaposition of land, ocean and sky as well as the blurring of the lines that separate them. It can turn from a representational space to a living space, and is at times perceived as a non-place or a heterotopia. From differing and decidedly interdisciplinary research perspectives, the conference also inquires into how ways of experiencing the beach interact with sociocultural body practices and markers of difference (such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, age, dis/ability, etc.): locals and travelers alike can perceive the beach as a space of encounter with the – erotic or dangerous – other, leading to (transitory) loss or vehement demarcation of the self. Contributing practices include Grand Tours, medical / health retreats, beach pastimes (swimming, promenading, building sand castles, collecting seashells as well as flotsam and jetsam), (mass-)touristic colonization, gender specific productions of subspaces (e.g. through towels, gazes), or the artificial incorporation of beaches into cities. Contributions could investigate these and other aspects from the point of view of changing cultural, medial, or aesthetic forms. But even when not thinking of such sociocultural ties, the beach remains a fluid and a non-localizable space which constitutes itself mainly via relations: for example, it is dependent on, yet also autonomous from, the sea and water, the harbor, urban structures, and other forms of the shore and the coast. The beach can be read in analogy or opposition to the harbor when representing the clandestine or the disturbances and disruptions in global systems of institutionalized trade currents and travel itineraries. To reach the beach might, thus, result from going astray, evading the harbor, or missing it – from being stranded. By analyzing the establishment of sanatoriums, the regulation of trade, tourism or migration, presentations could detail how processes of order and institutionalization remain (in)visible, how they (temporarily) establish structures, or even how they are in vain. While the conference is interested in how these liminal and multiple border spaces are narrated and constructed by sociocultural practices, it also investigates how beaches are generated by literature, music, theater, performance, film, photography, and art as (aesthetic) spaces and in which ways ›the beach‹ shapes and transforms both poetics and aesthetics. We thus invite contributions from all fields interested in cultural studies and pertaining to all epochs and places around the globe to analyze beaches as cultural artifacts or in cultural artifacts. Researchers can take into account the connections and interactions between the discursive conditions of the beach, its aesthetic dimensions, and its historical and cultural practices.